He'd searched
for clues too many times
not to spot the signs.
The shimmering fishscale smile in her eyes
swooped to the surface of the iris-pond,
swirling like light on lilipads
was as clear a clue to him as any footprint
her new dress might as well have been a shred
of clothing caught on a rusty nail or hung
on the body; for her body, though unbloodied,
was the scene of the crime.
He didn't need hard evidence
to read the story right - the sight
of her soft back in bed
her shoulders turned to him
left him startled, suspicious, bereft-
enough clues to look back. So that when she left
with that other man he was already there,turning it
over in his mind, their bodies in the sack,the
broken love, the knife stuck
in the back.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Respect?
Our society is not a just place. We live in a hierarchy whose flexibility is superficial – a hierarchy which crushes the brightest of kids and elevates the laziest, sometimes – a hierarchy which makes numerous mistakes. We elevate some people and lower others: even a perfect meritocracy has to have a scale, yet if we think we can rank people according to any set yardstick then we are blind to the human condition. For the value of people is in their diversity; any yardstick we measure people by will shove some good, decent, hopeful people to the bottom of the pile, and put some greedy, dishonest, indifferent people at the top. Hierarchy is inaccurate; what’s more, it’s the ultimate tool of prejudice against individuals, since your place in the hierarchy is often decided by your parents’ place. Moving up or down is like swimming against the tide: nigh on impossible.
Yet even that statement does not express my meaning: it suggests that the hierarchy is inefficient, inaccurate, that the hierarchy sometimes keeps ‘the wrong people’ in the slums. It’s not that the hierarchy’s flawed process is immoral: the hierarchy itself is immoral. There are no ‘wrong people’ and ‘right people’; nobody should be in the slums, nobody should feel like they’re at the bottom of the pile, should have to feel worthless or disrespected, even if they are really stupid or lazy. Everybody should be treated like a human being. Everybody deserves respect, because everybody has feelings and hopes and dreams and emotions; nobody else has a right to crush these.
Yet my ‘respect’ is not the same as the system’s ‘respect’. When somebody like Tony Blair talks about ‘Respect’, what they mean is: you should have respect for us. You rabble, you ‘scum’ (as Sarkozy so despicably put it) should have respect for us politicians. What they mean is: you should have respect for the system that put us at the top and you at the bottom. What they’re saying is: you should believe in a system that thinks you’re worth next to nothing, that pays you next to nothing, that will deliver you next to nothing in terms of ambition or education – and you should respect and uphold this system. Essentially, the ‘Respect’ agenda equates to politicians asking poor people to agree with and partake in a system that places them at the very bottom – to agree that they should be at the bottom, to be complicit in their own poverty.
The problem with the political ‘Respect’ agenda is, that it doesn’t work both ways: the police aren’t seen to have respect for muslim and black people or protesters when they deliberately target them on the streets; the politicians don’t have respect for young, poor people as a voting demographic. Their policies appeal to middle class morality, not people in poverty. They say, if you don’t adhere to the rules, we will limit your freedom further. They don’t say, why are you acting like this? What are the problems in your life? How can we solve them? Fair enough, in a smooth-running society with limited funds and limited interest. Yet by enabling police to stop anyone they deem suspicious, and by imposing ASBOs and thereby criminalizing young people who have committed no criminal offence, politicians are intervening in people’s lives, are taking an interest, are spending funds – but in a negative way, in a way that treats people as worthless, in a way that denies them a backstory and therefore deals with them more like a number than a human being. Human beings have backstories, problems: numbers don’t. Thus politicians toting the Respect agenda – from Margaret Thatcher in the 80s to Blair in the new millennium - have effectively created a society in which young people, poor, black and asian communities are treated as potential offenders, as alien threats, as ‘them’ against the ‘us’ of society, often arrested without sufficient evidence. That’s not what I call respect.
Entre les murs: The Class: a film by Laurent Cantet, adapted from the novel. Really interesting on social class and the clash between (school) institutions and young people, and the extent to which their destinies are predetermined by their class, and by the way society treats them, dismisses them, writes them off.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy158dWdbpw
Yet even that statement does not express my meaning: it suggests that the hierarchy is inefficient, inaccurate, that the hierarchy sometimes keeps ‘the wrong people’ in the slums. It’s not that the hierarchy’s flawed process is immoral: the hierarchy itself is immoral. There are no ‘wrong people’ and ‘right people’; nobody should be in the slums, nobody should feel like they’re at the bottom of the pile, should have to feel worthless or disrespected, even if they are really stupid or lazy. Everybody should be treated like a human being. Everybody deserves respect, because everybody has feelings and hopes and dreams and emotions; nobody else has a right to crush these.
Yet my ‘respect’ is not the same as the system’s ‘respect’. When somebody like Tony Blair talks about ‘Respect’, what they mean is: you should have respect for us. You rabble, you ‘scum’ (as Sarkozy so despicably put it) should have respect for us politicians. What they mean is: you should have respect for the system that put us at the top and you at the bottom. What they’re saying is: you should believe in a system that thinks you’re worth next to nothing, that pays you next to nothing, that will deliver you next to nothing in terms of ambition or education – and you should respect and uphold this system. Essentially, the ‘Respect’ agenda equates to politicians asking poor people to agree with and partake in a system that places them at the very bottom – to agree that they should be at the bottom, to be complicit in their own poverty.
The problem with the political ‘Respect’ agenda is, that it doesn’t work both ways: the police aren’t seen to have respect for muslim and black people or protesters when they deliberately target them on the streets; the politicians don’t have respect for young, poor people as a voting demographic. Their policies appeal to middle class morality, not people in poverty. They say, if you don’t adhere to the rules, we will limit your freedom further. They don’t say, why are you acting like this? What are the problems in your life? How can we solve them? Fair enough, in a smooth-running society with limited funds and limited interest. Yet by enabling police to stop anyone they deem suspicious, and by imposing ASBOs and thereby criminalizing young people who have committed no criminal offence, politicians are intervening in people’s lives, are taking an interest, are spending funds – but in a negative way, in a way that treats people as worthless, in a way that denies them a backstory and therefore deals with them more like a number than a human being. Human beings have backstories, problems: numbers don’t. Thus politicians toting the Respect agenda – from Margaret Thatcher in the 80s to Blair in the new millennium - have effectively created a society in which young people, poor, black and asian communities are treated as potential offenders, as alien threats, as ‘them’ against the ‘us’ of society, often arrested without sufficient evidence. That’s not what I call respect.
Entre les murs: The Class: a film by Laurent Cantet, adapted from the novel. Really interesting on social class and the clash between (school) institutions and young people, and the extent to which their destinies are predetermined by their class, and by the way society treats them, dismisses them, writes them off.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy158dWdbpw
Sunday, January 4, 2009
masks of mascara
Women who use makeup are literally self effacing, scrubbing off their real identity only to paint on a new appearance using mascara, black slightly smudged eyeliner, concealer, foundation, blusher, lipstick and blonde hair dye. Women at work literally constrict and limit themselves, deforming and reshaping their real bodies in cinched clothing, high heels and tight skirts.
So what? you say. The make-up's empowering. It's a way for women to assert their feminine identity at work, express themselves regardless of society's and men's desires, and paint themselves purple.
If only.The fact is, women change their appearance to be clones of the same blonde, busty woman with pink cheeks and thick black eyelashes. The way that all women strive for this particular Barbie look indicates the existence of a prototype of feminine beauty, heralded by the ironically misogynistic women's mags. A so-called 'enhancement' of women's appearance is a way for them to feel powerful at work, and a way for them to bridge the gender gap, some say. Yet the disparity between expectations of women's and men's appearance in a professional context indicates an aesthetic gap that still points to the pay gap - 12.8% - between men and women in full-time work. Women use make-up to make them feel confident and strong, rather than relying on inner confidence and strength, and in doing so they perpetuate the idea that a woman still needs to appeal to a male sexual appetite in order to succeed in the workplace.
Maybe makeup enables a woman to feel confident and strong at work- or maybe women's use of makeup is a denial of their identity, their make-up. Maybe the slap is a signal that, even at work, women are still just eye candy.
So what? you say. The make-up's empowering. It's a way for women to assert their feminine identity at work, express themselves regardless of society's and men's desires, and paint themselves purple.
If only.The fact is, women change their appearance to be clones of the same blonde, busty woman with pink cheeks and thick black eyelashes. The way that all women strive for this particular Barbie look indicates the existence of a prototype of feminine beauty, heralded by the ironically misogynistic women's mags. A so-called 'enhancement' of women's appearance is a way for them to feel powerful at work, and a way for them to bridge the gender gap, some say. Yet the disparity between expectations of women's and men's appearance in a professional context indicates an aesthetic gap that still points to the pay gap - 12.8% - between men and women in full-time work. Women use make-up to make them feel confident and strong, rather than relying on inner confidence and strength, and in doing so they perpetuate the idea that a woman still needs to appeal to a male sexual appetite in order to succeed in the workplace.
Maybe makeup enables a woman to feel confident and strong at work- or maybe women's use of makeup is a denial of their identity, their make-up. Maybe the slap is a signal that, even at work, women are still just eye candy.
The Red Academic
Property is theft anyway - at least, that's what I tell myself when stealing from my flatmates' shelves in the fridge...
"If property is theft then intellectual property is just stealing from the communal body of knowledge. My only hope is if ideas cannot be owned by anyone, if ideas exist purely as selfless facets of human wisdom rather than claimed & copyrighted snippets of someone's thoughts. Losing copyright over intellectual property would mean that no-one would strive for originality, to say something new, because they could not derive personal glory or fame for it - if good, it would be shamelessly repackaged and plagiarised. That way originality would no longer be the pinnacle of human achievement. This would leave people free to learn for learning's sake, not for fame, and search for what is 'right' or what seems truthful, rather than what is original. Too often people say something purely because it's new, exciting, unusual - with little regard for the truth of their statement.
Surely pointless to distract readers from the pursuit of human truths, in search of novelty?"
"If property is theft then intellectual property is just stealing from the communal body of knowledge. My only hope is if ideas cannot be owned by anyone, if ideas exist purely as selfless facets of human wisdom rather than claimed & copyrighted snippets of someone's thoughts. Losing copyright over intellectual property would mean that no-one would strive for originality, to say something new, because they could not derive personal glory or fame for it - if good, it would be shamelessly repackaged and plagiarised. That way originality would no longer be the pinnacle of human achievement. This would leave people free to learn for learning's sake, not for fame, and search for what is 'right' or what seems truthful, rather than what is original. Too often people say something purely because it's new, exciting, unusual - with little regard for the truth of their statement.
Surely pointless to distract readers from the pursuit of human truths, in search of novelty?"
Friday, November 21, 2008
haircut
Dreadlock holiday; when she returned home it was time for a haircut. She tipped her head back. Carefully she took the razorblunt implement, held it to the light and purified it in the mug’s luminous essence: alcohol. The meths reminded her of the hazy drugfug, the fumes and the flames of her earlier days. She used to watch them carefully, those flames atop the fiery shots that she downed in bars, one by one, like swallowing sparklers that fizzled out in her mouth: a daring, if not dangerous, trick.
Now Sian watched the scissors sizzle, flicker open and shut like flames across her hair. Scissors spread-eagled like a pair of legs, vibrating, quivering with the cut and squeal of each lock lost, her ebony tresses falling like trellises, the scissors snapping shut like curtains, closing on the final scene, the signal to the audience that the deed is done. Her hair is cut.
~~~
There is no audience to signal to, except herself. The strands of straight black hair lie like jailbars on the table, prison bars that she has broken free from: made a break for short spiky simplicity. The bars clunk as they hit the table and her eyes freeze across them like icicles – they will not melt for a few minutes, not until she hears the soft unwinding of keys from a coat pocket, the failure of the door’s silence as it is forced to open, the sound of another. Then she will look up.
“What the fuck is this about?” The words whistled around Sian and imprinted their vicious anger on her consciousness, not quite deflected by her hair’s short spikes – not yet . The spikes weren’t armour yet, they let goosebumps pinch on her neck like fat bubbling on a frying pan. She didn’t want to be one of the pretty girls whose eyelashes mimic their hair – long, black, wavy – whose mouths were lily fountains to drink from. Not any more. Yet at least the long hair had been a protection, a curtain to a four poster bed were she could curl up to her soul and introspect, stare straight at the kernel of her thoughts and forget about the rest of the world. This short hair left her free – and vulnerable.
“This is my fucking notebook! You can’t just cut your fucking hair all over my notebook!” Yet the strands formed words, swinging around the straight lines of the notebookblack strands swung around the straight lines of the notebook like words, communicating in a new language. Freshly cut hair, thought Sian: finally something scribbled in a notebook that could be described as original.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
The night of Kir = White wine and a town called Cassis
We take a train to Cassis and search for a hostel for three hours, having walked sweaty from the station. We ask a boy about our youth hostel; he leads us to the town square and confidently points out a block of light atop a dark and depressing concrete building.
"C'est la." He disappears down a narrow medieval alley, and we climb the rusting iron railings that form a skeleton staircase in the darkness and walk towards the bright light at the top. There's golden music coming from the doorway, it feels like we're hallucinating heaven...
Then we peer in and it's not a hostel at all; there are a load of old people sitting on school chairs in a circle, singing in harmony. Oh fuck. This is intensely strange... an old lady comes out to tell us that we have reached the Cultural Centre of Cassis. So this is not our youth hostel. We quaff cheap wine until the situation doesn't seem so bad. Everywhere is full, apart from a hotel offering one room for three people at 96 euros... three people take it, the rest of us agree to sleep on the beach.
At the beach we watch the gendarmerie (armed police) patrol the sand, bored and curious about the three guys and a girl perched on the steps, chattering in English and playing cards. Our night is peculiarly peopled: some pretty French women donate us a bottle of wine they don't want, a curious old guy asks us if we are cold while his wife urges him away, muttering "don't talk to those tramps," and the strange boy with a light strapped to his head slopes along the coast for hours in the dark, combing the beach for some long forgotten relic.
4AM: We migrate to the town square. Neils is asleep astride a low wall, Henry is insomniac and wide-eyed, Ipod tucked into his ears. Tom is asleep on the bench, curled up under a couple of towels. It never gets dark exactly, the streetlamps sweat out silver light all night as we sit and make small talk and slip into sleep for one brief hour...
Then morning comes and we have done it: we have slept rough. We slowly evolve from vagrants into civilised tourists, transformed by coffee and pain au chocolat, ready to face the day.
"C'est la." He disappears down a narrow medieval alley, and we climb the rusting iron railings that form a skeleton staircase in the darkness and walk towards the bright light at the top. There's golden music coming from the doorway, it feels like we're hallucinating heaven...
Then we peer in and it's not a hostel at all; there are a load of old people sitting on school chairs in a circle, singing in harmony. Oh fuck. This is intensely strange... an old lady comes out to tell us that we have reached the Cultural Centre of Cassis. So this is not our youth hostel. We quaff cheap wine until the situation doesn't seem so bad. Everywhere is full, apart from a hotel offering one room for three people at 96 euros... three people take it, the rest of us agree to sleep on the beach.
At the beach we watch the gendarmerie (armed police) patrol the sand, bored and curious about the three guys and a girl perched on the steps, chattering in English and playing cards. Our night is peculiarly peopled: some pretty French women donate us a bottle of wine they don't want, a curious old guy asks us if we are cold while his wife urges him away, muttering "don't talk to those tramps," and the strange boy with a light strapped to his head slopes along the coast for hours in the dark, combing the beach for some long forgotten relic.
4AM: We migrate to the town square. Neils is asleep astride a low wall, Henry is insomniac and wide-eyed, Ipod tucked into his ears. Tom is asleep on the bench, curled up under a couple of towels. It never gets dark exactly, the streetlamps sweat out silver light all night as we sit and make small talk and slip into sleep for one brief hour...
Then morning comes and we have done it: we have slept rough. We slowly evolve from vagrants into civilised tourists, transformed by coffee and pain au chocolat, ready to face the day.
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