Music and Writing and Things

“There is no question in our day of the artist receiving a true mandate from society to create. The mandate of society is to entertain, and that mandate is clear and uncomplicated. But the mandate of the artist’s own nature, of his special and innate gift, is to reach down into the depths of the human psyche and bring forth the tremendous images of things to come. These images are not yet art. It takes a lifetime’s work to mould them into works of art. For this the artist can have no reward but in the joy of doing it. He creates, because without art, in this deep and serious sense, the nation dies. His mandate is inescapable.” – Michael Tippett: Moving Into Aquarius, Frogmore, St Alban’s, 1974.

“Our need today is to see that most of our agreements and disagreements about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ music are, in fact, disputes not (as we suppose) about ‘aesthetic value’ as some mystical or abstract category, a self-enclosed system remote from the concerns of ordinary life, and with terms that have meaning and reference only within the system. On the contrary, we need to understand that these agreements or disagreements revolve around values that we hold to be important, or that are repugnant to us, or that fall somewhere between; and that such values are both social and historical.” – Christopher Ballantine: Music and its social meanings, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984.

“What we have here perceived as beauty,

We shall someday encounter as truth.” – Schiller: The Artists.

I am aware that I am moving into dangerous and turbulent waters when writing about music and art in general in relation to social and individual values. This is disputed territory and I will be seen by some as usurping a position they hold by virtue of their learning or knowledge or whatever. Others will see all this as totally irrelevant in a world dominated by the quest for the almighty dollar, pound, rand, or whatever.

What gives me the right to write about things like this – a mere lay person, an amateur, perhaps even a dilletante?

For me it is simply that I am claiming my right as a member of society and one who is affected by arts in general and music in particular to think about what these things are doing to me, what I am doing to them, and what sense can I make, as an individual music lover, of all the music I experience around me every day.

We cannot escape art – every building, every motor car, every billboard, even the clothes we wear, not to mention the music that pours out of radios, CD players and TVs constantly – all are part of that thing we call culture, and culture and art are inseparable. And we each of us have a response to what we experience in our daily activities.

In this web site I want to express my response to some of the joys, some of the dilemmas, of the very human activities of making music and writing. Because, as Ballantine makes clear in his brilliant book Music and it Social Meanings from which I have taken some lines quoted above, the activity of making music (or any other art, for that matter) cannot be seen as abstracted from our culture and our society. And I’m not here referring to Culture with a capital C, but to the accepted ways in which we live from day to day.

There seems to me to be a continuum of ways in which the products of artistic endeavour are used by societies, from the purely commercial commodification of art on the one hand, art as a commodity to be bought and sold to the understanding of art as a sublime activity closely related to the health both of individuals and of society at large.

Randall McClellan, in his book The Healing Forces of Music, (New York: Amity House, 1988) puts the latter view of music beautifully in this passage:”This whole universe is one great symphony and around us everything and every creature of this Earth continually resonates to that symphony, adding its own voice according to natural harmonic law. It is only we confused human beings who add the cacophony and create the dissonance. We shall continue to do so until we relearn how to hear the silence within and how to once again manifest our life in harmony with the greater whole.”

The journey of my life

‘A great loss for jazz music’

South African jazz legend Winston Monwabisi Mankunku Ngozi has died in hospital, aged 66. [AUDIO]

A great loss indeed!

One of the greats of South African jazz. See article here: http://hubpages.com/hub/Yakhal-inKomo—a-jazz-classic-from-South-Africa

 

“Awfully Weirdly” – the short, sad life of Aubrey Beardsley

In his short, sad life he was controversial. More than 100 years after his death, he seems  not much less controversial. But he still manages to weave a spell for anyone interested in art, particularly Art Nouveau and the art of illustration.

Beardsley by Valloton

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, dubbed by his contemporaries, often not too kindly, “Awfully Weirdly”, was born on 21 August 1872 in Brighton, England. His mother, Ellen, was the daughter of a Surgeon General of the Indian Army and his father, Vincent Paul, the son of a tradesman.

Aubrey’s family moved to London in 1883 and he was soon thereafter sent to Bristol Grammar School where he wrote and performed in a play with some of his fellow-students. He also at that time started to draw, and some of his cartoons were published.

In 1892 he began to study art at the Westminster School of Art, having been advised to take up art seriously by Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones and French artist Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes.

Two things which made Beardsley so controversial were his strange, unconventional drawings and his intense interest in sex, at a time when the society in which he moved was still extremely Victorian, prudish in matters of sex, to say the least. His style flouted the norms of “decent” society, society which could accept art which amounted to the erotic so long as it was cloaked in conventional, usually “classical”, forms.

As critic and editor Derek Stanford has written (in his introduction to Aubrey Beardsley’s Erotic Universe, Four Square, 1967), “Working in black-and-white, he brought to this narrowly limiting medium an immense resonance of suggestion; and it is this power of suggestion which makes him the superb eroticist that he is.”

Stanford explains why Beardsley was, and still is, a haunting, perplexing artist, whose images still have the power to hold the viewer’s attention, and stay in the memory long after they have been looked at.

The reason is that Beardsley is an eroticist par excellance, but not a pornographer.

There is always debate around the difference between the two, and Beardsley is an excellent subject with which to explore the difference, as he produced works which could be called erotic, indeed, the bulk of his output tends to be in this category, but he also produced a small number of clearly pornographic images, mainly in support of a play, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata which was published in 1896.

Stanford explains the difference between erotica and pornography thusly: “The pornographer’s business is solely to state; even in his fantasies he must be literal. In contrast, the erotic artist conveys his effect largely by suggestion. And what he suggests must be more than the erotic fact itself.”

In 1997, William J. Gehrke, then chairperson of the MIT Lecture Series Committee, explained the difference between pornographic and erotic films in this way: “Pornographic film has as its primary purpose the graphic depiction of sexually explicit scenes. It generally depicts these scenes in a way that is degrading to women or, less frequently, to men. It tends to perpetuate the myth that rape and sexual assault are appropriate forms of behavior. Erotica, on the other hand, seeks to tell a story that involves sexual themes. Sexually explicit scenes in these films serve a secondary role to the plot. Erotic film displays sexually explicit scenes in a more realistic and equal fashion that is not degrading to either gender.”

Beardsley’s work provides nice examples of the fine line that exists between the merely obscene and the high art of the erotic.

Beardsley contracted tuberculosis at age seven, and his struggle with ill health dominated his life. As Matthew Sweet wrote in The Independent of 15 March 1998, “Sex was a profound influence on Beardsley’s work, on the company he kept, and on the progress of his illness.”

Beardsley died in France on 16 March 1898, having been received into the Catholic Church the year before. He was 25 years old, and as far as anyone knows, still a virgin, despite his intense interest in all matters sexual. There was a rumour that his sister Mabel and he had had an incestuous relationship, but this was never proven.

Oscar Wilde by Beardsley

Although he kept company with known homosexuals, including Oscar Wilde, it is fairly certain that he was not himself homosexual.

For one who was so sickly and whose life was so short, Beardsley managed to produce a large number of works of art of unquestionable value and great, if sometimes strange, beauty. And in his short lifetime he managed also to have a great influence on Art Nouveau and the art of illustration.

Beardsley was associated with various publications including the Yellow Book, a famous British literary and artistic journal of the 1890s. Many of the leading artists and writers of the day were published in this journal, including Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, George Gissing, Henry James, H. G. Wells, and William Butler Yeats .

In this article I will discuss only ten of Beardsley’s works, drawing on comments by Stanford.

The first of these is the lovely Mysterious Rose Garden, which, according to Stanford, “conveys a sense of Beardsley’s elaborated gospel of sin.” The drawing, “is eminently successful, depending on the contrast between the naked, slender figure of the woman and the voluminously full figure of the ‘Dark Angel’ clad in a swirling loosely skirted robe and bearing his long-tipped staff and glowing lantern.” It is indeed a haunting image of great beauty and not a little disturbing for all that.

In “Venus between Terminal Gods” Beardsley’s use of what Stanford calls “disguised or concealed eroticism” is so subtle that it could easily be missed. Stanford draws attention to the floral pattern creeping up the gown of Venus “which terminates just where her thighs meet.” This illustration was to have been the frontispiece to Beardsley’s unfinished novel Venus and Tannhäuser which was published posthumously as Under the Hill, in 1907.

One of Beardsley’s most famous pieces is “The Black Cape”. In this work the influence of Japanese print makers is clear, even to the mark that Beardsley used as his signature. The balance and swirl of this piece is ravishing to the eye, in spite of its being in sober black and white.

Beardsley had, even before his reception into the Catholic Church, a strange relationship with religion generally, and the Church in particular. His attitude was expressed in two drawings, the “Large Christmas Card”, which was a loose insertion into the first issue of the Savoy, another literary journal with which he was associated, and “The Ascension of St Rose of Lima”.

The “Christmas Card” shows an insipidly pretty Virgin holding the Holy Infant, who looks more like a very young Anglican choir boy than a new-born child. The drawing is rich in typical Beardsley-fashion floral draperies against which the face of the Virgin and the figure of the Child stand out in stark simplicity. The Virgin is given more “holy” attributes than the Child, but in spite of them her prettiness leads one to thoughts of rather more mundane than sacred love. It is, to say the least, ambiguous.

Less ambiguous is the image of love in the St Rose drawing. Here the love is clearly profane which makes the picture almost blasphemous. Indeed, in Stanford’s words, “the saint’s closed eyes and smile, in the embrace of the heavenly bridegroom, speak more of sexual than celestial levitation.”

Beardsley did a series of illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé, of which we will consider six here, the Toilette of Salomé I and II, The Eyes of Herod, Stomach Dance, the Dancer’s Reward and the Climax.

“The Tetrarch has a sombre look. Has he not a sombre look?” the first soldier in Wilde’s play asks.

“Yes, he has a sombre look,” says the second soldier. Meanwhile Herodias is becoming quite unsettled by the way Herod the Tetrarch is looking at Salomé: “You are looking at my daughter. You must not look at her. I have already said so.” This is the scene depicted in the drawing “The Eyes of Herod.” Beardsley does not leave the viewer in much doubt as to what Herod’s eyes are taking in.

The two Toilette scenes show Salomé getting ready to dance for Herod: “I will dance for you, Tetrarch.” Then, “I am waiting until my slaves bring perfumes to me and the seven veils, and take off my sandals.”

The voice of Jokanaan is heard, saying “Who is this who cometh from Edom, who is this who cometh from Bozra, whose raiment is dyed with purple, who shineth in the beauty of his garments, who walketh mighty in his greatness? Wherefore is thy raiment stained with scarlet?”

Herodias is horrified by the prophet’s words and tries to get Herod to go back into the palace: “I will not have her dance while you look at her in this fashion.”

But Salomé dances and Herod, entranced, asks her “What wouldst thou have?”

Then comes the fateful, terrible answer: “I would that they would bring me in a silver charger … the head of Jokanaan.”

“The Reward” is brought to Salomé, dripping gore, and in “The Climax” she makes to kiss the gory head: “Yes, I will kiss they mouth, Jokanaan. I said it. Did I not say it?”

A really horrifying climax in which the illustration, by its starkness captures the horror and strange fascination of it. There is in Salomé’s response the horror of necrophilia, the wild abandon to the lusts of death: “If thou hadst looked at me,” she tells the dead head, “thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”

A few minutes later Herod’s slaves kill Salomé on Herod’s order. A fittingly gory end to a gory, sadistic scene.

Is this pornographic or erotic? Is there more than a hint of sadism here?

By his juxtapositioning of the beauty of his drawings and the ambiguousness of what they appear to show, Beardsley is confronting the viewer with questions – what is good and what is evil? What is sacred and what profane? His drawings challenge us not to accept things at face value, but to dig deeper. At the very least the simplicity of medium is contrasted with the richness of what is portrayed and this causes us to look more deeply at the images.

Because of the depth of the questions raised by Beardsley the images have the power to linger in our minds far longer than the insipid acceptable paintings and drawings of the time, which have little power to hold us because in the end they are so literal. So which images are pornographic and which erotic?

Peaceful spring morning photos

A collection of images from an early morning photo shoot in a spring garden in South African

Top 10 Jazz CDs â?? Tony’s Picks

A list of ten top jazz albums chosen by Tony McGregor

One Man’s take on the Jazz Audience Discussion

The contributor of this piece is jazz activist Ron Washington.  Besides being a stalwart jazz diehard and tireless observer of the scene, he is proprietor of Ron “Slim” Washington Productions, which provides jazz and other music for festivals, clubs and restaurants.

How Can a “Music of the Spirit” Die?

Jazz is dead! Here we go again; i.e. the recent Wall Street Journal article by Terry Teachout declaring that no one is listening to jazz and featuring a prominent cartoon of a “black Jazz musician” being wheeled out on a cart speaks volumes to a continued bourgeois, arrogant Eurocentric lack of understanding of jazz.

Mr. Treachout’s methodology is the classic case of someone going out to investigate the flowers, but never getting off the horse to “smell the flowers.” Hence the article is so “lightweight” I had to keep a paper-weight on it to keep it from elevating and floating away on its own. Put another way, as Amiri Baraka in his latest book “Digging” would say, “The lack of knowledge about America’s richest contribution to world culture is a reflection as well of the deadly ignorance which stalks this country from the New York City Hall to the halls of Congress to the corporate offices to academic classrooms, like a ubiquitous serial killer…”

Treachout uses a number of useless (without context!) numbers from a National Endowment of the Arts survey to conclude that only those with their head in the sand cannot see a larger picture of “lack of mass support for jazz” leading to its demise. There were fewer people attending a jazz concert; the audience is (graying) growing older; older people are less likely to attend jazz performances today than yesterday; and the audience among college educated adults is also shrinking. On the surface, this kind of approach can scare or misinform a great many people into following the ever present “jazz is dead” attacks upon the music. This kind of approach is not the approach of someone who wants to help jazz survive, but one that serves to drive people away from exploring and learning about jazz.

How about we come at the non arguable “less than healthy’ state of jazz another way? Once again we call on America’s foremost jazz critic for guidance. Why not investigate and raise the question as to the “domination of US popular culture by an outrageously reactionary commercial culture of mindlessness, mediocrity, violence and pornography means that it is increasingly more difficult for the innovative, serious, genuinely expressive, or authentically popular artist to get the same kind of production and the anti-creative garbage that the corporations thrive on.” (Digging, Amiri Baraka). I suggest that this is the inquiry that the Wall Street Journal should be making into the subject matter, the health state of jazz. But when you’re part of the problem, it’s difficult. From the standpoint of the WSJ, jazz’s mystery can/cannot be solved by market forces. “Look here are the numbers!”

From the great work “Blues People,” to his other book, “Black Music,” and the latest contribution from the peoples’ critic, “Digging,” there is one thing that stands out. Amiri Baraka insists that the music, from blues to jazz, is a creation and reflection of the struggles of the Afro-American people. The music is an expression of a people’s culture and cannot be separated from such. Jazz, Afro-American in origin, universal in content and expression, is nonetheless tied to a people, expressing their greatest fears and joys, hopes for the future and repository of the past, that it can said, “the music is the people.” Hence the music can never die, because the people live. Bill Cosby is quoted in Digging as saying, “There’s a wonderful story I like to tell. It’s the end of the world…gray, blowing, turbulent… and there is this tombstone that says, ‘Jazz: It Broke Even!’ The music has its high and lows, but it can never die.”

Art is a reflection of a people’s culture. As Baraka says, “Whether African Song, Work Song, Spiritual, Hollers, Blues, Jazz, Gospel, etc., no matter the genre, the ideas contained in Afro-American art, in the main, oppose slavery and desire freedom.” (Digging). For jazz to die, the entire history and Afro-American people would have to die. This is the content that an interloper like Treachout cannot understand.

But since jazz is what the great trumpet player Ahmed Abdullah calls, “the music of the spirit,” it can never die. While the WSJ declares jazz dead, refuses to get off the horse and smell the flowers, the music continues to thrive and fight for its life, for its expression. In New Jersey , new small clubs are opening up all over the place, anchored by Cecil’s in West Orange . You have the work of Newark’s own Stan Myers, who has run a successful Tuesday night Jam session at Crossroads for years;  Papillion, Skipper’s, the Priory, Trumpets, John Lee’s annual concerts in South Orange, and countless other venues all testify to the fact that the “spirit” is alive.

Jazz is not popular culture. To compare and demand that Jazz be equated with the lowest common denominator cultural expression, packaged for the most extreme exploitation by monopoly capitalism is to have no understanding of the music. By its very nature it is “rebel” music. Treachout complains that it is not the music of the masses, of the youth, as determined by corporate measuring sticks. Well of course. I like hip-hop but I’m not going to any concerts. That’s youth music. Not particularly challenging.

When we say jazz is “a music of the spirit,” sitting in on a jazz program has the possibility of elevating the listener to heights never experienced by a poplar culture event. For many it is a shared communal experience, as witnessed by the common clapping in appreciation of a musical interlude, or the strictly individual experience of the music. Some can appreciate the full recipe of musical virtuosity on display, some may connect deeply in an emotional way with the music, some relate to the democratic display of the skills of the musicians, and some may not have liked the particular performance.

Ron Washington, September 10, 2009

blacktel4justice@gmail.com

Art and the search for meaning

“A picture is worth a thousand words” – this is a popular and frequently-heard saying. And yet it cannot be taken at face value. Philosophers and artists have during the past hundred years or so argued about the purpose and content of art, ever since art theoreticians like Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Herbert Read contended that art should not convey any message other than the formal contents of the work of art itself, the form, line, colour, texture of the work itself.

These three philosophers of art were reacting to the extreme sentimentalisation of art of the Victorian era, where art became the servant of “prettiness” and bland subjects that did not require any depth of thought but just a superficial reaction of pleasure, much like what we would today call “comfort food” gives us when eaten – no nourishment for body or mind, just a pleasant taste.
Which brings us to the question of the “purpose” of art – or does it not have any purpose outside of itself? What would life be like without beauty around us? What is beauty?

Painting of bisons in the caves at Lascaux

Indeed there is also the question, “Is art good for us, or bad for us?” The Puritans and fundamentalists would argue that art is a distraction which takes our minds of the serious business of life, and feel this so strongly they would ban it from any places where this seriousness is pursued, like places of worship or work.
The answer given by such people gives us a clue that art has an impact, quite a big impact, on our lives. The earliest people made paintings and drawings of sometime haunting power on the walls of caves, depicting the life around them and their responses to that life, practical or spiritual. They clearly needed to surround themselves with these images, the images enriched their lives in some way, they invested these images with meaning which could not be gained in any other way.
Likewise mediaeval monks in their monasteries created works of art in the manuscripts that they wrote out, embellishing the words with exquisite miniatures of scenes from life or myth, which added to the meaning of the words themselves. Clearly these monks in the otherwise austere lives found these embellishments not only added to the manuscripts but to their own lives as well.
With the dawn of the modern era in the 19th Century art became more and more separated from this kind of context and came to be pursued as “art for art’s sake.” This is a concept which would have been unthinkable to the cave artists or to the monks creating those magnificent manuscripts.

From the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

In the 20th Century this was taken to extremes, but perhaps necessary extremes, when one thinks about the poor, meaningless stuff that was favoured by the Victorians, the “comfort food” type of art.
The ultimate challenge to the “comfort food” art was the art of the modernists like Hans Arp and the surrealists like Rene Magritte who painted a tobacco pipe and then labelled it Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe) and did the same with the painting of an apple. This is a direct challenge to the viewer’s normal interpretation of such a painting, or image. If asked, “What is it?” the viewer will naturally respond, “It’s a pipe.” However, clearly it is not a pipe. Asked about it the artist said “Try stuffing it.” It is an image and can be read in many different ways – it can be appreciated for the colours, the lines, the texture, the “feel” of it. But it cannot, ever, be used. Likewise the apple could never be eaten, only looked at.
So what is meaning in art? Another artist, Paul Gauguin, painted a huge canvas which also took on the issue head on. This painting is frankly philosophical in intent: “I have completed a philosophical work on a theme comparable to that of the Gospel,” he wrote to his friend Daniel de Monfried in 1898. He called the painting “Where have we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” and the painting was large, like its theme. It measured six metres in length and almost two metres in height.
Gauguin had high aspirations for the philosophy expressed in this painting, which he saw as having a definitive and moral result, “the liberation of painting, already freed from all its fetters, from that infamous tissue knotted together by schools, academics, and above all else by mediocrities.” It is a painting dense with meaning, but the meaning needs to be teased out, it cannot be simply assumed. It is, in Herbert Read’s words, “a correlative for feeling and not an expression of feeling.”

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

This painting would seem on the surface at least to be light years away from paintings such as those of Piet Mondrian, which are simply grids made on the canvas by lines of grey or black, with the spaces between filled with white or primary colours, seemingly at random. These paintings cannot be “read” like a story, so what are they about, what do they mean? Mondrian called his style “neo-Plasticism” and it related to the neo-Platonic “positive mysticism” of Dutch philosopher (Mondrian was also Dutch) M.H.J. Schoenmaekers and the teachings of the Theosophical Society. This philosophy was an attempt to penetrate the reality behind nature and to give it expression. As Herbert Read said of Mondrian’s approach, “Art becomes an intuitive means, as exact as mathematics, for representing the fundamental characteristics of the cosmos,” (in A Concise History of Modern Painting, Thames and Hudson, 1959).
So while the surfaces of the two paintings are worlds apart, the meaning coming from the intentions of the artists can be seen to be related, in that both artists saw their works as having a spiritual dimension, the meaning was external to the painting, though neither literal nor literary. The paintings referred to no external “Gospel” or myth, but to the understanding of the artist.
The viewer’s life and understanding is therefore enriched by contemplating the work of art and connecting his or her experience and situation to that of the artist. This is no “comfort food” but good, wholesome, hearty fare, well-cooked and needing to be thoroughly digested for the goodness to be available to the consumer. And like such wholesome food, time and effort put into the contemplation is rewarded with a sense of completion, of healthy and lasting fullness, quite different from the quick and transient satisfaction which comes from “comfort food”.

Nature’s fragile bounty and our insensitivity

Recently I spent a week with my family at a resort on the shore of the Hartebeespoort Dam, that lovely stretch of water in the valley of the Crocodile River in the North West Province of South Africa.
It is a beautiful part of the country nestled in between mountains thought to be among the oldest in the world, the historic and beautiful Magaliesberg range. This is a range of mountains which stretches from the Pilanesberg in the west to Pretoria in northern Gauteng province and was formed about 2 billion years ago. It forms a dividing line between the cooler Highveld region to the south and the warmer, lower Bushveld to the north. The mountains are criss-crossed by valleys formed in the geological upheaval of the formation of the range, with some high cliffs and many crannies, wonderful sites for rock climbers to do their thing.
It is also a historic area, being the home of the World Heritage Site, the Cradle of Human Kind, which includes the famous Sterkfontein Caves in which fossil evidence of the earliest humans has been found, including the famous “Mrs Ples” and the more recently discovered “Little Foot.”
So the range has been the site of human habitation for some 2 million years, but only in the last 20 or so years of that time has the environment of the area been so threatened as it is now.
Indeed the Dam itself is threatened by water hyacynth and algal blooms which are formed by toxic cyanobacteria, making the water unsafe for swimming and hazardous for other aquatic activities, as well as blocking irrigation canals and drainage systems.
While the problems of the dam are caused by run-off from agricultural land and effluent spillage, the insensitivity of people to the environment around them was evident in the resort we were staying at.
The greater area of the resort is taken up with an 18-hole golf course crossed here and there with fairly deep water courses which were for the most part dry at the time of our visit. My daughter and I walked along a number of them, spotting some of the rich variety of birds living in the fairly dense indiginous vegetation, consisting mostly of various varieties of acacia thorn trees.
We found several lost golf balls, to my daughter’s delight, but also found less delightful things in these little wooded valleys: human faeces, bits of plastic, broken bottles, both glass and plastic. The macro-level lack of care evidenced by the deterioration of the water quality in the dam was echoed in the micro-level in these places, which could have been charming.
So on every level during our stay we were confronted with the contrasts of the incredible, sometimes very subtle, beauty of nature and the rather ugly side of human despoliation of nature’s fragile bounty.
I hope the accompanying photos will give some idea of this contrast.

A tranquil part of the dam overlooked by the Magaliesberg

A bushbuck and young in a wooded part of gthe resort

Early morning reflections on the water look inviting, but there's trouble in that water

Blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) and water hyacynth make the water toxic to humans

The reality

Our insensitivity to our surroundings is sometimes breathtaking!

A black flycatcher finds a perch at sunset

Sweet the rain’s new fall

The past few days in Pretoria have been rainy, not the torrential rain that has plagued the Western Cape and caused such disruption, but good rain has fallen nevertheless. As always, such rain brings new life to a garden, new leaves and flowers and insects. Our small garden has become a joyful place, a place of little joys and delights that recall for me the words of Eleanor Farjeon’s popular song “Morning has Broken”:
Sweet the rain’s new fall
Sunlit from heaven,
Like the first dew-fall
On the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness
Of the wet garden
Spring in completeness
Where his feet pass.
The grass underfoot has indeed become springy, and a wonderful vibrant green. The trees surrounding the garden have taken on a new look, as though they have put on new clothes in honour of the arrival of summer.
Birds, especially the masked weavers, have become very active in the garden also. The weavers collect long strips from the palm tree leaves to weave into their intricate and beautiful nests, many in a small area, to try to please their picky wives.
Hadeda ibises dig great holes in the lawn in their search for earthworms and other delicacies. And on every leaf and petal shiny drops of rainwater glisten in the sun.
I took out my camera and wandered around the garden just clicking away at anything that looked interesting to me and the accompanying photos are the result. I’m not sure of the aesthetic value of the images, but for me they are eloquent testimony to the arrival of summer.
Tony McGregor
Pretoria
12 November 2008

The Two Helens of Great Renown

Two Helens have epitomized opposition to apartheid over the course of many years. On the one hand (is it the right hand?) was Helen Suzman, whose death this week finally brought the era of the two Helens to an end, and on the other hand (definitely the left hand!) was Helen Joseph.
These two indomitable champions of freedom and democracy were part of my political con-sciousness for most of my life, and I had the privilege of meeting them both, if rather briefly.
Helen Suzman must rank as one of the great parliamentarians of all time, in South Africa and beyond. She was a brave champion of human rights throughout long years when it was not safe to be a champion of human rights in South Africa.
She endured vicious attacks in Parliament. One National Party MP called her “a cricket in a thorn tree” while the unspeakable P.W. Botha called her “a vicious little cat.” She disliked Botha intensely and once remarked of him, that had he been a woman, “he would arrive in Parliament on a broomstick.”
Suzman was one of eleven United Party (UP) parliamentarians who, under the leadership of the Member for Queenstown, Dr Jan Steytler, left the UP to form the Progressive Party in 1959. From 1961 to 1984 she was the lone voice of liberalism in the South African Parliament, earning herself notoriety in National Party circles for her bold speaking out for political prisoners, for the rights of Blacks generally, and for calling attention to the iniquities and inhumanities of the whole apartheid ideology and apparatus.
The time I met Mrs Suzman was in the late 70s when the people of Winterveld, a desolate area north of Pretoria, were suffering immense hardships as a result of apartheid in general, and of the Group Areas Act and the “homelands” policy in particular. I was working for the South African Council of Churches at the time and a Winterveld Action Committee had been estab-lished to try to raise awareness of the plight of the people of Winterveld. Mrs Suzman was in-vited by the committee to see for herself the conditions the people had to live under.
I was impressed by her humility, the way she listened intently to the people, trying to get a tho-rough understanding of their plight. This lady from the decidedly upper class Northern Suburbs of Johannesburg seemed paradoxically to be quite at home in the squalor and poverty, walking forthrightly through runnels of stinking water and past heaps of festering garbage. No pussy-footing around this lady, I thought at the time.
From the other end of the social spectrum in a sense came Helen Joseph. This Helen was born in the United Kingdom in 1905 and came to South Africa in 1931. After serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during the Second World War, she started to work for the Garment Worker’s Union and was one of the founder members of the Congress of Democrats, a white movement in close association with the then all-Black African National Congress (ANC).
As a member of the Congress of Democrats she was a leading light in the Congress of the People held at Kliptown in 1955. This Congress drafted and published the Freedom Charter.
Mrs Joseph was a leading figure in the march of women on the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956 which was in protest against the extension of the Pass Laws to women. The famous free-dom song which has come to symbolize the strength and courage of women in the anti-apartheid struggle, Wathint’ Abafazi Wathint’ imbokodo! (Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock) was composed and sung for that march, which was led by Mrs Joseph and Lilian Ngoyi, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn.
The occasion on which I met Mrs Joseph was a party at the home of Dr David Webster, the assassinated anti-apartheid academic, in the mid-80s.
We were discussing her banning and listing under the draconian apartheid security legislation. I rather stupidly, I suppose, said: “What does the government have to fear from you?” I was thinking of the anomaly of the mighty apartheid security machinery being mobilised against a rather frail, elderly woman. Her response was quick: “Quite a lot, I should hope!”
So the two Helens epitomize two different approaches to human rights: one from the working class, gritty and down-to-earth, the other from the more refined, perhaps, certainly upper middle class.
Clearly different ideological approaches, but somehow both aiming for dignity for all people, both looking for understanding and acceptance, both showing immense courage and conviction and compassion.
South Africa and its people have been greatly enriched by the two Helens. May their spirits be felt among us for many generations to come: Wathint’ Abafazi Wathint’ imbokodo!

Tolerance and fervor

For the first decade, the Crusaders pursued a policy of terror against Muslims and Jews that included mass executions, the throwing of severed heads over besieged cities walls, exhibition and mutilation of naked cadavers, and even cannibalism

I am at one with Frantz Fanon when he writes: “I do not trust fervor.” (in Black Skin, White Masks, 1967; originally Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, 1952)
Somehow, honest debate and discussion turns into diatribe and vindictiveness when “intense and passionate feeling” (the definition of “fervor” given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 11th Edition, 2006) are employed by one or more of the protagonists, instead of listening in order to understand the other.
As Fanon continues: “every time it has burst out somewhere, it has brought fire, famine, misery … And contempt for man.”
Throughout history, and in particular it can be said, the history of the Christian Church, this has been shown to be true. Even a cursory glance at the history of the Crusades, for example, can show how the Gospel of the Prince of Peace inspired such “intense and passionate feeling” that thousands of Jews, Muslims and even non-Roman Catholic Christians were massacred. This “holy war” was pursued by the Catholics with the Papal assurance: “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested.”
Does this not have present day resonance as well? It sounds very like the promise of immediate entrance into paradise that some proponents and perpetrators of jihad use to justify their actions.
Religion is used to justify both the killing of Muslims and the killing of Christians.
Fervour leading to, in Fanon’s words, “contempt for man.”

Representation of Saint Louis considered to be true to life - Early 14th century statue from the church of Mainneville, Eure, France

In Andre Schartz-Bart’s novel, The last of the Just, he writes of the Rabbi Solomon Levy who is called before King Louis IX, later canonised as a Catholic Saint. The Rabbi was to be questioned by the “Saint King” about his views on the divinity of Jesus, in order that the King could decide, on the basis of the Rabbi’s answers, what sort of torture he should be subjected to.
The Rabbi gave an unanswerable answer: “If it is true that the Messiah of which our ancient prophets spoke has already come, how then do you explain the present state of the world?”
The Rabbi went on: “Noble lords, the prophets stated that when the Messiah came sobs and groans would disappear from the world – ah – did they not? That the lion and the lamb would lie down together, that the blind would be healed and that the lame would leap like – stags! And also that all the peoples would break their swords, oh, yes, and beat them into ploughshares – ah – would they not?”
The Saint went on to order the torture of the Rabbi, this same saint who, in order to finance his participation in the Seventh Crusade, confiscated all the property of Jews in Paris and expelled them from the city, in addition to publicly burning about 12 000 manuscript copies of the Talmud.
Such intolerance is the result of fervor.
After the Crusades came more fervor in the form of the Inquisition. This movement to suppress any questioning of or dissent from official Catholic teaching or doctrine was set in motion in 1184 CE by the Papal Bull entitled Ab abolendum and was aimed primarily at the Catharist movement growing in southern France at the time.
The Inquisition went on for centuries with incredibly painful results for many thousands of people caught up in its fearsome clutches. This in the name of the God of Love?

Cover of the seventh Cologne edition of the Malleus Maleficarum, 1520 (The University of Sydney).

In the fervor of the Inquisition also came the amazingly popular witch hunts which were given “theological” backing by the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1486.
This iniquitous book was given Papal approval, or at least justification, by Pope Innocent VIII. A section of this bull (one is tempted to make some bad puns here!) is worthy of reading:
“It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Tréves, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many.”

Pope Innocent VIII

The good Pope went on to say:
“Our zeal for the Faith especially incites us, lest that the provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, and territories of Germany, which We had specified, be deprived of the benefits of the Holy Office thereto assigned, by the tenor of these presents in virtue of Our Apostolic authority We decree and enjoin that the aforesaid Inquisitors be empowered to proceed to the just correction, imprisonment, and punishment of any persons, without let or hindrance, in every way as if the provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, territories, yea, even the persons and their crimes in this kind were named and particularly designated in Our letters.”
There’s that fervor again!

Two priests ask a heretic to repent as he is tortured.

The “just correction, imprisonment and punishment” referred to above included most hideous tortures and great entertainment for the populace as burning at the stake. Something like the public executions still carried out now in some countries (not excluding the US?) for the amusement and “edification” of the people. Just to prevent others doing what the executed victims might, or might not, have done.
And who can say that these things are not going on even today? What was the invasion of Iraq, if not a modern day crusade? What about torture sanctioned by the Bush administration in violation of US law and the US constitution?
And what of the Iran-Iraq war, which was really a religious war between competing Muslim factions, the Sunni and the Shia? As noted in the Wikipedia article on the conflict: “The war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage – a half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers as well as civilians are believed to have died in the war with many more injured and wounded – but brought neither reparations nor change in borders.” So half a million people died essentially for nothing, except to feed someone’s fervor.
What of the attack on the World Trade Centre, usually referred to as 9/11? Again that dreadful thing called fervor leading to a complete “contempt for man,” and, quite literally, fire and misery.
And now we have the fervid Christian right pushing the idea that the election of that essentially conservative, good, upright man Mr Barack Obama brings the end time closer, because he is the anti-Christ. Dear me, Pope Innocent VIII and the writers of the Malleus Maleficarum would feel right at home with this kind of idea.
After all, the proponents of witch hunts would determine the guilt or innocence of a person (usually a woman) by throwing them into a pond and seeing if they sank and drowned or swam and survived. If the former, they were declared innocent (too bad they didn’t live to enjoy their new-found reputation!) and if they swam they were declared guilty and burned at the stake.
God save us from religious fervor and let’s find ways to know and understand each other. This is not only a moral imperative, but in the long run its cheaper! We certainly don’t need more crusades.
Understanding, empathy, is the opposite of fervor. It is employing one’s imagination and intelligence to put oneself in another’s shoes, to see things from their point of view with the intention of getting past the differences. That is the way of peace, the way of love. It is also the way of reason.
How, indeed, then do we explain the present state of the world?
Perhaps Fanon again can point us in a way which could lead us out of this morass of intolerance and misunderstanding:
“Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. If it is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding. Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him.”