Halcyon In Kaleidoscope

So are we all really being watched over by "machines of loving grace"? If you haven't seen the documentaries by Adam Curtis, full as they are of quirky and strangely compelling arguments, patterns and links between the seemingly unlinked, then sit back, ingest a huge pinch of salt, take it all in and think for yourself. ...read more

A hopefully apocryphal - but probably not - anecdote has it that a first year history student at an American Ivy League university recently raised his hand and asked the professor: "If you're currently teaching us about the Second World War, that means there must have been a First World War, right?"

Now comes the suggestion that many of the younger generation have never heard of perhaps the most successful composer - in commercial terms - of all time.

Can we escape from the prison of our own feelings and desires, and embrace the lives of others, discovering ourselves by learning about other people, and finding out how they live, think and look at the world?  Author Roman Krznaric has identified George Orwell as an "empathy hero" trying to do just this, praising his efforts to empathise with people who lived on the social margins.

Great to see my joint all-time favourite bard releasing a new album.  I last saw Leonard play in Lille in late 2010, accompanied by Maddy, my eldest daughter, who I'm sure will help carry the torch for this unique talent forward to the next generation and beyond.

Speaking at the recent Prince of Asturias Awards, Leonard - the king of duende - recalled the defining little moment when he shifted towards music and songwriting.  He called it the moment that explains “How I Got My Song,” and it’s all bound up with Spain and tragedy (transcript here).

Meanwhile, I'm Your Man is a wonderful tribute to Leonard's work by other top artists:

You can find 30 further imaginative and fitting covers of Leonard's work here.

See also:

• On Sainthood
• On Villanelles
• On Hallelujah
• On Words
• On Genius
• On Minor
• On Guests
• On Perseverance
• Inspired by warts and all
• Inspired by the major key optimists?
• Leonard Cohen (www.leonardcohen.com)

 "If the past is replayed too fast, life seems futile, and humanity resembles water flowing from a tap, straight down the drain.  A film of history for today needs to be in slow motion, showing every person who ever lived as a star, though dimly visible in a night sky, a history still unexplored" - Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity

A call to action.  Time to explore these unexplored histories together. 

"Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living", so claimed Arthur C Clarke in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Population growth over the past 40 years means that, on average. we each only have about 15 ghosts to meet (i.e. 107bn/7bn).  A buddy system for all the dead would surely yield fascination, cultural understanding and perhaps, just perhaps, a sense of us all being children of those two parents, 50,000+ years ago. 

This wouldn't solve all problems, of course, as close family members tend to fall out more than most, but still, it might help lessen racial discrimination, encourage empathy for the economically disadvantaged and bring us just that little bit closer together.

 "And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching" - Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony" - William Henry Channing

The search for meaning, unsurprisingly, remains an ambition, sometimes an obsession, for very many.  Inspiring thinkers have attempted, in the past* and more recently, to provide clarity on this topic, but the mystery and subjectivity remain.

In 1931, author and philosopher Will Durant wrote to a number of notable figures and asked, essentially, "What is the meaning of life?"  Durant received many replies, a selection of which were compiled in the book, "On the Meaning of Life".  Among the most thoughtful replies was one from H.L Mencken.

Juxtaposing this EU communication on animal welfare with the video below illustrates clearly how, so often, poetry trumps policy. 

Utopian perhaps, but the video nonetheless conveys simply the awakening realisation that I myself have been through about how we should treat non-human animals, and captures perfectly why I protested against animal exports many years ago and eventually stopped eating meat entirely. 

In contrast, the dull but worthy EU prose (perhaps it contains good news for animals, perhaps it doesn't, but who's going to wade through it to find out?) appears orthogonal to this simple act of visual emotion.  All this in the one continent which - above all others - should remember and recoil from shipping sentient beings in trucks.

Calling for a re-evaluation of what we label fascism, a recent book argued that, by using the word as a synonym for anything that is undesirable, we are blinded to the examples around us of real fascism from both Left and Right wing governments. 

During a recent, highly-reputable radio discussion about the book, the old "Hitler was a vegetarian", "Hitler was a fascist", "so aren't vegetarians fascists if they try to stop others eating meat?" non sequitur briefly reared its ugly head. 

A rather different view on this point was expressed with terrible clarity by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Noble Laureate in literature: "In relation to them (animals), all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

Due to my own complacency and, let's be honest, due too, I guess, to my then underdeveloped compassion muscles, it took me another 10 years to react fully, but I felt something similar when we ("we" being just a cross-section of outraged local citizens, many of whom had never before protested in public) blocked the streets during the "battle of Brightlingsea" to try and stop the export of live sheep and veal calves through the little port.  

Looking at the faces of the animals through the lorries' barred sides recalled painful images from nearly 70 years ago, and we all know who the fascists were then.

See also:

• On Meat

Pace David Bowie, and in the light of the hagiography building in some quarters around the late Steve Jobs, one wonders who are the real enduring, beyond "just for one day" heroes, ancient and modern?

A good candidate from my childhood is Alexander the Great, from the moment I first shed a tear when reading in a Ladybird history book (a constant companion, and part of a set which I preserve with fondness and gratitude to this day) about Alexander dying (at just 33, thereby giving him a special bond with Jesus in my young mind) "far from his homeland".  As a long-standing, albeit non-heroic exile from my own homeland, this still resonates...

Of course, many have tried to dispel the aura around Alexander; the latest being historian Mary Beard in a new biography.  She may be correct in her analysis, but how do we want our heroes, godly like Galahad, or flawed and vital like Lancelot, Alexander (or, for that matter, for today's unhistorical acolytes, Jobs) and the rest?

Equally, and more prosaically, there are many others, in many walks of life, not heroes as such, but people nonetheless whose achievements and interests might be satisfying to try and emulate, even to a small degree.  One such is polymath Melvyn Bragg.

"It must be love, love, love..."... pace Labi Siffre/Madness. If Google's annual list of popular search terms is anything to go by, the search for love tops the world's preoccupations.

Meanwhile, this song remains as moving and beautiful as when we first saw Dougie Maclean perform it during the Folk Aid concert after the Lockerbie disaster...all those years ago already.