‘ISIS ASTARTE DIANA HECATE DEMETER KALI INANNA.’ So goes the famous Goddess chant but where is her voice to be heard? Where is the voice of the Goddess?
Where are the voices of women to be heard?
In this time of darkness two men: Bush and Blair drag the World to war
despite all but the baying support of their sycophant’s and the cruel absence of the law-the stinking supine law. Where are the voices of Balance? Where are the voices of the encircling Feminine?
All I see on my screen are the furrowed brows of dark suits fondling each others egos. Urgh…Disgusting.
I am not a pacifist. My dictionary defines pacifism as:
'The policy or doctrine of rejecting war and every form of violent action as means of solving disputes... '(Shorter OED)
I do not have the courage of pacifism and I have problems with it too.
Hitler's Reich. Governments of the criminally insane like Mugabe. Government by violent criminal psychopaths clearly results in concentration camps, murder, torture, corruption, rape and genocide. Consequences of insane individuals holding great offices? Madness of holocausts. Mass graves. Rape as weapon. Handcrafted slaughter.
Is war always horrible? Can it arise from the noblest of motives? Yes, sometimes, but the motives for this assault upon the Iraqi people are the least honourable of all:
The inflicting of misery, fear, and pain for the profits of the corporate oil and construction bosses and their shareholders and the power of the military industrial complex.
The mining and logging interests will pay one day, the evil bastards. Right now they’re all driving the bus.
To the soldiers, the boy toughs discovering the principles of spurious manhood in the fire of combat, is it any wonder they treat the ‘ragheads’ with such contempt? After all they’re not US are they?
Let us not forget war is fought in the front line by heavily armed boys raised on deadly computer games against a soundtrack of solipsistic bullshit.
I believe that sometimes war is necessary to control the mad dogs but I also know that mad dogs do not spontaneously arise out of a vacuum. Mad dogs are made that way.
However as a reasonable man I need to know that war is the last resort of all. If weapons of mass destruction were the reason for the invasion of Iraq, where were they? We know where they were now; they were in the minds of Bush and Blair. If Saddam’s predilection for murderous psychosis was the reason for war, if his inherent brutal instability was the reason for this invasion I would ask George and Tony when are we invading Zimbabwe, North Korea, Burma, Congo, Darfur? When will we question the criminal brutality of the Palestinian occupation as opposed to bankrolling Israel’s murderous depredations upon the Palestinian people? When will we parachute into Chechnya to save the civilian population from a Russian sponsored criminal government made psychotic by looting, frenzy, rape and vodka?
Bush and Blair, Rumsfeld and Cheney are war criminals and history will judge them if not an international war crimes tribunal. As it will the spineless jobsworths of the NEW Labour Party. How many stood up against this ill considered adventure? History shall judge Robin Cook with approval for his courage and the rest for the bloody cowards they are.
The political process is not an end in itself. If Fukayama's ridiculous assertions about the end of history were based on the notion of an end to cataclysmic events in the world then he will be proved sorely wrong. The World is at the edge of darkness but to the street children of Brazil, to the starving inhabitants of Sudan, to the terrorised young women of Guatemala City, to the child soldiers, to the displaced and the poor and the wretched of the earth, where else have they ever been?
There are women in politics. Condoleezza Rice is a woman. However she does not speak like a woman. She speaks like a fundamentalist right wing Christian American with a background in the oil industry.
Mrs. Thatcher was a woman but she did not talk like a woman. A Churchillian simulacrum with the mindset of a grocer; she represented for me the very worst kind of English Home Counties small mindedness. A trail of destroyed communities is the legacy she left behind. A legacy of waste, of brutally rampant financial markets. A government of jobsworths was created by her curious mix of laissez faire economics and fanatical moral certitude in her own worldview through a peashooter. The potential for millions to have died through new variant CJD was directly linked to her poisonous and selfish mini beliefs. To call them philosophies is to create structure and dialectic around prejudice and fear. Poison in the heart-space ultimately leads to poison in the food, poison in the rivers, poison in the air. I believe Margaret Thatcher to have been a force of darkness in my country and the world. Her poison still seeps around the lifeblood of this land.
So where are the real women? The women who will speak for children, hearth and home? Where are the women who will speak of the wisdom of patience, who will speak of relating to each other, who will speak of the power of listening with the heart? And where, oh where, are the women who run with the wolves?
In a political system based on power games, lies and propaganda, the wise women will simply not enter the arena. The circus of the House of Commons with its braying mocking voices, its archaic boy’s own rituals, its bullshit merchants and pin-striped fuckwits, is not a place where the feminine can be acknowledged, honoured and given voice.
What is the foundation of all this restless noise? My take is that all violence and negativity arise from fear. Saddam Hussein acted from fear. Ariel Sharon- definitely acted from fear. Tony Blair- fear. George Bush- definitely fear leavened with a chronic lack of imaginative intelligence.
If politics is to depend upon climbing the greasy pole then possibly the women who run with the wolves and the paradigm surfing poets will sense their own potential corruption. If the process of attaining to the place of power ensures the moral corruption of those who attain to it then perhaps they are right to stay away. This is the fundamental paradox of New Labour. To the question what is the point of principal if you are never going to be electable we must add what is the point of being in power if you have jettisoned your principles.
In a time when the voices in men's hearts shout with discord then hearken to the poets. They are and always have been the articulators of the heart- Song of the World. Poets! The songsters of the human heart. The revealers of the possible. And if that human heart is a great tree then poetry is the sound the wind makes in its branches.
I have always believed that a pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist but truly we are at the Edge of Darkness. Yet for most of the men, women and children of our World, is it not where they have always been?
THESE ARE THE SONGS IN MEN’S HEARTS!
First, there is the song of war
that rises boiling in the blood.
Sing O Argives cross the dusty
plains of Troy a shout of joy.
Joy! Joy! Joy! To Kill! To Kill!
Such glorious joy
the blood to spill!
Sing songs of bloody ecstasy
whose words cut through steel.
Let the axe sing in the morning bright.
Let sword sing out against shield.
These words are hacked into
the hearts of young warriors.
These words sound like this:
It is a good day to die
Who wants to live forever?
Ride hard die young
I have no fear
It is the sing-song of death.
Yet it is a song of protection too.
It is a song of duty.
It is a song of purpose.
Then there is the song of the Earth.
This is the song of the Earth’s heart
That whispers in the hearts of men:
I am warmth.
I am food.
I am nourishment.
I am home.
But it is a quiet song this
and its words are quickly
lost on the wind’s moan.
Then there is the building song.
And the building song is full of
hammering and purpose.
But the building song is also
a song of forgetting the whisper
of the Earth.
Forgetting the song of space.
And the building song can cover the Earth
and all the other songs.
except the song of war.
No, never the song of war!
But of all the songs in men’s hearts
there is one containing all the rest.
This is the song of Love!
This is the song that fills
the eyes and ears of men,
blinds them to all other songs.
They stumble in its singing.
They cavort like boys again!
Like donkeys following carrots,
they are led to that
deep and sacred pool.
That magick mirror,
and the Song of Love says;
Come in to me.
Plunge in to me.
Cover yourself in me.
Dive to the very depths of me.
And this is a song of all time
and it is a song of bliss.
It is the song of the encircling
Feminine.
It is the call of breasts
and the curving naked softness of
Woman.
It is the call of her red fruit
and it is the future’s song too.
It is the song men love the best.
It is the song that wounds them most.
It is the song of their becoming.
It is the song that makes men blessed.
