Ruminatrix
...more recent posts
Friday, Feb 21, 2003
I don't have good explanations for a three-month silence -- or none that would constitute a valid excuse. Yet I can't simply ignore it either. So for now I'll just say that this has been a very hard winter indeed, perhaps the hardest of my life. My overall mood has been at best saturnine (OED: "1 of sluggish gloomy temperament; 2 of, or affected, by lead-poisoning") and frequently much worse than that. This has not been conducive to the practice of regular logging. Or regular anything except sleep and broodiness.
The causes have been both internal (i.e. personal) and external (political). Somewhere in between these meet in the realm of the economic. Here's the rub: long-term unemployment doesn't seem to suit me any better than it does anyone else. I have found the slope from having some time off to having too much on my mind to leave the house a very slippery one. But I'll save the more personal stuff for another time; there will be opportunities.
As for today: attending the big anti-war non-march with several hundred thousand others in New York City on Feb 15th pulled me out (somewhat) of my blues. It felt good to be there to show dissent despite the freezing temperature. Even if we didn't stem the tidal drift to war.
Because a week later it's clear that the day of world-wide marches (millions from Melbourne to California) has altered policy neither in Washington nor in London. Mr Blair is apparently not for turning, even if the Labour Party and the British public is overwhelmingly opposed to his war. If memory serves, the main UK contribution in to the 1991 war (which I supported) was a series of low-level daylight ground attacks which led to the loss of several RAF pilots and failed to destroy Iraqi Scuds. Very spectacular and glorious but ineffective. Britain's participation in this adventure is more important for its diplomatic or symbolic value than for its "assets".
France, after its Security Council proposal to increase the scale of the UN inspection regime in Iraq drew applause, won't follow through with any particulars. Perhaps it has concluded that in any case the US is unlikely to tell the UN whatever ingredients it provided to Iraq back in the days when it was arming it to invade Iran. We can be pretty sure that those stocks won't survive any invasion and occupation.
Putin isn't saying much about what Russia's position is, but then they know who's gonna win the argument. They will, it appears, simply wait until Washington does what it intends to and reluctantly settle for whatever they can get out of it.
There's a glimmer of hope in Turkey's refusal to allow a northern front from its territory for invasion -- not much however since the difference of opinion is more about dollars in aid than an actual oposition to the policy.
I have gone on much too long here. But still I think one needs to say so even if one can't prevent it: this war is wrong and it is also wrong-headed. In 1804 Napoleon, not yet emperor, had an inconvenient opponent, the Duc d' Enghein, executed for treason. He was shot at night-time in the moat of Vincennes after a very brief court-martial. Napoleon's future minister of Police, the cynical Fouche, quipped that the shooting was "worse than a crime, it was an error." This impending war is a error in ways that will only become more apparent after it's over.
I'll log sporadically not daily but that's enough for one day.
"If I venture into the slipstream..." A place to start?
Van Morrisson spits it out: "My t-t-tongue gets tied, every every every time I try to speak..." From Cyprus Avenue on Astral Weeks of course -- the album he made while flat broke and very unhappy in Cambridge Massachussets in 1968, trying to break out of his old Them contract and start over in New York. I picked up a copy two days ago, on sale. Each song still speaks to me of breaking silences, and of getting under way: "step right up, fly it, try it, just-a like a ballerina..." Astonishing. And if it seems like hubris to quote Van Morrison, I can only reply that his "tongue gets tied" is from Hound Dog.
My fingers get tied (and insides shake just like a leaf on a tree) every time I try to get this page started. I first have to overcome a great resistance to getting going at all, then defeat a compulsion to re-edit over and over and over, to stop myself from finding some other task...Is the trick of it just to put it down and push the post button?
On the subway uptown the other day, thinking about this here page, a question bubbled up: Will writing a log be a "putting down", a congealing or freezing of thoughts? Or is it perhaps more productive to think of writing this as a "letting go", a release from my preoccupations and obsessions?
Let it go. Step right up, try it, fly it see what happens, dear reader
It's a beginning of sorts.