lost in paradise

Rachel Sussman

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

Duty Calls

From:

xkcd – A Webcomic – Duty Calls.

Women with Fire Masks, Downshire Hill, 1941

Lee Miller

Fast Tube by Casper">Looking cool in b&w

Fast Tube by Casper">Looking weird in colour

Sarko: victim of liberal ideology

Sarkozy, the President of the French Republic, says that the burka has no place in France because it represents the oppression of women. For this, liberals have applauded him for defending secular values in France.

But he has no plans to ban veils on nuns or legislate to force the Catholic church to allow women priests. This might be because there are more Catholic voters than Muslims ones in France;  or that he wants to look strong on an issue where he doesn’t have to spend money. But perhaps that is too cynical.

There is another issue I’d like to raise in connection with Sarko’s pronouncement. Sarko’s view seems to be that even if a woman says she wants to wear a burka, it is still somehow not a free choice. This is because of ideology, or to be cruder, ‘brainwashing’ – the notion that the mind has been so externally affected that apparently free choices are in some sense forced.  This may be true.

So: a liberal (male) politician is going to tell a woman she can’t wear what she likes because she is being told what to wear by (muslim) men.  It’s hard to be sure where this approach will end: a dress code  like they have in Saudi Arabia but with different rules, perhaps.

But Sarko knows what’s best for them, and wants to make them do it. This is paternalism, of course, something liberals are supposed to be against. I wish some of my liberal friends would consider this  before inveighing against so-called patriarchal islamic ideology. Not liking the burka can’t be a liberal justification for banning it.  Or perhaps their ‘tolerance’ for diversity means only: ‘you can be different, but not too different;  if you are  too different  we’ll make you conform’.

An alternative might be to drop the idea that freedom is revealed by the choices people actually make. I’m quite ready to go along with this, provided it isn’t restricted to the choices made by Muslim women. How many of our choices are truly ‘free’? The main ideological driver in ‘the liberal west’ is surely capitalism – with consumerism as the classic example of the addictive lifestyle which, unlike the burka, is regularly described as an unfree state by its victims. For a ‘liberal’ to  focus on sartorial choices that don’t harm others, while ignoring the real status of our abstract  ’freedoms’ is to act in bad faith. Or to be the victim of ideology – which is it, M. Sarko?

Photographs by Kertesz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zurbaran: Still Life with Lemons

Helen Bamber

Photograph: Helen Bamber in Belsen, 1945

She calls herself “a witness to the vulnerability of humanity”. From her home in north London, a pint-sized divorcee has emerged as one of the world’s most prominent campaigners against the very worst type of personal suffering, that of deliberate and coldly calculated torture.

For more than half a century, Helen Bamber has devoted her life to the care of survivors of horror and violence. In 1985 she created the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Its very name, says Bamber’s biographer Neil Belton, tells us “more than most of us wish to hear”. She and her colleagues have provided therapy to more than 30,000 people, from more than 90 countries.

The “Good Listener”

Bamber has never had any formal training, but believes the most important part of her work is to “listen to clients for as long as they wish or can bear to talk”. The title of Belton’s book about her is The Good Listener, a neat summary of her life and work.

Bamber believes the world is divided into two types, bystanders who see only what they want, and proper witnesses who observe and record the truth. She joined the latter group in 1945, when she volunteered to go into the concentration camp of Belsen to help with the physical and psychological recovery of Holocaust survivors.

As a 19-year-old girl, Bamber found herself on the receiving end of some of the worst human horror stories imaginable. She has described the survivors there who “would dig their fingers into your arms and hold on to you to get to you the horror of what had happened.”

Moving on from Amnesty

This tenacious teenager returned to London to work with children who had survived the camps, and later joined Amnesty International, where she worked to expose torture regimes in such countries as Chile and Argentina.

It became increasingly apparent that the AI brief to expose these regimes and look after its victims was too wide, and Bamber saw a greater need for individual care. She was moved to create her own foundation, where the role of therapist is “to receive, not to recoil” and often “simply sit rocking somebody while they tell their story”.

Never moved to tears by these tales, Bamber remains strangely affected by the sound of survivors singing together. It reminds her of “what capacity people have for creativity and what’s denied them”.

Bamber sits on human rights committees from Belfast to Gaza. Former hostage John McCarthy is impressed by her energy and power, her combination of compassion and determination.

Unusual childhood reading

He believes her work must require a certain anger. Bamber admits to this fuel for her gruelling schedule, and the source of it may be found in her childhood. Born to Jewish parents of Polish descent, young Helen grew up in a house where the Nazi threat was overpowering.

Her father read her sections of Mein Kampf to remind her of the evil in the world, and she has described a sense of constant foreboding. Her trip to Belsen was about overcoming her own fears.

Bamber has since dedicated her life to helping others do the same, and describes a sense of satisfaction in helping people learn to live again. And as to what really drives her on, she explains that even in the midst of such evil and suffering, or perhaps especially in such places, “there’s something very good to be retrieved from people”.

Caroline Frost

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/profile/helen_bamber.shtml

BBC – BBC Four Profile – Helen Bamber.

Portrait of Edouard Manet by Henri Fantin-Latour

Manet – The painter of modern life and a great flaneur.

This is quite interesting! I just wish Mr Jeffries had taken the Hegel a little further: there’s a lot more to his philosophy of freedom than is intimated here. Still, it’s a pleasure to see anyone noticing that liberal ideas of ‘negative freedom’ are a bit inadequate, to say the least.

Brush up your Hegel, Sarko

Monsieur Président’s burka outburst suggests he can’t tell his abstract and concrete freedoms apart

 

Brush up your Hegel, Sarko | Stuart Jeffries | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Excerpts from The Present Age (1846)

The present age is one of understanding, of reflection, devoid of passion, an age which flies into enthusiasm for a moment only to decline back into indolence….

..When first a clever society makes concrete reality into nothing, then the Media creates that abstraction, “the public,” which is filled with unreal individuals, who are never united nor can they ever unite simultaneously in a single situation or organization, yet still stick together as a whole. The public is a body, more numerous than the people which compose it, but this body can never be shown, indeed it can never have only a single representation, because it is an abstraction. Yet this public becomes larger, the more the times become passionless and reflective and destroy concrete reality; this whole, the public, soon embraces everything. . . .

The public is not a people, it is not a generation, it is not a simultaneity, it is not a community, it is not a society, it is not an association, it is not those particular men over there, because all these exist because they are concrete and real; however, no single individual who belongs to the public has any real commitment; some times during the day he belongs to the public, namely, in those times in which he is nothing; in those times that he is a particular person, he does not belong to the public. Consisting of such individuals, who as individuals are nothing, the public becomes a huge something, a nothing, an abstract desert and emptiness, which is everything and nothing. . . .

The Media is an abstraction (because a newspaper is not concrete and only in an abstract sense can be considered an individual), which in association with the passionlessness and reflection of the times creates that abstract phantom, the public, which is the actual leveller. . . . More and more individuals will, because of their indolent bloodlessness, aspire to become nothing, in order to become the public, this abstract whole, which forms in this ridiculous manner: the public comes into existence because all its participants become third parties. This lazy mass, which understands nothing and does nothing, this public gallery seeks some distraction, and soon gives itself over to the idea that everything which someone does, or achieves, has been done to provide the public something to gossip about. . . . The public has a dog for its amusement. That dog is the Media. If there is someone better than the public, someone who distinguishes himself, the public sets the dog on him and all the amusement begins. This biting dog tears up his coat-tails, and takes all sort of vulgar liberties with his leg–until the public bores of it all and calls the dog off. That is how the public levels

Søren Kierkegaard

Charles Baudelaire

From Les Fleurs du Mal

(The Flowers of Evil)

(French followed by translation)

Au Lecteur

La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine,
Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps,
Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords,
Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine.

Nos péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont lâches;
Nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux,
Et nous rentrons gaiement dans le chemin bourbeux,
Croyant par de vils pleurs laver toutes nos taches.

Sur l’oreiller du mal c’est Satan Trismégiste
Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté,
Et le riche métal de notre volonté
Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste.

C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!
Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas;
Chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas,
Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent.

Ainsi qu’un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange
Le sein martyrisé d’une antique catin,
Nous volons au passage un plaisir clandestin
Que nous pressons bien fort comme une vieille orange.

Serré, fourmillant, comme un million d’helminthes,
Dans nos cerveaux ribote un peuple de Démons,
Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort dans nos poumons
Descend, fleuve invisible, avec de sourdes plaintes.

Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l’incendie,
N’ont pas encor brodé de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
C’est que notre âme, hélas! n’est pas assez hardie.

Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,
Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants,
Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices,

II en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde!
Quoiqu’il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris,
Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris
Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde;

C’est l’Ennui! L’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,
II rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

— Charles Baudelaire

To the Reader

Folly and error, avarice and vice,
Employ our souls and waste our bodies’ force.
As mangey beggars incubate their lice,
We nourish our innocuous remorse.

Our sins are stubborn, craven our repentance.
For our weak vows we ask excessive prices.
Trusting our tears will wash away the sentence,
We sneak off where the muddy road entices.

Cradled in evil, that Thrice-Great Magician,
The Devil, rocks our souls, that can’t resist;
And the rich metal of our own volition
Is vaporised by that sage alchemist.

The Devil pulls the strings by which we’re worked:
By all revolting objects lured, we slink
Hellwards; each day down one more step we’re jerked
Feeling no horror, through the shades that stink.

Just as a lustful pauper bites and kisses
The scarred and shrivelled breast of an old whore,
We steal, along the roadside, furtive blisses,
Squeezing them, like stale oranges, for more.

Packed tight, like hives of maggots, thickly seething
Within our brains a host of demons surges.
Deep down into our lungs at every breathing,
Death flows, an unseen river, moaning dirges.

If rape or arson, poison, or the knife
Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
Of this drab canvas we accept as life —
It is because we are not bold enough!

Amongst the jackals, leopards, mongrels, apes,
Snakes, scorpions, vultures, that with hellish din,
Squeal, roar, writhe, gambol, crawl, with monstrous shapes,
In each man’s foul menagerie of sin —

There’s one more damned than all. He never gambols,
Nor crawls, nor roars, but, from the rest withdrawn,
Gladly of this whole earth would make a shambles
And swallow up existence with a yawn…

Boredom! He smokes his hookah, while he dreams
Of gibbets, weeping tears he cannot smother.
You know this dainty monster, too, it seems —
Hypocrite reader! — You! — My twin! — My brother!

— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

The Entire text of Les Fleurs du Mal here

& for some  more Baudelairian activities try The Flaneur