Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

In my last Blog I included a picture of Titch (psychogeographicer) Thomas, or at least, an "artists impression", a pineapple. The caption of Google Images was "Strange Fruit" and this caption made me think of a much more dark subject, one the subject of a book I was reading recently on the history of protest songs. "Strange Fruit" was a song - first written as a poem by Abel Meeropol then later set to music - made famous by Billie Holiday. It concerned the racist lynchings of people in the South of the USA. 

The whole subject of racism, of how each of us have to deal with "the other", involves much of what is in the air at the moment within the UK. But really, it is "in the air" at all times and in all places.

Moving on to our sporting world, many years ago a British Relay team, fresh from winning a Gold Medal, were being interviewed. They were asked what they thought of being of various colours. It was then that I was made aware of the potential of sport to heal - this because until this was mentioned I had not really been conscious that they were of different hues! I was made to do a double take as I thought of each one of the four man team. First and foremost they had been for me athletes.

This realisation came as a blessing, a blessing of just what sport could offer. Now, many years later, as banana skins are thrown at black footballers at UK soccer matches, it has to be recognised that any genuine sea change remains undetermined. 

Leaping away at a bit of a tangent, and looking back at the history of the rise of Rome, there is a superb 15 volume history of that city - from its beginnings to its eventually fall - written by a Japanese lady, Nanami Shiono. Ms Shiono offers many fresh perspectives on ancient Rome, saying that often our judgement can suffer a degree of distortion because the actions of its people are often viewed through the prism of "our Christian sensitivities".

Nanami Shinono

 Ms Shiono, not being a Christian, and looking with new eyes, sees much to be admired. 

(As people were asked in the Life of Brian, "what did the Romans ever do for us?")

Think man, think!!

Up until the fall of Carthage in 146 BC - razed to the ground by the Romans after the Third Punic War - Namami Shiono, along with many other historians, judged the Roman expansion as "benign imperialism". This because those defeated by them were more often than not allowed to continue to manage their own affairs and more; even had citizenship (of Rome) extended to them. Rome also had a citizen army and did not hire mercenaries to fight their battles, as did most other power brokers of the ancient world. To be obliged to serve in the army was in fact a form of taxation for its citizens, an obligation only for those with the wealth and land ownership that attracted a tax demand. Those lower down the scale, though still citizens, had no such obligation. Already, for the perceptive eye, this is a "new" way of providing soldiers, and of just who would be soldiers. As far as I can determine, there were no draft dodgers; those with a true stake in the republic had to fight their own battles.

A Roman filing his tax returns

Citizenship, extended to many others beyond the city of Rome as it often was, can also be seen to be something with lessons for us, now, today. That citizenship was related to allegiance to Rome - not a thing of race, religious creed or colour. This is not an idealization but a known fact of Rome's rise from its mythic beginnings to the fully formed Republic. 

Slavery was another matter - suffice to say that slavery was also at times the fate of conquered people, especially if they had picked the fight with Rome. Yet slaves were not sought for as such on foreign shores and deemed lesser beings because of colour. Again, a slave being rewarded with freedom was not totally unheard of and many, lifted from what is now Greece, Spain and elsewhere, were recognised as highly intelligent human beings, bi-lingual, and became teachers of the young, even historians (whose works are still extant) Nevertheless, freedom, however conceived and imagined, is obviously the bottom line, so let's leave it there. 

A free man and a slave - and never the twain shall meet?

I think I am drifting and waffling as usual, but surely such lessons have to be considered in our current world of Nation States, of sometimes ludicrous imaginings of racial "purity", where immigrants are seen as second class citizens. One fact gleaned from Roman history:- a new citizen of Rome, just twenty years after being of a conquered foe, was elected as one of the two yearly Consuls, the highest position within the Roman republican system. 

Truly astonishing if thought is given to it. Truly astonishing.

Anyway, to finish, a poem by Mary Angelou, "Equality":- 

You declare you see me dimly 
through a glass which will not shine, 
though I stand before you boldly, 
trim in rank and marking time. 
You do own to hear me faintly 
as a whisper out of range, 
while my drums beat out the message 
and the rhythms never change.

Equality, and I will be free. 
Equality, and I will be free.

You announce my ways are wanton, 
that I fly from man to man, 
but if I'm just a shadow to you, 
could you ever understand ?

We have lived a painful history, 
we know the shameful past, 
but I keep on marching forward, 
and you keep on coming last.

Equality, and I will be free. 
Equality, and I will be free.

Take the blinders from your vision, 
take the padding from your ears, 
and confess you've heard me crying, 
and admit you've seen my tears.

Hear the tempo so compelling, 
hear the blood throb in my veins. 
Yes, my drums are beating nightly, 
and the rhythms never change.

Equality, and I will be free. 
Equality, and I will be free. 

Related Quote:-

"Strange Fruit" is a protest song, a musical response—in equal parts sorrow and anger—to the barbaric practice of lynching, that horrific brand of racial terrorism used to reinforce white supremacy from the end of the Civil War through the mid-20th century. 

At the time "Strange Fruit" was first released, lynching remained a shockingly common and socially accepted practice; even powerful liberal President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unwilling to support an anti-lynching bill in Congress, fearful that it would cost him too much political support in the South.

Written as a poem by Abel Meeropol in 1937, and recorded as a jazz song by Billie Holiday in 1939, the song marked a kind of turning point between the Jim Crow and civil rights eras. In the song, you can hear the powerlessness and despair of an age when African Americans were afforded few legal rights and little political power; you can also hear the determination and resolve that led to a revolution in American race relations over the following decades. 

"Strange Fruit" is a song that sings to both a dark past and a brighter future.

(From Shmoop Notes)

THIS WEBSITE USES CO

Psychogeography

Yes, another buzz phrase enters my vocabulary. Psychogeography. This the title of another cheap little ebook as I trawled the Kindle Bookshop seeking solace from the latest absurdities of Brexit. 

A psychogeographical map

Apparently psychogeography is to wander around a particular environment noting in particular diverse ways the impressions gained. Well, something like that.

It does seem to me to be nothing new at all, irrespective of the rather pretentious name. I tend to wander around most of the time registering various impressions.

Apparently, in psychogeography, you add a further dimension by giving consideration to the impressions others might register from such an environment. This I would say is rather more difficult. 

Graffiti that moves

Graffiti, often found during urban perambulations, inspired Philip Larkin to pen his poem "Sunny Prestatyn" (which is a great little UK holiday resort):-

Come To Sunny Prestatyn

Laughed the girl on the poster,

Kneeling up on the sand   

In tautened white satin.   

Behind her, a hunk of coast, a

Hotel with palms

Seemed to expand from her thighs and   

Spread breast-lifting arms.

She was slapped up one day in March.   

A couple of weeks, and her face

Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;   

Huge tits and a fissured crotch

Were scored well in, and the space   

Between her legs held scrawls

That set her fairly astride

A tuberous cock and balls

Autographed Titch Thomas, while   

Someone had used a knife

Or something to stab right through   

The moustached lips of her smile.   

She was too good for this life.   

Very soon, a great transverse tear   

Left only a hand and some blue.   

Now Fight Cancer is there.

Add your own graffiti

Obviously, as Titch Thomas ruminated during his very own psychogeographical wanderings, he chose not only to register his impressions, but to actually add his very own to our urban world. This for others to make notes upon, or even to compose poems about. 

Our latest snap of Titch Thomas

Really, I find it difficult to grasp exactly where the novelty is in psychogeography. It does seem to have no particularly unique content. Then again, I am really being just a little bit facetious. Brexit takes its inevitable toll.

Related Quotes:-

Cities are sites of mystery, and psychogeography seeks to reveal the true nature that lies beneath the flux of the everyday.

(Art Haus)

Psychogeographer? The word, defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals”

Like psychotherapy psychogeography inhabits the uncertain border between science and art. It is the exploration of landscape and nature as a mapping of the psyche, in which inner terrain becomes outer terrain and vice versa, and in which the structures of society are experienced by the act of walking the land.

(From the Buddhist Art website "Urthona")

And last, a poem and morer elated to psychogeography written long before the word existed:-

The City of Dreadful Night

James Thomson was a Scottish-born poet, atheist and anarchist. He struggled with depression, insomnia and alcohol-abuse throughout his short life and his work frequently reflected the bleakness and despair of his life’s experiences. Thomson wrote The Doom of the City in 1857 and his best known poem, The City of Dreadful Night in 1874.

Raymond Williams calls The City of Dreadful Night: ‘a symbolic vision of the city as a condition of human life’. Williams asserts that, by the Victorian-era, the city had become a new form of human consciousness. The city of Thomson’s poem is clearly an imagined London. But it is not the dynamic hub of Empire of the popular imagination: for him it is a city of death in life.  A place permeated by loss of belief, loss of purpose and loss of hope.

The City is of Night, but not of but not of Sleep;

There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;

The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,

A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain

Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,

Or which some moments’ stupor but increases,

This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.

The City of Dreadful Night takes the form of the poet’s journey through one night in the city and suggests a reworking of Dante’s Inferno. In terms of atmosphere it can be viewed as part of the Gothic tradition, but the setting is a supposedly modern city. The poem’s structure is interesting – it alternates odd-numbered seven-line sections giving description with even-numbered six-line sections giving narrative. This very mechanical structure seems to suggest an inhuman, mechanical world. A world where its inhabitants merely follow their allocated roles within a continually-running machine:

They are most rational and yet insane:

And outward madness not to be controlled;

A perfect reason in the central brain,

Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,

And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly

The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly

To cheat itself refusing to behold.

Thomson’s narrator is an alienated wanderer, a joyless flâneur. As he walks he encounters other aimless wanderers, in fact the city teems with people: it is a haunted space. But the wanderers walk, not to arrive, not to satisfy any purpose, but to make a kind of penance to the silent, impersonal ‘necessity supreme’ that permeates the entire city:

There is no God; no fiend with names divine

Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,

It is to satiate no Being’s gall.

In Thomson’s eyes the hopes and everyday concerns of the inhabitants of the ‘real’ London are just daydreams; eventually they will awake from what they think is reality and embrace ‘this real night’. In Masao Miyoshi’s words: ‘the desolation of the decomposing self permeates the dreadful night of his vision’.

For the poet wandering the city streets there is no alternative vision and no contrast to the unremitting gloom, as a result of which there is a complete absence of any hope. Even in that other nightmare vision of the modern city, Eliot’s The Waste Land, there is the hint of some hope, but here there is none.

Wherever men are gathered, all the air

Is charged with human feeling, human thought;

Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,

Are into its vibrations surely wrought;

Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,

Are breathed into it with our respiration

It is with our life fraught and overfraught.

So that no man there breathes earth’s simple breath,

As if alone on mountains or wide seas;

But nourishes warm life or hastens death

With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease,

Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours,

Incessant of his multitudinous neighbours;

He in his turn affecting all of these.

Strange, dark images fill the lines of Thomson’s poem, a vision almost modernist in its self-conscious power and summoning up images of a type echoed many years later in Eliot’s work:

That City’s atmosphere is dark and dense,

Although not many exiles wander there,

With many a potent evil influence,

Each adding poison to the poisoned air;

Infections of unutterable sadness,

Infections of incalculable madness,

Infections of incurable despair.

Thomson, in his The City of Dreadful Night, characterises the city as a place of loneliness, alienation and spiritual despair for the many, which contrasts with the political and economic confidence enjoyed by the few. London in the nineteenth-century had seen an explosion in the size of its population and a proliferation of its downtrodden underclass. George Gissing wrote about the psychogeography of  this human underbelly of the city in his The Nether World:

Pass by in the night, and strain imagination to picture the weltering mass of human weariness, of bestiality, of unmerited dolour, of hopeless hope, of crushed surrender, tumbled together within those forbidding walls.

The French artist Gustave Doré, together with his journalist colleague Blanchard Jerrold, spent three months wandering the grittier streets of London in 1872, just before The City of Dreadful Night was published. As a result of their investigations they published London, A Pilgrimage to highlight the experience of London’s poor, or what Jerrold called ‘that long disease, their life’. Doré and Thomson never collaborated, but the artist’s illustrations make a fitting accompaniment to Thomson’s poem.

New Words For Old

I did my usual stint at the Oxfam Music and Book shop yesterday. Still those pesky customers interrupting me as I listened to my music and read my Kindle. But most remained polite and left me in peace.

I have really been into Bob Dylan recently, mostly his latest stuff, "Modern Times" (2006) and "Tempest" (2012), plus a couple of the officially released bootleg albums, Volume 5 "The Rolling Thunder review", and Volume 8 "Tell Tale Signs", which covers rare and unreleased tracks from the period 1989 to 2006. 

A lot of browsers made comments. The usual "he never could sing" (ha ha ha) but mostly surprise that it was Dylan:-

"bluesy"......."great track"..........."where can I get the album?"

The track that got most attention was "Thunder on the Mountain", and Dylan's vocals on this, at least for me, are brilliant, the way his voice fades and rises at the same time at the concluding word of so many great lines.

I got the pork chops, she got the pie

She ain't no angel and neither am I

Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes

I'll say this, I don;t give a damn about your dreams

.......and....

"Gonna forget about myself for a while, gonna go out and see what others need"

It seems some feel insulted at the thought of Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. But looking back through history, a lot of what many now consider great literature was first written for the masses and was often sung. The word "lyric" itself originates and has evolved from Lyre, a musical instrument. 

Whatever, there is a book by Richard F Thomas, "Why Dylan Matters". Mr Thomas, senior professor of Latin at Harvard, gives a course on Dylan every four years, always over subscribed. His book is an eye-opener, tracing Dylan's lyrics back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and more recently, into the deep USA folk traditions. 

Then again, some are saying that Dylan steals his lyrics. But as I see it, there is a vast difference between outright plagiarism and adaptation. Dylan, in his more serious moments and when he is not out to confuse and put us off the track (to protect himself from being put in our own little boxes), gracefully acknowledges those who have provided him with words and ideas to grace his own songs. Surely that is how the world works - or at least, should do. Taking what is there and making it our "own" and passing it on. Even though there is nothing new under the sun. 

"Behold, I make all things new"

Bob Dylan once said:- "There's a moment when all old things become new again" which makes me think of T S Eliot:- "For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice." (Four Quartets, Little Gidding) 

Associating such thoughts with the creative process, we have the assertion of Eliot - again - when he said that "immature poets imitate, mature poets steal......mature poets make the old line new, and make it their own, improve on it...."

So, did Dylan "steal", copy, or did he create anew? Can something really come from nothing or is all a constant transformation? Whatever, it is difficult to find sympathy for the fundamentalists of any creed, seeking to tie salvation itself to the precise repetition and understanding of unchanging words. 

Another great song of Dylan's is "Tempest", a thirteen and a half minute epic, 45 verses, all accompanied by a really beautiful little Irish tune and the voice of one who "never could sing". Repetitive, but it takes me into another world - or better, transforms this one. The sinking of the Titanic. "Stolen" of course from the poem of James T Fields who died in 1881, who included the following in his very own poem "The Tempest":- 

But his little daughter whispered

As she took his icy hand, 

"Isn't God upon the ocean, 

Just the same as on the land?

The ship that was the subject of James Field's poem rode out a storm and anchored safely, so Dylan obviously never stole the ending; but then again, how could he have done - we all know the story of the Titanic!

The watchman he lay dreaming

Of all things that can be 

He dreamed the Titanic was sinking 

Into the deep blue sea.

So ends Dylan's epic. So ends this rather short little blog. I suppose, reading through, it is about our putting things in boxes.

Related Quotes:-

"Jim Dandy smiled

He never learned to swim

Saw the little crippled child

And he gave his seat to him"

(Bob Dylan, from "Tempest")

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then

I'm younger than that now

(Bob Dylan, lines from "My Back Pages")

"Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.........The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn...."

(T. S. Eliot)

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes" 

(Marcel Proust)

May the farce be with you UPDATE

Yes, that thing called Brexit is fast approaching what some might term the "end game" i.e. the date 29/03/19 when the UK officially leaves the EU. I say "leaves" but as at this date the draft agreement now on the table between the UK and the EU seems merely to offer a long transition period in which a future trade deal and final relationship can be negotiated! Quite extraordinary that over two years of negotiation has merely resulted in how long will be given to negotiate the "final" deal. Never mind, on 29/03/19 we "leave", this as a result of triggering Article 50. (Please note that the EU Court is soon to declare whether or not this Article can be revoked) 

A good question

The UK is now on its third Brexit Secretary, who is rumoured to be someone who merely popped into Number 10 to read the meter. Whatever, the first, David Davies, has, since leaving his post, come up with many great ideas as negotiating tactics. The second, Dominic Raab, finds the deal he himself negotiated  "unacceptable". 

I blame him ( Nigel Farage )

Well events move on and the latest Opinion Polls show a strong majority who would now wish to remain in the EU. Alas, democracy has already had its day and spoken, the "will of the people" was set in stone over two years ago and there will be no People's Vote ( at least, according to Theresa May,  who is not always reliable on such things ) 700,000 marched on Westminster to demand one, but democracy must be defended; while PM Theresa May claims a second vote would cause us to "lose trust in our leaders". The mind boggles.

A boggling mind

 

The ardent Brexiteers, having lost the argument on virtually all fronts, now retreat to the claim that the vote to leave was "always" solely about "sovereignty". Our right to make our own Laws, self determination and all the rest of it. This, they claim, is the basis of "all". This is what those in the past "fought and died for". Yet is it all as simple as that, or are we here hearing only soundbites? 

Surely those who "fought and died" were individuals, each having their own thoughts on exactly why they chose  not to be conscientious objectors. And they were called to fight by the leaders then simply because the various nation states of Europe were unable to settle their differences peacefully, without resort to arms. The EU was formed to seek another vision, one of co-operation where perhaps the sovereignty of its individual nations could be tweaked in order to bring forth a unity of purpose among its peoples. The great British statesman Winston Churchill - who called upon our citizens to take up arms - was himself a supporter of that European vision, arguing that our sovereignty was not inviolable if partly sacrificed towards a greater good.

 But no, those who "fought and died" are hi-hacked by the Brexiteers - just as the Leave Vote has been hi-hacked to become the indisputable "will of the people". Those who spoke before the Referendum of all the various "softer" options regarding the UK's future partnership with the EU suddenly, in victory, became very vocal in insisting that "leave MEANS leave" -  and the previously unknown term "Hard Brexit" entered the English language. 

Brexit MEANS Brexit - the harder the better

At the last count there are now three main factions amid our Leaders ( for whom we must not lose trust ) seeking to give us "what we voted for", with each group determined not to actually ask us what it is we want now. There are even more factions seeking to tell us what will happen next, and even more accusing Mrs May of various things ( having been a declared Remainer in a previous incarnation, some are suspicious of her ultimate motives )

Another good question

And so we British stumble on and a  demographic map of just who remain in favour of a "hard brexit" makes any lover of the United Kingdom despair. Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and large swathes of England are now more in favour of remaining in the EU, with those for Leave reduced to areas previously associated only with the "Tory Heartlands". And to add, for good measure, the findings of another Poll, that 79% of Tory voters in favour of Brexit view the end of the Irish peace process as a "price worth paying" to obtain their ends. Desperately sad. 

The final insult provided by the Brexiteers is the accusation that the possible failure of the whole process to bring a good result is the fault of those who voted Remain and who have since not "accepted the democratic will of the people". Yes, we are to blame!  

One of the guilty with no place left to hide

Ever since the very first Referendum to take us  INTO the EU a large section of the population have never accepted the result, have constantly been a thorn in the side of every successive Government seeking to make our membership of the  EU work. The so called "euro sceptics", mainly of the Tory Party. Then a large portion of the British Press, poisoning the atmosphere, blaming virtually every failure of successive governments on "the EU" no matter what the actual underlying cause. Until Dave Cameron, PM, seeking to heal the divide and the split in his Party once and for all, called a totally unnecessary referendum. Constitutionally it should have been "advisory only" and  - with hindsight  - perhaps a proviso that for such a possibly so great a constitutional change, the necessity of at least a 10% margin for any winner to be declared. But alas, no. Confident of victory, Dave ploughed ahead. 

So it all unfolded, and now the Remainders are to blame for the whole debacle while dear Dave C himself has retired to the sidelines, to a garden shed, to write his memoirs (rumour has it that having reached the chapter to be devoted to his "achievements" he  has succumbed to writers block and has got no further) 

Recommended for Writer's Block

Well, events will now unfold. The "Deal" - still to be finally ratified by the EU - must be presented to the UK Parliament and passed. Betting odds suggest it will fail to be passed. But who knows? Does a "No-Deal" await.........another Referendum............a General Election. 

Apparently the Army is ready.