my articles are in front of me because somewhere, a tree has died.
a tree lives somewhere because i have not yet pressed print.

either as a tree or as a page, the thing screams 'Life!!'
but as a tree, it screams it so much louder.
and yet, we know only our own language, and so we must cut down the tree and translate it's message into grossly simplied code that in the end, points us in exactly the same direction: towards the forest.

Insight Vs. Compromise

You decide.

The thought that is to be judged is as follows:

Why have I tied myself to the idea that there is only one path to one destiny that I have to find if I am to find happiness?

What a limiting, scary, unimaginative, faithless idea!
Ridiculous.
I need to change it, pronto.

25 years old, and this is the only mathematics I know how to prove (to a highly exclusive audience of one):

The perfect sum -

1 + 1 = ∞

Once in a while - Madeleine Peyroux

From bad luck
I'm walking away
I'm not getting stuck
I'm not gonna stay
To good things
I'm moving ahead
I'm tired of dying
I'm living instead

Once in a while I'll wake up
Wondering why we gave up
But once in a while
Comes and it fades away

The sun's up and lighting the sky
I never could see it
It just passed me by
Good things keep moving along
I'm not looking backward
For something that's gone

Once in a while I'll wake up
Wondering why we gave up
But once and a while
Comes and fades away

I don't know what love is
I'm selfish and lazy
And when I get scared
I can act like I'm crazy

When I think of your kisses
I'm still gonna smile
I'm still gonna miss you
Once in a while
Once in a while

Once in a while I'll wake up
Wondering why we gave up
But once in a while
Comes and it fades away

Good things keep moving ahead
I'm tired of dying
I'm living instead.

---

Amen.

The Pattern That Connects

It was a terrible idea, wasn't it, to try and explain the whole universe in a blog?
I can't even keep my world well ordered, and I want to tie together all of creation?

Ambitious, presumptious, arrogant little sparkplug.

Valentines Day

He buys me presents, and writes me a card.
I have never received either on Valentines day.

I get him a bottle of Disaronno.

We kiss.

Firsts, firsts.

---

And on another, completely different note, cliche as it might sound: I am now entirely and totally in love with Sailing to Philadelphia. It tugs at something inside me and I can't help but turn and look.

Ghosts

and my attempt to lay them to rest...

----
Here's what I did:
I wished for it.
I started it,
I ended it,
I WORKED at it,
I wrote: the emails, the texts, the loveletters.

But it was not meant to be.
The death sentence was on my birth certificate.

And no one can fight either.

And does everything always have to be such a struggle? Always?
I got tired. Deathly tired. So I quit.
Did he take over then, stay when I told him to go?
No.
And so -
Nearly three years since that tortured phonecall longdistance, and many many long nights later, it's over.

Finished.
If I have made the right decision, God, keep we walking forwards.
If it's the wrong one, God, forgive me, and keep me walking forwards.
----

Peace.

Come on. Peace.
----

A shameful dirty secret:
I have stolen one item of clothing from the launderette.
(No, I am not saying what it was)

In my defense;
It was lying on the floor, unclaimed.
Perhaps it was a relic from a break up or a death or a failure or a forgetfulness or perhaps it was just unloved.
Perhaps she didn't notice it was missing until well after she went to her room and unpacked her laundry bag (which, for students, can be anything from a couple of hours to a couple of months after doing the actual laundry).
Either way, I decided that she did not care to have it back.

Also in my defense -
It was a one off, on impulse.

I have been stolen from thrice, and I went to reclaim my dropped items within 30 minutes each time, but they were gone.

You give a little, you take a little.
Sue me.

Two ideas I used to love as a child, but haven't about that much until now;
------

We are dreaming, and soon we will wake up. And the most real-seeming things will vanish and dissolve.

---

God exists. Or many Gods.
And we live in one tiny insignificant corner of some tiny insignificant part of their world. A breeze blows through their window, and our universe implodes. We have no time to think but if we could, we would be shocked at the scale of the catastrophe.
At other times, maybe a dust particle in their room shifts positition and a falling comet changes course and a tiny green planet breathes a sigh of relief, shocked at the scale of the blessing they've been granted.
The Gods, in the meanwhile, continue living their own lives. They don't know about us, and if they did they would be unimpressed. They do things on a bigger scale up there.
---

Both not so original, I know. But both would make me smile.

I believe!
I believe!
I B.E..L.I.E.V.E. and I talk to him or It or Her or them all. the. time.
When I see stars. When I see mist. When I see rain. When I see my father. When I am kissing. When I want to be kissing, and can't. When I'm lonely. When I read. When I am silent. When I am dancing. When I see a lover. When I want a lover.

All. The. Time.

I believe!
So what?

Nonsense, don't bother

If at the end of my life, I am in a room exactly like this, will it be so bad?
(This is a superficial thought, I am not existentially alarmed about being alone, I know there are bigger problems in the world than my patheticness, don't worry.)

This what my moment looks like:
A warm pink light in my room. A fat grey cat. Posters on the wall. I'm alright, I'm alright, I've been lonely before. There are stars liting up the sky outside. I have to go out for a smoke, and who's going to stop me?! I'm alright, I'm alright, I've been lonely before...
Will it be so bad, if it's exactly like this?
No, not so bad at all.
Not so bad at all.
I'm alright, I'm alright, I've been lonely before.

--
Italicised = I'm alright by Madeline Peyroux. Have a listen, she's wonderful.

Who is the great love of my life?
Let's face it, darling.
It's Just Me.

--

Of all the loves past and future, not one has gone as deep as my own desire to fly. And only I can do that.
Friends and lovers and great loves and small; None of them can do more than present cliffs high enough to leap from. The greater the love, the higher the ledge from which to leap.
Who, though, will force me to fall and fly?
Only me.

There. is. no. greater. love. than my own pact with myself: Keep climbing, keep falling, keep on flying.
I minister that.
Who can heal me through the exquisite pain of crashing against rocks and realizing: I don't have to do this, I have wings.
Me. I do that.

Thank goodness.

Decisions, Decisions.

Is the act of having children an expression of radical hope?
And therefore, if I decide not to...
What am I saying about my views on life? On possibility?

- I am a hopeful, positive person.
- I don't think we're going to make it.
- At a fundamental level, I don't think we've figured out how best to be the best humans we can be.

This moment in time feels to me like the farewell party. Joyous, (for those who will make the last exit), filled with light and colour and sound and chaos... because we won't be here tomorrow to look each other in the eye... so we might as well go crazy. Fuck around with all manner of strangeness.

I'm not going to bring any children into this mess.

Sustainable Development

A defintition by C.S. Holling:

''Sustainability is the capacity to create, test and maintain adaptive capacity. Development is the process of creating, testing, and maintaining opportunity. The phrase that combines the two, "sustainable development", thus refers to the goal of fostering adaptive capabilities and creating opportunities. It is therefore not an oxymoron but a term that describes a logical partnership."

(emphasis added)
Holling 2001 in Newman and Dale 2005, 'Network Structure, Diversity, and Proactive Resilience Building: a Response to Tompkins and Adger' Ecology and Society 10(1):22

India Together

For anyone who wants an alternative source of news to put 'India Shining' into perspective, subscribe to newsletters from India Together.

(not going to insert link, google it you lazy bums.)

National Gallery, Edinburgh

Some of the art I saw when I visited the National Gallery, Edinburgh.
More in a later post.

An Allegory, El Greco

Diana and her Nymphs, Robert Burns

Francesca da Rimni, William Dyce

Wandering Shadows, Peter Grahm

The Three Ages of Man, Titian

The Sick Rose, William Blake

The Hill of the Winds, Sir David Young Cameron

The Death of Adonis, Giuseppe Mazzuoli

St. Bride, John Duncan

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/opinion/28dowd.html?hp

Yes, it's in 'Opinion' and is therefore most likely a spoof (at least I hope it is).
But still. Read it.

Climate Change and World Peace for Dummies

As pointed out by Eric Pooley of Time Magazine, Al Gore's Peace Prize will be a subject of intense debate. One camp will hail it as deserved recognition, at long last, of the severity of climate change and the urgency with which it needs to be tackled. Everyone else will call it either: a.) SlightlyRidiculous (since there were more deserving candidates and/or causes) or b.) Totally and Completely Ridiculous (since the climate change-world peace link is a myth or worse, since climate change itself is a myth).
You probably know by now which camp I belong to.
And therefore can imagine my irritation, annoyance and frustration when I encountered this article on The Telegraph, entitled 'What has Al Gore done for world peace?' by Damian Thompson. What annoyed me more than the article itself (which at least made some attempt at pulling together a series of 'facts') was the string of absurd reactions to it in the Comments section. Two major themes were - Climate change is not real / Climate change is not linked to peace (or lack thereof).
Below is my response. I have deliberately left out the all-important incident-and-example rhetoric, since people tend to twist every piece of evidence to suit their own particular perspective. The thread I have proposed below has already been written about extensively. My summary of it is simply a compressed version:
______________________________
A theme that should ring true, and close to home, for all the Yankee cowboys here (suitably simplified to match the level of intelligence I see on this forum). Try, if you can, to wrap your minds around this -
1. An important driver of human conflict is intense competition over scarce (or highly desired resources)
2. Climate change entails a change in the distribution of some highly valuable natural resources - like freshwater.
3. The resulting poverty is likely to drive areas of scarcity (Africa, parts of Asia, etc.,) into further sociopolitical unrest.
4. Therefore, an important driver PREVENTING unrest is the mitigation of climate change, or at least adaptation to it.
5. Education is the first step towards changing policies, since we (and by we, I do not mean the United States) live in a (supposedly) democracy-loving world.

Therefore the link between education and peace.
Therefore the conspicuous lack of peace within America and American 'foreign policy'.
Therefore the Peace Prize for an environmental educator.

Geddit?
_____________________________________________________

Chomsky on the role of the press in a democracy

"Chomsky is quick to explain that none of this is to be taken as a conspiracy: no one meets with editors behind closed doors to tell journalists what to report. No one has to, for reporters know that they can become rich and famous if they just remain "normal". The best example: Bob Woodward. As an unknown journalist with nothing to lose, he broke the Watergate story right under the noses of the established reporters. And he became famous. But today, no one is afraid of the investigative journalist of yore. On the contrary, Woodward is the only journalist who has been able to spend hours with the otherwise so secretive Bush, and in his book "Bush at War" critical questions are few and far between:
After my interview with President Bush the morning of Aug. 20, the president offered a tour of his ranch. We walked outside, and he climbed behind the wheel of his pickup truck and motioned me toward the passenger side. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and a female Secret Service agent squeezed into the cramped passenger back seat. Barney, his Scottie dog, parked himself between us in the front and was soon in his master's lap.
Woodward does not give us the information that voters need. Rather, he entertains us. As Chomsky puts it, the US media see their audience as consumers, not citizens."

An excerpt from an article I read on Noam Chomsky. I can't find the exact link, but it's somewhere on his website.

A Question for Arundhati Roy

Dear Arundhati-didi :

I have read your books and your essays. Come September, and The Road to Harsud have moved me the most. Angered me the most. And woken me the most sharply, to the "...absolute, relentless, endless, habitual, unfairness of the world." While I do not presume that you will ever read this, I would still like to put a question to you.

What can I do, and how should I be feeling?

We live, as you say, in the world of "spurious choice". I can choose to buy Big Business out of business, but is what I buy instead organic, or local, or fair trade? Which one is to be traded off against the other one? And in the millions of choices I make everyday, this bottle of water vs. that drink vs. thirst, I am then exhausted. This exhaustion, I realize, is the ultimate weapon of Big Business. (I object to the use of that phrase, it doesn't seem fair to be sizeist. But I do acknowledge that Big = Powerful, most of the time, in economic terms.) This exhaustion, this feeling, at age 25, that I would like to curl up under a tree and look at the sky, or be with a lover, or damn-it-all, drink the Coke that my uneducated childhood has addicted me to. To remember what it is like to Not Know.

But of course, I can never go back. And if I did, I would regret it. Therefore, the question is - can I meaningfully go forward? Can I make any difference by leading a different life? (I don't require an answer to know that I must lead a different life anyway.)

And in the background of all of this, there is the unrelenting, absurd and nameless terror, anger and frustration that the world wrenches out of me. Terror, anger and frustration were further than the edges of the universe when I was growing up. Now, they are constant, darkly glittering, burning cold companions. Ruthlessly invasive and unforgiving. I say they are nameless because they are directed at everything - and therefore at nothing, meaningfully. Who should I be angry at? George W. Bush and Shell? Or the endlessly recursive set of circumstances that make George Bush and Shell possible? And the terror and shock, when I realise that time and space are illusions even in this purely mental exercise - at the heart of the circumstances making George W. Bush and Shell possible, is the individual. Me. Where I spend my money and how, where I laugh with my friends over coffee and whether or not I smoke and where I buy my clothes.

So: Caught as we all are in this endless circle, this going-nowhere-fast spiral, I can only Scream.
What can I do, and what should I feel?