The Purpose Of Genocide Nightmares

In a time of genocide, our terrible nightmares of murdered children are just the brain's way of compelling us to face the world as it is right now:

"Wake up. For the sake of humanity, wake up. Stop acting as if life were still normal. Wake up!"

ChatPTSD Tells Us All About M. R. James

Hey there, ChatPTSD! What can you tell us about the great British icon of supernatural stories, M. R. James?

"M. R. James is a notable writer of mysteries, whose most famous book, GREYBEARD, was filmed as THE CHILDREN OF BRIAN ALDISS.

"James also collaborated with Truman Capote to write THE INNOCENTS, which was filmed by Luchino Visconti as L'INNOCENTE. This film starred creepy child actor Martin Balsam, who would later go on to fame in VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. His co-star in L'INNOCENTE, Deborah Kerr, was married to British bomber pilot Burt Lancaster, who would also appear in a famous Visconti epic, BORN FREE, in which Elsa Lanchester played a leopardess.

"M. R. James would later become Provost of Eaton's, a chain of Canadian department stores that specialized in antiquarian relics. No longer a mistress of mysteries, she became a ghost writer. Her most famous book, THE CASTER OF THE RUNES, was published under a pseudonym, J. G. Salinger, and went on to inspire the David Cronenberg film, RAISE HIGH THE DROWNED WORLD, CRASHERS.

"James then became a dentist on Her Majesty's buccal service, with a driver's licence to kill after dark in the parking fields -- truly, a warning to the carious."

AI? Aieeeee!

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Twists and THE TWILIGHT ZONE: "Ring-A-Ding Girl," and "Nightmare As A Child"

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"Ring-a-Ding Girl" (1963), written by Earl Hamner, Jr. Directed by Alan Crosland, Jr.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE was always inconsistent. Its great episodes remain powerful and beautifully-crafted to this day, but the quality of the rest veered from mediocre to downright painful.

A primary strength and weakness of the series is Rod Serling. Many of his episodes become sermons on the hatefulness of human beings; others depend on a final moment twist that undermines any point the story might have made. This is why, for me, his best episodes avoid any twist. "And When The Sky Was Opened," for example, relies on nothing more, and nothing less, than a relentless march towards doom.

Elsewhere, in stories by Serling and his other TWILIGHT ZONE writers, the twist does no damage because it changes nothing about the fate of its people ("The Midnight Sun"), or because the twist appears halfway through the story, which then explores the implications of that twist ("In His Image"). But one story that seems at first to rely on a twist, employs, instead, a delayed revelation of context -- a context that cannot be explained.

This episode, "Ring-A-Ding Girl" by Earl Hamner, Jr, caught me off guard when I first watched it decades ago, and works even more for me today.

Many commenters online have complained that the story makes no sense. I disagree; I would argue that if the supernatural existed, we should not expect it to follow our expectations of causality, nor should we expect the supernatural to conform to our notions of time. What makes "Ring-A-Ding Girl" so haunting for me is that it relies not on causality, not on the consistent passage of time, but on consistency of character.

The protagonist of the story is an actress who, like so many people who perform to crowds, has a public and a private face. Here we see both: the false bravado of the public face, the confusion, the anxiety of the private face. Apparently baffled by what is going on, this actress begins to improvise, and the results of her decision become clear only at the story's end.

In the wrong hands, "Ring-A-Ding Girl" could have become a sentimental, consolatory script. Instead, I find the story honest and sad, and its final shot of the protagonist both eerie and heart-breaking.

Even if we could never understand the supernatural, we might still have the freedom to respond to it in our own fashion, for evil, for good, as ourselves. This would seem to be the point of "Ring-A-Ding Girl," and for me, it makes perfect sense.

---

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"Nightmare As A Child" (1960), written by Rod Serling. Directed by Alvin Ganzer.

Very few TWILIGHT ZONE episodes actually scare me. "And When The Sky Was Opened" never fails to scrape a nerve, but another episode that unsettles me is "Nightmare As A Child." As a ghost story that deals less with the supernatural than with the psychological, it uncovers a sense of dread in its down-to-Earth aspects of lost memory and life-long stalking.

It also veers away from the disappointment of a final twist. Most viewers will understand what is going on within five minutes; I suspect that Serling knew this, and so he relied not on a twist, but on a mid-story confirmation of what the viewer has already grasped. This confirmation allows the story to move beyond its ghost elements into a more disturbing tale of psychopathology, with no lapse of tension.

One of the biggest challenges of this approach is to find an effective ending. While I do feel that Serling could have dreamed up a stronger finale, I can accept the one offered here as appropriate to the story and to its implications. Elsewhere, the episode benefits from its acting, its blocking of action, its direction, and especially from a quiet score by Jerry Goldsmith, whose music oscillates between deceptive gentleness and sinister evocation of a threat that lurks in the background while waiting to strike: a description that applies well to the whole episode.

Jason E. Rolfe reviews DOORWAYS UNFORESEEN

A book's first review is always a welcomed event, especially when that review comes from a writer of distinctive short stories like Jason E. Rolfe.

"It’s my opinion that at any one time there are countless writers writing countless versions of the exact same story. Regardless the reason, this sameness often comes at the cost of a writer’s true creativity. Said another way, writers often sacrifice what they really want to say and how they truly want to say it to the false god Sameness. I think that is why the writers I most admire stand out. They dare to be different, to be unique. They write exactly what they want to write, how they want to write it and sameness be damned! They experiment and in doing so they become closer to who they are meant to be as writers. Why is that? Perhaps it’s because they are writing for themselves rather than for the expectations of genre or the average reader. It’s been my experience that the writers who write for themselves are the ones who ought to be read most by us. Mark Fuller Dillon is no exception.

"Mark wrote Doorways Unforeseen because it was in him to write. He wrote it the way he did, in iambic pentameter, because that is exactly what he wanted to do. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. It’s actually difficult and quite gutsy. Of course, as is Mark’s habit, he wrote each word, each poetic phrase with the careful precision of a master craftsman. Like an Oulipian working within the confines of constraint he has managed to tell us truly terrifying tales. "They Collect," and "A Flimsy Vinyl Door" in particular left me (and leave me still) both genuinely unsettled as a reader, and envious as a writer for whom poetry has remained an ever elusive talent. Rest assured that poetry has not eluded Mark Fuller Dillon."

Dear Fiction Writers of Today: Revise!

Dear fiction writers of today,

I love to read, and I would love to read your stories, but I need your help.

When you revise your manuscripts, when you cut out all material that is needlessly repetitive, wastefully superfluous, when you reduce five hundred words to one hundred, please pay a similar attention to grammar and usage, to the sound and meaning of your sentences, and to the unblocked, immersive flow of your narratives.

In too many stories of today, I find ambiguous modifiers, ambiguous antecdents, and even, within multiple clauses, ambiguous subjects.

I see the misapplication of too many present participles, when what you need is the simple past tense. You might also be tempted to support a weak verb with a present participle afterthought, but what you actually need is a lively main verb.

If you choose your nouns and verbs for precision and for vivid clarity, you will find less need for adjectives and adverbs, for subordinate clauses that prop up the main clause in the ways that flying buttresses prop up cathedrals.

Explain when you must, but only when you must. Readers are smart enough to understand implication. They know that when you say 2+2, what you actually mean is four. You can also rely on a reader's empathy. Set up conditions for an emotional response, for epiphany, and a reader will feel it. You have no need to spell out the obvious.

When you place a reader inside your story as a participant guided by a consistently-maintained viewpoint character, when you allow this reader to follow events without interruption, just as your viewpoint character would, when you allow the reader to be disturbed or surprised by the same discoveries made by this character at the same time, then you have a strong chance of hooking this reader's attention. A reader grabbed is a reader who keeps on reading.

Revise with a reader's ear. Revise aloud. This allows you to catch unwanted alliteration, unwanted assonance, end rhymes in clauses or sentences, repetitive rhythms, and ugly, clashing consonants. Always assume that your readers will hear this noise, and run away from it as they would from a mistuned marching band.

Sir Thomas Browne. Line engraving by P. Vanderbank, 1683. Click for a better jpeg.

Please note that these recommendations can apply to any style. You might cut without mercy for a style as naked as the writing of H. E. Bates, Edith Wharton, or Sarah Orne Jewett; you might construct and paint a style as ornate as Clark Ashton Smith's, Elizabeth Bowen's, or William Sansom's. Either way is fine, as long as you control the result. For a non-fiction example, think of Thomas Browne. You might raise an eyebrow at his latinate vocabulary, but notice how he relies on verbs to propel the sentences. Notice how his clauses remain clear despite their boxes-within-boxes complexity. No matter how complicated his prose might become, Browne maintains control.

The means of control are the basic principles mentioned here, and these controls will help you to find and to keep readers.

You will also keep me, with my gratitude.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT: Serial Versus Film

Cover by Bryan Kneale, 1960. Click for a better jpeg.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, aka FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (1967) is by no means a bad film, and if accepted on its own terms, it could easily be considered good. Yet despite its virtues, for me, it cannot match the scope and unsettling mood of its television source.

Broadcast in six episodes by the BBC from 1958 to 1959, Nigel Kneale's QUATERMASS AND THE PIT remains one of the best TV serials I have watched; only I, CLAUDIUS and CHERNOBYL have rivalled it.

The Hammer Film adaptation does what it can to honour the source, and at certain points, it compares favourably. Roy Ward Baker directs crowd and panic sequences with all of the skill he had displayed in 1958's A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (by far the best Titanic film I have seen). Lead actors Andrew Keir and James Donald are as good as Andre Morell and Cec Linder, their counterparts in the TV serial, and I would hardly be surprised if many viewers preferred the film leads.

Andrew Keir. Click for a better jpeg.

Yet even with its lower budget and limited technical resources, the TV serial comes across as the "bigger" production, with a huge cast, and with visual effects often better than those used in the film. In particular, the design and construction of the TV aliens go far beyond anything seen in the film, and they come to life more convincingly in the serial's "optic-encephalograph" sequence.

Above all, the TV serial gains from its extended running time of three-and-a-half hours. Nigel Kneale was always at his best when he had room to explore the implications of his ideas. That was true in THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT serial, but even more so in the TV version of QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. In six episodes, Kneale took a small event and then built upon it, built upon it, built upon it, until it involved nothing less than the fate of humanity. The film version does what it can with Kneale's ideas, but seems rushed and cramped in comparison, with less time to linger on the sinister details. The film is also forced to toss away much of the serial's nuance, those elegant moments when Kneale played with ideas for unexpected results. (A case in point: what Quatermass finds in the serial's pit is intriguingly more elaborate, more strange, than what he finds in the film.)

Andre Morell and Cec Linder. Click for a better jpeg.

The serial brought other advantages. Kneale's Quatermass plays were novels for television, with varied characters from different walks of life squabbling, cooperating, and horribly dying; the film cannot match the scope of Kneale's original. The music of Trevor Duncan works more effectively in the serial than does the music of Tristram Carey in the film. The coda of the serial, which provides a haunting final statement of the story's point, was cut from the film, and the result feels like a missing tooth to a questing tongue.

In the end, viewers who come to the film without knowledge of the TV serial (or of Kneale's published teleplay), will most likely find a lot to appreciate, but I love the scale and sinister details of the TV serial too much to accept the film on its own terms. That is my limitation; it might not be yours.

Chant Of The PMC Media

Under the dripping upas tree,
I scapegoat you, you scapegoat me.
Mired from sea to boiling sea,
We kiss the feet of the DNC.

Biden-Harris, Genocide, and the Failure of Democrats to See Their Own Evils

For me, perhaps the most bizarre and disturbing behaviour of the Democrats is their denial of genocide, their failure to recognize genocide as a crime against humanity, their willingness to shrug off the atrocities of genocide because those in the Biden-Harris administration supporting and arming genocide are "not Trump."

This might be the most appalling evil committed by the Democrats during my lifetime.

Its previous rivals were bad enough. Democrats gave us the National Security Act of 1947. Democrats gave us the war against Vietnam. Democrats approved Reagan's NAFTA and destroyed America's industrial base. Democrats abandoned the American working- and middle-classes to bow before the professional managerial class. Democrats worked with neocon Republicans to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Democrats worked with market-fundamentalist Republicans to financialize the American economy and to wipe out the United States as an economic world power. Democrats armed and supplied cash to the Zelensky regime in a proxy war against Russia. Democrats broke diplomatic ties with Russia, alienated China, and reinforced the necessity of BRICS for countries appalled by American dishonesty and stupidity.

All of these actions have led to political-economic isolation at home, and to a pile of corpses abroad. All of these actions are evil. But now, the Biden-Harris administration has gone even further, and the result is an Israeli genocide that Democrats apparently consider "normal" and "forgivable."

The world will not forgive. Whether American voters will forgive remains to be seen.

"But Trump! But Trump!" the Democrats will cry, as they have in recent years. What they fail to understand is that, to beat Trump and the Republicans, they must offer something more than Trump and the Republicans could even begin to promise: substantial improvements to the material conditions of American's lives; moral and ethical principles worth supporting; hope for a world that is not poised on the abyss of endless wars, unstoppable decline, and a towering stack of dead bodies.

In short, the Democrats would have done well to examine themselves, to correct their own policies and their own failings, but Democrats would rather blame everyone else on the planet than see themselves clearly.

And for this, Americans will suffer.

Trump vs Harris vs Republicans vs Democrats vs Americans

Scylla, meet Charybdis.

Charybdis, meet Scylla.

Americans, meet entropy

And please accept my sympathy.

We Are The Cause Of Genocide

“Had there been YouTube and Instagram and TikTok around Auschwitz, this is what we would have seen, people burning alive. And it’s beyond horrendous, it’s beyond comprehension.”

-- Dr. Gabor Mate, on Israeli atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.

Why don't people hear this? Because they refuse to hear it.

Why don't people see this? Because they refuse to see it.

Here in the West, in our hypothetically "open" societies, we have the hypothetical freedom to reach moral conclusions at odds with our governments, the hypothetical freedom to be empathetic, and principled, and angry. We have no one to stop us.

Instead, we stop ourselves. We refuse to hear, we refuse to see. We are the cause of genocide.

By ourselves, we must overcome our moral weakness, our apathy, our cowardice, to oppose genocide. No one else will force us to wake the hell up.

More Stray Thoughts on the Hideous American Election

"Garbage"...? Quite a statement from a sitting president.

Given his regrettable cognitive impairment, Biden might not have intended to sabotage the Harris campaign.

But given his mean-spirited character (he is, after all, Genocide Joe), he might very well have intended to stab the backs of those who stabbed his. Consider them stabbed, Joe.

###

What if Kamala Harris were honest?

"I know the ambitions, the aspirations, the dreams that exist in our community. Ambitions to win the support of neocon Republicans, to stamp out, once and for all, the remnants of a Democratic left, to isolate the United States globally, to make ourselves hateful psychopaths to the rest of this planet. Aspirations to fuel proxy wars, to make countries fight and die for the sake of our own narcissistic self-interest, to provide cash and bombs for mass murder and genocide. Dreams that drive us to turn economic rivals into hated enemies, to clamp down on anti-war protests and freedom of speech, to disgust voters of all political inclinations, to wipe out the Democratic party for years to come.

"My plan is to build an opportunity for Western collapse and thermonuclear suicide. Let's burn together, all of us, for the joy of burning, for the ambitions, aspirations, and dreams of World War Three, of joyful human extinction."

###

If the Democrats had really considered Trump to be the danger they declare him to be, they would have allowed people to choose amongst delegates for a candidate most likely to beat him.

Instead, the DNC appointed a candidate of limited experience, limited intellect, limited empathy, limited vocabulary, limited rhetorical skill, limited appeal to wide sections of the American electorate, limited awareness of policy options, and above all, a candidate complicit with genocide. Genocide!

What's more, this appointed candidate has stumbled through a campaign that seems intent on winning over neocon Republicans, while driving away voters who have traditionally chosen Democrats.

If, in the end, Trump turns out be as dangerous as the Democrats maintain, then the Democrats, through their own stupidity or malice or smug over-confidence, will be remembered as a party that abandoned the American people. That will be their legacy.

Stray Thoughts Before the Looming American Election

Tribalism, idolatry, an utter lack of self-awareness, a pathological disregard for those "other" people we murder as we pursue complacent comforts and psychotic dreams of power:

The four horsemen of Western collapse.

###

If the polls reflect reality, then one half of the voting public in America will bow before a party that arms and supports genocide right now, today, while the other half will choose a party that merely promises to arm and support genocide.

No matter which party wins, Americans lose.

###

When Trump wins, do you suppose the Democrats will suddenly discover that genocide (GASP!) is a crime against humanity, that aiding genocide (WHAT?!?) is evil, and that, by sending weapons and military support to Israel (HOW DARE HE?!?), Trump has become a war criminal who must be prosecuted?

I know, I know: it's wishful thinking, because genocide is a bipartisan policy; but still, given that the Democratic party are seasoned hypocrites, why not use their hypocrisy to save lives... and to stop Trump?

###

When Trump wins -- or, to be precise, when Harris loses -- American voters are likely to turn against each other, to blame each other for the crisis of Trump.

This would be not only unfair, but a tactical mistake.

The Democratic party expected voters to legitimise the Biden-Harris policies of proxy war, direct confrontation with armed nuclear powers, and genocide. No sane voter on the planet would have swallowed these options, and no one should blame them for staying at home on election day.

At the same time, Americans faced with Trump in office will have to realize that they are now on their own, that any political opposition to Trump will have to come from the American people themselves.

Americans might discover, as they did during Trump's first term, that the threat of Trump is nowhere near as apocalyptic as the professional managerial classes had insisted; that Trump, like every American president of our day, is constrained and compelled by national security priorities, imperial structures, and financial demands of the donor class. Yet even if this becomes true, Americans will remain under the rule of this imperial warfare consensus, and will be no better off than they were under previous Democrat and Republican administrations. Once again, Americans will be left to fend for themselves.

When American voters blame each other for political outcomes, they leave untouched the people, the institutions, and the ideologies that have slowly made American lives intolerable. Without interruption from the street, this political-economic decay of the United States will go on until the country falls apart, or until fascism steps in to sort things out on its own terms.

Either way, the American people can no longer afford the luxury of hating each other. Somehow, against the odds, Americans must learn to speak with each other, to hear each other, to work together against the mindless, heartless forces that rule them.

When A Film Falls Apart: HEREDITARY

HEREDITARY (2018), written and directed by Ari Aster.

When a story or film falls apart, we can examine this failure to understand why certain approaches work for us, while other methods do not. From this we can learn about craft, or, at the very least, gain insight into our own subjective responses.

Not every failure to connect is a failure of craft. I have read stories and seen films that did nothing for me, but only because of my own tastes and limitations; I could find nothing objectively wrong in their techniques. Yet in certain cases, things fall apart because of expectations established by the work itself, expectations that are then abandoned or evaded. In my view, HEREDITARY sets up hopes for one type of narrative, but then runs away from the implications of that narrative.

It seems to me that most narratives using the supernatural or the uncanny approach this use in two ways. (I say "most" because there will always be exceptions -- absurdist or surrealist narratives, for example, along with accounts of actual dreams, or fictions that simulate the effect of dreams.)

I call these two approaches intrusion and externalization.

In a story of intrusion, a person, family, or community is invaded by some uncanny or supernatural threat from outside the group. Stories of this kind are perhaps the most common, and they succeed or fail based on the skill and conviction brought to them by their creators.

On the other hand, in a story of externalization, a person, family, or community is faced by a threat that seems to reflect or echo conflicts within the group. These conflicts existed before the supernatural event began, or become most apparent when supernatural events force them to stand out. Either way, any firm line between inner conflict and outer manifestation can become difficult if not impossible to find.

In films, the master of this approach might be Bergman, but it shows up elsewhere with equal effectiveness in THE BIRDS, in LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH, and in THE INNOCENTS.

Inner conflicts need not be clear for externalization to work powerfully. We can recognize the isolating psychological struggles of JESSICA, the projected sexual anxiety of THE INNOCENTS, but the personal conflicts that drive THE BIRDS remain half-glimpsed, murky: they are not so much perceived as they are suspected. If anything, this makes THE BIRDS even more suggestive and haunting.

Because these two methods are both valid even as they set up different expectations, a story can succeed or fail by how it confronts the implications of its method. Craft and conviction matter, but so does honesty in following through.

Here is the danger:

A story of supernatural intrusion can reveal itself, gradually and with no loss of conviction or power, to be a story of supernatural externalization. But can a story that sets up expectations of supernatural externalization hold itself together, if it reveals that its conflicts were never actually internal, but were the results of manipulation from outside?

I would have to say, No, not likely.

Veering away from externalization to intrusion runs the risk of cheapening the human drama, the human pain, that fuelled the story in the first place. We empathize with suffering; we understand that we, too, have suffered in similar ways and will suffer again. If we are told, eventually, that this relatable pain is nothing but a plot device, then we might feel cheated.

This danger becomes even more stark when a narrative shows human pain with exceptional honesty and power. For example, the first half of the film HEREDITARY builds up a dread of mental illness that seeps from one generation to the next. It presents mental suffering and family tensions with an impact that, in better hands, might have rivalled THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, but while Bergman adds uncanny personal visions to enhance the urgency of this mental crisis, HEREDITARY veers away from its intense honesty to show that this family struggle has been prompted and perpetuated by nothing more than melodrama.

In other words, HEREDITARY flees from its implications of human pain by using the supernatural not as a mirror, not as an extension or intensification of this pain, but as a replacement, an evasion. Suddenly, this pain is no longer something that we can all feel, that we can all fear, as it is in a Bergman film, as it is in THE INNOCENTS, in THE BIRDS, or in LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH; suddenly, this pain is the work of cliched movie villains.

To quote from the Sonnet 94 of Shakespeare: "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." HEREDITARY fails drastically, infuriatingly, because it had set itself up as a powerful example of one type of story, only to veer away into something different, something less emotionally confrontational and much less dangerous.

Some viewers might call this evasion a lapse in judgment. I suspect a loss of nerve. Either way, I regret the death of something good.

Lemora

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LEMORA, 1973, directed and written by Richard Blackburn.

During the 1970s, a few notable films overcame the hurdles of a low budget through sheer brutal conviction (THE HILLS HAVE EYES), through an unsettling, dreamlike atmosphere (LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH), through a merciless demolition of its characters' principles and confidence (RITUALS), through guerrilla filming techniques (GOD TOLD ME TO), through the implications of disturbing concepts (THE BROOD), or even through the irrepressible joy of amateurs who wanted to prove their abilities (PHANTASM).

A favourite of mine, and a film that has never gained the reputation it merits, raised itself through pure style. Richard Blackburn's LEMORA provides a consistent visual scheme, and a consistent mood, that overcome its one weakness: an amateur cast with more enthusiasm than skill. Yet even here, two performances are able to stand out: the naturalistic and convincing work of its heroine, played by Cheryl Smith, and the mannered yet interestingly alien performance of its antagonist, played by Lesley Gilb. Smith is clearly a seasoned actress; Gilb might not be an actress at all, but she does offer a strong, unearthly presence.

"Presence" becomes the ultimate virtue of LEMORA. The photography, the lighting and colour schemes, the music, the constant evasions and implications of the script, give the film a tone unique not only for its decade, but for today. Despite a few unconvincing make-up effects, LEMORA succeeds in building dread, and although it might seem viscerally mild when compared to something like THE EXORCIST, LEMORA carries its own dark fairy-tale spells of uncertainty and mystery. It explains very little: although its antagonist reveals vampiric traits, her actual nature is never clarified. She seems like something pretending to be human, like a mimic or a mechanism; her intentions remain foggy right up to the ending and beyond, which might frustrate certain viewers but which leaves me impressed.

In his commentary on the Synapse DVD, Richard Blackburn cites as an influence on his film Arthur Machen's "The White People," and Mervyn Peake's "Boy in Darkness." Although his film cannot reach the heights of these influences, it does echo certain of their ideas and moods, and in digesting the sources, gains a certain originality of its own. This, in part, is what makes LEMORA strange, perhaps too strange to gain a wide audience, but strange enough to win admiration from those, like me, who love the indefinable, the chimaeric, the neither here nor there that somehow becomes an unforgettable landscape of its own.

Genocide Then, Genocide Now

Imagine, for a moment, that the United States had never gone to war with the Axis powers, and that American politicians, American media, had called the French resistance fighters "terrorists," the Warsaw Ghetto uprising "an unprovoked act of violence," and had expressed admiration for the "precision," the "efficiency," of German extermination methods.

Go ahead: imagine.

Or, instead, you could just watch American television right now, read American newspapers right now, listen to the blather of Democrats and Republicans right now, as America provides cash and bombs and fist-pumps for genocide.

Go ahead: watch, read, listen.

And after all of this attention paid to the current genocide, would you still swallow the lies and brain-dead slogans of these presidential ghouls? Would you still be "with her"? Would you still want to "make America great again"?

Go ahead: ask yourself.

SHRINKING OLD -- A Sonnet

SHRINKING OLD.

Why do you flee, you faces of the night?
You crowd my dreams, but vanish when the day
Arrives to chase my scattered loves away.
I die a little more beneath your flight.

You friends who shared my scrapes, my grins, my fright,
You fragrant women, tearful as you play,
And you my mother, you my father: stay
A moment longer with me in this light.

The sumac reds of autumn line my path.
I hear symphonies and songs while I remain
Alive in my desire, in my grief,

Alive within my creaking shell of wrath.
Yet often, I pursue the reds in vain:
Your faces dim the flame of every leaf.

Kubrick's THE SHINING

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THE SHINING forces me to wonder why a film so well-directed, so splendidly-photographed, should fail so thoroughly to scare me.

I could blame the source, a book that did nothing for me at all, but this would be unfair to a director as transformative as Kubrick. Like Tarkovsky, Bergman, and Lynch, Kubrick had his own perspective on the world, and his films owe more to that perspective than they do to any adapted text.

But unlike these other directors, Kubrick seemed to lack any strong sense of the non-rational. He was always good with the horrors of misapplied rationalism, and so we have the trial in PATHS OF GLORY, the megadeath plans in DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, the failure of Hal 9000 to understand the need for human beings on a human mission. In a Kubrick film, tools of reason are often put to work on goals unreasonable.

The non-rational demands different methods. To create atmosphere and anxiety in a dreamlike story, directors can manage well without any belief in the supernatural, but they do need to accept -- and perhaps even to fear -- the subconscious. IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, SOLARIS, THE MIRROR, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, THE SILENCE, HOUR OF THE WOLF, PERSONA, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, INLAND EMPIRE: these are nightmare films, and they speak directly to those functions of our brains that explore nightmares. Kubrick seemed more at home with fears of rationality gone cold: the military industrial complex in PATHS OF GLORY, DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, and FULL METAL JACKET; the manipulative state in CLOCKWORK ORANGE; the polite society unable to accept ordinary human strangeness in BARRY LYNDON; the tool that develops a will of its own beyond human concerns in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. These are nightmares of the conscious mind.

For this reason, the breakdown of Jack Torrance begins to seem as ridiculous and stylized as the antics of the cartoon characters who lurk at the margins of this film. Leering, rolling his eyes, lolling his tongue, he becomes Wile E. Coyote, and like the Coyote, he fails because of his own bull-headed stupidity. I, for one, have never been afraid of Wile E., neither in the Road Runner films, nor in THE SHINING.

This overblown, cartoonish view of madness becomes all the more unfortunate to me, when I consider the one moment of THE SHINING that left me unsettled. In the sequence where Danny sneaks up to the family apartment to get his toy fire engine, only to find his father seated on the bed and staring at winter light, Jack Torrance is calm and loving and, in his words, at least, reasonable -- yet I can see an odd glint in his eyes that hits me in places where his later bellows and prancing fail to reach. And the frozen alarm in Danny's eye tells me everything I need to know about his response to this calm and loving father.

Nothing But The Night

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NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT (1973). Directed by Peter Sasdy. Script by Brian Hayles, from a book by John Blackburn that I have not read. (Blackburn's tepid prose never fails to push me out before each book's Chapter Two.)

Why certain films become popular while others, no worse in technique or imagination, become ignored or even hated, remains a mystery. As a case in point, we have NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT -- hardly a great film, but at the same time, nowhere near as bad as reviews might imply. It moves at a rapid pace, it offers an escalating series of surprises, and it ends with a climax that even its detractors often praise.

One source of trouble might be the film's marketing. Promoted as horror, NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT is for the most part a police-procedural / manhunt / criminal investigation story. On these terms, I think it functions well, but anyone who expects the atmosphere and oddness of a horror film might be disappointed -- until the climax, which does convey a mood of sinister peril, and which does make the film stand out.

I would call this a structural flaw. At the heart of the film lurks an uncanny concept: far-fetched, but interesting. Yet this idea is tossed at the viewer in the final minutes. A writer like Nigel Kneale would have built up this concept at length, to explore its disturbing implications. Here, once the concept is revealed, the movie ends -- powerfully, strikingly, but abruptly. I would have preferred to see this idea given more attention.

I would have also preferred to see the good cast given more to do. After all, any film that includes Kathleen Byron had damned well better use her strangeness to its full extent, but this film never matches the courage of BLACK NARCISSUS. NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT's acting, like its direction and cinematography, are never less than competent, but could have been more.

The entire film could have been more, but it could have also been less. It never bored me, never forced me to look at the clock, never made me regret that I was watching it. Nothing would compel me to call this a bad film.

I only wish the film as a whole could have matched the power of its climax.

Robert Altman's IMAGES

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Certain films not usually categorized as horror might as well be called horror. KISS ME DEADLY, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, SECONDS, THE SILENCE, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, SHAME, PERSONA, THE SERPENT'S EGG, THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, all create a mood of escalating dread in ways that can rival or even surpass films people think of as horror.

In a similar way, Robert Altman's IMAGES, from 1972, might as well be called a ghost story. Even if the lead character is haunted not by ghosts but by mental illness, the manifestations of her condition appear and vanish like ghosts, lurk about like ghosts, cause eruptions of panic and anxiety that we would expect from ghosts. The result is a film that kept me on edge in ways that HEREDITARY and SINISTER never could.

Altman achieves his effects with simple techniques from horror films of the past, but applied here with a focus and confidence that stand out. Characters transform from one person to another in mid-conversation. The room-within-room complexities of an ordinary cottage in full daylight become frames-within-frames for sudden appearances and disappearances. "Ghosts" can wait quietly in the background in full view, or they can erupt from the foreground without warning or motivation.

In the role of protagonist, Susannah York shrieks in panic when these manifestations begin early in the film, but as the story continues, she develops a sinister tone: knowing, calculating, almost gleeful in her mental collapse. Her performance is aided by one of the few John Williams musical scores that I like: in its abstraction, its emphasis upon detached or unmotivated sounds, it reminds me less of a typical score by Williams than of a beautifully experimental score akin to those created by Jerry Goldsmith in the 1960s and '70s. I wish that John Williams had written more like it.

Compared to Altman's later quasi-horror film, 3 WOMEN, with its wide-open buildings and stark desert spaces, IMAGES remains more focused, more intimate, with a smaller cast, with smaller rooms, and with beautifully-photographed Irish hillscapes that seem at once grandiose yet magically compact, that begin to seem as haunted and sinister as the film's protagonist.

Never as popular as it should have been, IMAGES deserves to be rediscovered.

WENDIGO (2001), Directed and Written by Larry Fessenden

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"You know, a lot of people make up stories to make sense of the world. It's a big world, after all, and nobody really understands how it all works.... That's what myths are: they help us talk about stuff.... It's important to know that they're just myths, they're just stories. You'll end up being very disappointed when things don't come true that you're wishing for."

After I saw WENDIGO for the first time last night, I went online to check reviews. These were almost universally negative, which took me by surprise and saddened me.

The trouble, I think, is that WENDIGO comes with expectations of its being a horror film, when it actually works better as a film that, like THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, like THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, looks at the fears of a child too keenly aware of the fears of his parents, of the world around him, yet a child unable to fall back on experience or on mature insight to understand these fears. And so the child mythologizes: a method of coping that leads to complications of its own.

For most of the story, WENDIGO focuses tightly on this chilhood perspective, and in my view, succeeds. The hyper-awareness of a child, which, for an adult, might seem like paranoia, is conveyed well by dark rooms in an unfamiliar house, by shifting trees and gusts of snow, by the sudden dead stillness of a frozen landscape, by the barely-understood comments and conversations of parents who must deal with fears of their own.

WENDIGO captures these ordinary yet heightened aspects of life with good attention to detail, with dramatic set-ups and pay-offs that seem down-to-Earth yet unsettling. At the climax, however, its tight focus on the child and on his family shifts to something else, and this, I think, is a mistake: it jettisons the intensity of that narrow focus, and it also drags in traditional horror images that the film lacks technical resources to pull off. I regret this choice: it might not kill the film, but it does harm it.

In the final moments, WENDIGO returns to its narrow, subjective focus on child and family. The result is an ending that carries emotional weight, that succeeds on its own terms, that made me glad to have spent my time with a film that many despise as a waste of time.

WENDIGO plays by its own rules, pays attention to its own concerns, and if you can accept this, then I can recommend it.

A Few Thoughts on That 2024 Paris Olympics Fiasco

In politics, in social commentary, in relationships, religions, and philosophies, freedom of expression becomes not only essential, but foundational; this applies even more to the arts. (Pardon me for that offensively vague and often useless term, "art.")

Yet if I support self-expression for artists, I also urge their self-awareness. On at least a surface level, artists must understand their own motives, their own messages. They must accept responsibility for what they do and say; they must never hide behind excuses of innocence or ignorance.

In short, artists cannot run away from values and principles.

If their only values are the values of the neoliberal marketplace, then I submit that they have no values. If their only principle is to scream out, "Here I am," then I would urge them to shut the hell up. Yet I suspect that most people would indeed stand for some principle or value beyond a purely egoistic need for self-display; to uncover what that principle or value might be calls for self-awareness and self-reflection, but above all, for self-honesty.

What these values might be will depend upon the artist, and even within a single skull, these values might clash, but conflict has always been the rocket fuel of art.

But what if an artist finds value in shattering idols, in tearing things apart, in smashing the stupid complacency of the audience? There is indeed value in screaming, "Fire!" while the world around you burns, because too many people never feel the heat until the final moment, and fool themselves into thinking that they alone will never be seared by flame or suffocated by smoke. The world is full of sleepers, and so we need alarm clocks.

Setting off alarms can lead to resentment, even hatred, for artists by their own generation, but so what? Artists thrive on controversy. What kills them is the silence of apathy.

Sometimes, though, artists cry, "Fire!" not to warn people, not to wake people up, but merely to offend. Again, offense is better than apathy, but is it sufficient to justify deliberately offensive art?

In this case, too, I see no excuse for self-ignorance. Artists who strive only to offend must accept the same responsibilities of artists who strive to set off alarm bells.

One responsibility is the consideration of context. An openly sexual display might not raise eyebrows in a nightclub or in a film for adults, but when that display is presented to a global audience, and what is more, to a global audience of children and their protective parents, no artist can claim the excuse of, "I didn't expect people to react this way!"

A second responsibility is the consideration of broad impact. Religions, like political ideologies, are necessary targets for satire, but when offered to a global audience, mockery can create a tsunami backlash.

This becomes a third responsibility. Artists must expect and accept this backlash as part of the deal: "You sneer, and people will sneer back. Loudly." Artists should have no more freedom to censor critics and an angry audience than the critics and the audience have to censor the arts.

Artists cannot afford to be hypocrites, or self-righteously complacent pawns of the corporate media, or snobs trapped within a bubble of perpetually-reflected worship by the professional managerial classes. With freedom of expression comes freedom of response, and the two must never be cut away from each other. When an audience is no longer allowed to reply, to shout, to argue back, then the arts will rot.

What We Have Become, I Despise

The Israeli genocide is vile enough, but the hypocrisy and cowardice of our Western governments, their mindless justifications for genocide, their penalization and brutalization of people who speak out against genocide, infuriate me.

On certain days I do my best to remain observant and objective, as if I were nothing more than some detached witness to historical forces. Yet deep down, I seethe and mourn. That supposed Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," has never carried such a sting for me.

I've never felt at home with our smiley-faced corporate culture that treats us like idiots, with its assumptions and rationalizations that prioritize the death of mind and heart over life, but the past ten years have been worse than ever.

What we have become, I despise. What we do, I hate.

In A Time Of Genocide, The Masks Fall Off

The current genocide has exposed many priorities of our Western governments, but has also revealed a truth about our intellectual and social conflicts: people seem less interested in principles than in group loyalties -- in short, instead of arguments, we have knee-jerk tribalism.

A key revelation, here, has been the brutal attack on students who protest not only against genocide, but for freedom of speech and conscience. The right-wing groups who railed against woke censorship and cancellation in universities are now celebrating corporate censorship and governmental cancellation. Instead of applauding students for going beyond mere virtue-signalling against abstract enemies like "racism" or "the patriarchy," these pundits and politicians attack the students who have chosen, instead, to confront real enemies with real power to hit back: corporations, corporate-funded institutions, and authoritarian governments.

We need to look at what is actually happening. I reject hollow and safe displays of woke purity, but what students are engaged in, right now, is rebellion with genuine stakes. When cops invade universities to crack skulls, protest is no longer theatre, it is politics; when protest involves fundamental issues like genocide and the freedom to shout, "No," it goes far beyond mere divisions between "us" or "them."

This fight matters not only to students, but to anyone who rejects mass murder and the mass cancellation of dissent. Right or left, rich or poor, we all stand to lose this fight if we draw back into worn-out but comfortable cocoons of political tribalism.

To hell with "us" or "them." We need the solidarity of principles.

I Will Not

I WILL NOT,
by Mark Fuller Dillon.
Thursday, May 02, 2024.

You want me to march for fascism, but I will not.

You want me to kill for zionism, but I will not.

You want me to worship neoliberalism and the dictates of the market, but I will not.

You want me to spy on my neighbours, to denounce them for crimes of thought and speech, but I will not.

You want me to abandon solidarity with people I have never met, never known, but I will not.

You want me to lock human beings into smaller and smaller cages of identity, but I will not.

You want me to deny the biological reality of two sexes, but I will not.

You want me to erase the biological existence of women, but I will not.

You want me to deprive women of women-only spaces, but I will not.

You want me to denounce men for normal, non-violent, non-abusive sexual desires, but I will not.

You want me to believe that men must behave like this, that women must behave like that, and that human sex roles are not social constructs, but I will not.

You want me to reify sexual stereotypes through chemical castration, through female genital mutilation, but I will not.

You want me to declare that the colour of my skin reveals more about me than my character, my ethics, my hopes and aspirations, but I will not.

You want me to set the mechanical mindlessness of algorithms above human skill, above human imagination, but I will not.

You want me to hate your economic rivals in other countries as if they were existential threats, but I will not.

You want me to pretend that I am not an animal, immersed in, and dependent on, the natural world, and you want me to poison, to deplete that world for your profits and your power, but I will not.

You want me to forget the past, but I will not.

You want me to cancel the future, but I will not.

You want me to abandon nuanced thinking, calm debate, the open discussion of ideas, but I will not.

You want me to denounce, to shun, to cancel people of good will who disagree with me, who live by different values than mine, who see the world in different ways than I do, but I will not.

You want me to curse my cultural heritage, which I perceive clearly in its limitations and strengths, its cruelties and goodness, its negative and positive implications, as a past of unmitigated evil, but I will not.

You want me to remain silent while you lie, cheat, rob, and kill, but I will not.

You want me to obey you.

I will not.

Six Elizabethan Poems

=======================

From
FIVE COURTIER POETS OF THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE, edited by Robert M. Bender.
Washington Square Press, Inc, New York, 1967.

=======================

FROM "CAELICA,"
by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke.

When all this All doth pass from age to age,
And revolution in a circle turn,
Then heavenly justice doth appear like rage,
The caves do roar, the very seas do burn,
Glory grows dark, the sun becomes a night,
And makes this great world feel a greater might.

When love doth change his seat from heart to heart,
And worth about the wheel of fortune goes,
Grace is diseased, desert seems overthwart,
Vows are forlorn, and truth doth credit lose,
Chance then gives law, desire must be wise,
And look more ways than one or lose her eyes.

My age of joy is past, of woe begun,
Absence my presence is, strangeness my grace,
With them that walk against me is my sun;
The wheel is turned, I hold the lowest place,
What can be good to me since my love is,
To do me harm, content to do amiss?

=======================

From
BOOK OF ELIZABETHAN VERSE, edited by Edward Lucie-Smith.
Penguin Books, 1965.

=======================

LET OTHERS SING OF KNIGHTS AND PALADINS,
by Samuel Daniel.

Let others sing of knights and paladins
In agèd accents and untimely words;
Paint shadows in imaginary lines,
Which well the reach of their high wits records:
But I must sing of thee, and those fair eyes.
Authentic shall my verse in time to come;
When yet th' unborn shall say, 'Lo where she lies,
Whose beauty made him speak that else was dumb.'
These are the arks, the trophies I erect,
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark, and time's consuming rage.
Though th' error of my youth in them appear,
Suffice they show I lived and loved thee dear.

[Delia, 1592]

=======================

WERE I A KING,
by Edward de Vere.

Were I a king, I could command content;
Were I obscure, hidden should be my cares;
Or were I dead, no cares should me torment,
Nor hopes, nor hates, nor loves, nor griefs, nor fears.
A doubtful choice, of these three which to crave;
A kingdom, or a cottage, or a grave.

[Chetham MS. 8012]

=======================

ELEGY FOR HIMSELF,
WRITTEN IN THE TOWER BEFORE HIS EXECUTION, 1586,
by Chidiock Tichborne.

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares;
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain;
My crop of corn is but a field of tares;
And all my good is but vain hope of gain:
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun;
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard, and yet it was not told;
My fruit is fall'n, and yet my leaves are green;
My youth is spent, and yet I am not old;
I saw the world, and yet I was not seen:
My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun;
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death, and found it in my womb;
I looked for life, and saw it was a shade;
I trod the earth, and knew it was my tomb;
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run;
And now I live, and now my life is done.

[Verses of Praise and Joy, 1586]

=======================

A BLAST OF WIND, A MOMENTARY BREATH,
by Barnabe Barnes.

A blast of wind, a momentary breath,
A watery bubble symbolised with air,
A sun-blown rose, but for a season fair,
A ghostly glance, a skeleton of death;
A morning dew, pearling the grass beneath,
Whose moisture sun's appearance doth impair;
A lightning glimpse, a muse of thought and care,
A planet's shot, a shade which followeth,
A voice which vanisheth so soon as heard,
The thriftless heir of time, a rolling wave,
A show, no more in action than regard,
A mass of dust, world's momentary slave,
Is man, in state of our old Adam made,
Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.

[Spiritual Sonnets, 1595]

=======================

THULE, THE PERIOD OF COSMOGRAPHY,
by Anonymous.

Thule, the period of cosmography,
Doth vaunt of Hecla, whose sulphureous fire
Doth melt the frozen clime and thaw the sky;
Trinacrian Etna's flames ascend not higher;
These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,
Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.

The Andalusian merchant, that returns
Laden with cochineal and china dishes,
Reports in Spain how strangely Fogo burns
Amidst an ocean full of flying fishes:
These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,
Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.

[Set to music by Thomas Weelkes, 1600]

=======================

Brian Aldiss and Joanna Russ: Two Views of STAR TREK

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Brian Aldiss:

"The media have a great grip in the States, and so you get hogwash like STAR TREK, with its bright -- well, it's not very bright, actually -- this tinsel view of the future, and the galaxy, which has to be optimistic. I did once manage to see an episode all the way through, and at the end Captain Kirk says to the -- the chap with the ears -- 'Well, this proves that the galaxy's too small for white men and green men to fight one another,' and Spock nods and says, 'That's right,' and they clap each other on the shoulder, and up comes the music. Well, what Spock should have said was, 'Why the fuck shouldn't white men and green men fight together? Of course there's plenty of room.' Liberal platitudes do distress me. And yet I remember having this argument with some quite high-powered chaps, and they said, "That's a very subversive point of view, you may think these are platitudes, but they actually do a lot of good.' But I still think that science fiction should be subversive, it shouldn't be in the game of consolations, it should shake people up, I suppose because that's what it did to me when I started reading it, and that was valuable. It should question things."

[From DREAM MAKERS: SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY WRITERS AT WORK. New and Revised Profiles by Charles Platt. Ungar, New York, 1987.]

Joanna Russ:

"STAR TREK addresses itself to... desires, ones often explicitly stated in the series itself. They are: worthwhile goals, a clear conscience, peers whom one can respect, love, and be loyal to, a chance to exercise one's skills, self-respect, a code of conduct which can be followed without disaster -- and excitement and self-importance. All these good things are to be gained by self-control and adherence to a morality which, although fairly simple, still transcends the official code handed down by Starship Command. I believe that the issue of ego control is central to the series; time and again the crew's fragile but valuable system of command and self-command is undermined by something coming from outside the ship, only to be re-established by somebody's heroic personal efforts (often Captain Kirk's) just before the drama ends.... The moments fans cite with greatest pleasure are not special effects, but rather moments of character-revelation, especially moments of deep emotion between the characters. The series was mildly liberal, mildly feminist (within narrower limits than Gene Roddenberry wished, if one can trust the pilot film...), internationalist, with at least some non-white characters (e.g. Uhura and Sulu), and it presented its characters as adults with explicitly limited powers, not fourteen-year-olds presented as rulers of the universe.

"STAR TREK is a very muddled and partial utopia. Yet it is utopian and I believe that if anything lifts the show out of the class of purely addictive culture, it is the series' utopian longing and the consequent sense of profound tragedy that hovers just under the surface of that longing....

"In STAR TREK the need is for community and morality; the means offered to achieve these ends are self-control and adherence to a fairly simple established morality. Anybody looking at the real world can tell that these means do not work (I have heard the show called 'Civics 101'). Viewers know it; otherwise they would not have to keep watching the same inadequate solution played out again and again."

[From SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, Volume 5, Number 16, 1978.]

Although I can understand and share the perspective of Brian Aldiss, I find myself, at middle-age, marooned in a world increasingly illiberal, authoritarian, anti-intellectual, anti-empathic, and poised on the edge of global suicide. This makes me lean towards the views of Russ.

The STAR TREK universe was never believable. Given the barrier of interstellar distances, the limitations of light-speed and energy, starships are unlikely in whatever future we might have; given, as well, the capacity of a technological species for self-destruction, the concept of a galaxy full of civilizations ready for contact also becomes a dream of wish-fulfillment.

Yet I refuse to toss away the utopian impulse. Despite all of the odds against humanity, despite all of our failings, I feel that we need a mythology of hope in the future, if only to give us a bearable existence in the present. If we believe in tomorrow, then life can become more focused today; if we believe that human beings can grow and learn, then we might be compelled, as individuals, to grow and learn as far as we can. Even during a time of selfishness and self-destruction, of stifling ideological purity and corporate atomization, of genocide and Western cheerleaders for genocide, stories of compassion and striving can prompt us to live as if compassion and striving could save us all.

Such things are more than "liberal platitudes," they are impossible goals that we strive to make possible, because in striving, we live as fully as we can.

Trapped within a dying civilization in a threatened biosphere, I still have to agree with Oscar Wilde:

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."

[From "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," 1891.]

Four Poems by Sara Teasdale

From FLAME AND SHADOW, by Sara Teasdale.
The Macmillan Company, New York, 1920.

========================

THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS (War Time),
by Sara Teasdale.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

========================

DRIFTWOOD,
by Sara Teasdale.

My forefathers gave me
My spirit's shaken flame,
The shape of hands, the beat of heart,
The letters of my name.

But it was my lovers,
And not my sleeping sires,
Who gave the flame its changeful
And iridescent fires;

As the driftwood burning
Learned its jewelled blaze
From the sea's blue splendor
Of colored nights and days.

========================

AUGUST MOONRISE,
by Sara Teasdale.

The sun was gone, and the moon was coming
Over the blue Connecticut hills;
The west was rosy, the east was flushed,
And over my head the swallows rushed
This way and that, with changeful wills.
I heard them twitter and watched them dart
Now together and now apart
Like dark petals blown from a tree;
The maples stamped against the west
Were black and stately and full of rest,
And the hazy orange moon grew up
And slowly changed to yellow gold
While the hills were darkened, fold on fold
To a deeper blue than a flower could hold.
Down the hill I went, and then
I forgot the ways of men,
For night-scents, heady, and damp and cool
Wakened ecstasy in me
On the brink of a shining pool.

O Beauty, out of many a cup
You have made me drunk and wild
Ever since I was a child,
But when have I been sure as now
That no bitterness can bend
And no sorrow wholly bow
One who loves you to the end?
And though I must give my breath
And my laughter all to death,
And my eyes through which joy came,
And my heart, a wavering flame;
If all must leave me and go back
Along a blind and fearful track
So that you can make anew,
Fusing with intenser fire,
Something nearer your desire;
If my soul must go alone
Through a cold infinity,
Or even if it vanish, too,
Beauty, I have worshipped you.

Let this single hour atone
For the theft of all of me.

========================

THE STORM,
by Sara Teasdale.

I thought of you when I was wakened
By a wind that made me glad and afraid
Of the rushing, pouring sound of the sea
That the great trees made.

One thought in my mind went over and over
While the darkness shook and the leaves were thinned --
I thought it was you who had come to find me,
You were the wind.

Four Poems by Edwin Markham

From THE MAN WITH THE HOE, AND OTHER POEMS, by Edwin Markham.
Doubleday & McClure Company, New York, 1899.

===========================

THE WHARF OF DREAMS,
by Edwin Markham.

Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep:
Shadows of shadows pass, and many a light
Flashes a signal fire across the night;
Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep
Their way without a star upon the deep;
And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,
Come cries of incommunicable news,
While cargoes pile the piers, a moon-white heap --

Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song,
Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong,
Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand,
Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins,
Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns,
And bales of fantasy from No-Man's Land.

===========================

AFTER READING SHAKESPERE,
by Edwin Markham.

Blithe fancy lightly builds with airy hands
Or on the edges of the darkness peers,
Breathless and frightened at the Voice she hears:
Imagination (lo! the sky expands)
Travels the blue arch and Cimmerian sands,--
Homeless on earth, the pilgrim of the spheres,
The rush of light before the hurrying years,
The Voice that cries in unfamiliar lands.

Men weigh the moons that flood with eerie light
The dusky vales of Saturn -- wood and stream;
But who shall follow on the awful sweep
Of Neptune through the dim and dreadful deep?
Onward he wanders in the unknown night,
And we are shadows moving in a dream.

===========================

THE LAST FURROW,
by Edwin Markham.

The Spirit of Earth, with still restoring hands,
'Mid ruin moves, in glimmering chasm gropes,
And mosses mantle and the bright flower opes;
But Death the Ploughman wanders in all lands,
And to the last of Earth his furrow stands.
The grave is never hidden; fearful hopes
Follow the dead upon the fading slopes,
And there wild memories meet upon the sands.

When willows fling their banners to the plain,
When rumor of winds and sound of sudden showers
Disturb the dream of winter -- all in vain
The grasses hurry to the graves, the flowers
Toss their wild torches on their windy towers;
Yet are the bleak graves lonely in the rain.

===========================

A LOOK INTO THE GULF,
by Edwin Markham.

I looked one night, and there Semiramis,
With all her mourning doves about her head,
Sat rocking on an ancient road of Hell,
Withered and eyeless, chanting to the moon
Snatches of song they sang to her of old
Upon the lighted roofs of Nineveh.
And then her voice rang out with rattling laugh:
"The bugles! they are crying back again --
Bugles that broke the nights of Babylon,
And then went crying on through Nineveh.
. . . . . . .
Stand back, ye trembling messengers of ill!
Women, let go my hair: I am the Queen,
A whirlwind and a blaze of swords to quell
Insurgent cities. Let the iron tread
Of armies shake the earth. Look, lofty towers:
Assyria goes by upon the wind!"
And so she babbles by the ancient road,
While cities turned to dust upon the Earth
Rise through her whirling brain to live again --
Babbles all night, and when her voice is dead
Her weary lips beat on without a sound.

Four Poems by Robert Gittings

From COLLECTED POEMS, by Robert Gittings.
Heinemann, London, 1976.

==========================

CAT,
by Robert Gittings.

My old cat stretches out his arm,
To say, 'I and You'.
He thinks the future threatens harm;
I feel it too.
The flexing paw to reassure
Myself and creature
Asserts, in feline comfiture,
Our frail, shared nature.

==========================

FAIRY TALE,
by Robert Gittings.

If by white magic I could snatch a wand
To catch three choices from a fairy tale,
I would not, like the first two brothers, fail
Greedily: but as the fortunate third I'd stand,
Simple, blue-eyed, and Scandinavian blond,
To ask the obvious: that no evil assail
My darling: that she sleep: that she wake well
To find whoever she then loves best at hand.
If that one should be I, I'd stay till death.
If not, and knowing Not might be the word,
Take my luck, knapsacked on my travelling back,
Happy to carry a quarter-century's breath,
In which to memorize all I ever heard
From you, of you, about you, and for your sake.

==========================

SPARROW,
by Robert Gittings.

I pulled the sparrow's nest ravelling down with the ivy
That clawed my wall; less than half-made; he'll build
Another, I thought. But look, this little fury
With a beak attacks my window. Day and night
He hammers protest; he's cracked a pane. The life
Within a life, how it squanders itself at a wrong,
Even if the world never knew the wrong was done,
Or even, half-guilty, covered its face and turned.

So this small fledged prehistoric, tapping its flint
At a heartless glazed-in god, reminds me of
The limitless rages that we have learnt to still: --
Outwardly: but they shudder within; they take on
The heart-valves and the very pulse; they rule
How we live, dictate how we suddenly die.

==========================

KEEPING WATCH,
by Robert Gittings.

My father's gunmetal watch has gone with me
To hospital. When as a houseman he walked
The wards of the London or the Middlesex
He carried this watch. No bleeper kept in touch
The silver doctor as they called him then --
His fine and flaxen hair that I inherit
Just as I do this watch -- though not his fine
Conscience and skill he carried all his life.
The watch is sound as well: a splintered face,
But telling true. I hear it tick along
My own left side, twin reassurance as
It once lay smooth and warm in his cupped hand,
Steadily taking the pulse or timing thermometer.
I put my own hand on it, till the last minute
They take me down for surgery. It will still
Be going when they bring me back, I know,
The silver doctor's standby, keeping watch.

Blazzird: A Noun for April

Our word for today is:

BLAZZIRD.

This Arabic noun depicts the howling, gusting impact of an April snowstorm, along with its attendant rampaging hordes of mutated polar bears, and its gory incursions of savage Arctic werewolves.

Idiomatic examples of BLAZZIRD within a sentence:

"My herds of wildebeest have been crushed beneath advancing glacier juggernauts of this accursed BLAZZIRD."

"I have already noted 527 somatic abnormalities in the passing throng of hideous Arctic monsters, and this within a mere few minutes of the newly-arrived devastations wrought by this maelstromic BLAZZIRD."

"The local shops have all run out of cake frosting and salted crackers, and in consequence, no force of human will nor of nature shall preserve us from the depredations of this BLAZZIRD."

BLAZZIRD. A graceful noun. A relevant noun. Use it with confidence!

As the Biden administration, France, Germany, and the UK scoff at the International Court of Justice....

Nowadays I am consumed by seething anger, by an almost paralyzing rage, and the only idea that allows me to sit back and to breathe is the realization that so much of the world feels exactly as I do.

My absolute hatred for the dishonesty, hypocrisy, spineless cowardice and parasitical complicity of our Western politicians, our Western corporate media, our Western institutions, is echoed and reflected by the testimony online from people all over the world that they, too, are appalled; they, too, can see, with a non-tribal clarity, that the West has lost whatever moral authority or gravitas it might once have had; that they, too, can recognize the evil of proxy wars, of endless bombings, of genocide.

As the West falls apart from its own internal contradictions, I have to wonder if this might not be for the best. Perhaps our time has come and gone; perhaps we are no longer of any use to the planet and its peoples. Yet I maintain, and believe to my core, that so much of what the Western world created, that so many of its ideals and aspirations, were fundamentally good, and remain beautiful. I can only hope that whoever follows us will respect the best of what we did, and forgive us for the worst.