from seed magazine, a science magazine i delve into occasionally.
The Prophetic Brain
It's a commonly held belief that information from the outside world impinges upon our brains through our senses to cause perception, then action. But this reasonable assumption now appears to be false.
by KARL FRISTON
Over the past decade, neuroscience has revealed that rather than acting as a filter that simply maps sensation onto action, the brain behaves like an "inference machine" that tries to discover patterns within data by refining a model of how those patterns are likely to be generated. For instance, depending on whether the context is a crowded concert hall or a deserted forest, a sound can be perceived as either a human voice or the wind whistling through trees. The pioneering German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz articulated this idea as early as 1860, when he wrote of visual perception that "objects are always imagined as being present in the field of vision as would have to be there in order to produce the same impression on the nervous mechanism." Now a unified understanding of how the brain makes and optimizes its inferences about the outside world is emerging from even earlier work — that of the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes.
Bayes developed a statistical method to evaluate the probability of any given hypothesis being true under changing conditions. The concept is straightforward: The probability of two things happening together is the probability of the first given the second, times the probability of the second. This allows the certainty of a single inference to be weighed according to how much additional evidence exists at any particular time. The "Bayesian" approach has emerged in many guises over the past century and has proved very useful in computer science applications like machine learning.
Since at least the 1980s, neuroscientists have speculated that the brain may use Bayesian inference to make predictions about the outside world. In this view, the brain estimates the most likely cause of an observation (that is, sensory input) by computing the probability that a particular series of events generated what was observed — not unlike a scientist who constructs a model to fit his or her data. This probability is a mathematical quantity we call the "evidence." But evaluating the evidence for most realistic models requires calculations so intricate and lengthy they become impractical. This would be particularly problematic for the brain, which must constantly make split-second decisions. Fortunately, there is an easier way. In 1972 the American physicist Richard Feynman devised an elegant shortcut to calculate the evidence using something called a "free-energy bound." Freeenergy is a concept from statistical thermodynamics — it is essentially the energy that can be used for work within a system once that system's entropy, or useless energy, has been subtracted.
Feynman's basic idea was simple: Instead of trying to compute the evidence explicitly, just start with a quantitative guess about the causes, which we will call a "representation," and then adjust the representation until it minimizes the free-energy of the data. Feynman exploited the fact that the freeenergy is, by construction, always greater than the negative logarithm of the evidence, a mathematical quantity we will call "surprise." In other words, the free-energy is an upper boundary upon surprise (remember this — we'll come back to it later). So by changing the representation to minimize freeenergy, the representation becomes the most likely cause of whatever sensory inputs make up an observation, and the free-energy becomes the evidence itself. The machine-learning community has used this approach with great success, leading many researchers to wonder: If minimizing free-energy is so effective in allowing statistical machines to perceive and "learn" about their surroundings, could the brain be taking similar shortcuts?
In this formulation, a "representation" is simply a quantitative guess about the likely cause of a sensory observation. To understand representation in the brain, imagine you are in a bar having a conversation. The sounds you hear have no meaning beyond being the product of someone speaking. Your brain must first represent the deeper cause of the sounds (in this case, the concepts and words that make up the speech) via its internal variables like the activity of neurons and the strengths of connections between them. Only then can you infer any meaning. What would this process look like?
The emerging picture is that the brain makes its inferences by minimizing the free-energy of messages passing between hierarchical brain regions. Imagine the brain as an onion, where meaningful exchanges with the outside world take place on its surface (the outer sensory layer). Information from these exchanges passes on to "higher" levels (those responsible for cognitive functions) through "bottom up" connections. The higher levels respond with "top down" messages to the lower levels. This reciprocal exchange repeats itself hierarchically, back and forth, layer by layer, until the highest level (at the center of the onion, or front of the brain) becomes engaged. Only then will you consciously register a perception. In this scheme, the free-energy is essentially the collective prediction error over all levels of the hierarchy: Top-down cognitive messages provide predictions based on representations from above, and lower sensory levels reciprocate with bottom-up prediction errors. These "error messages" drive encoded representations (such as neuronal activity) to improve the predictions for lower levels (that is, to reduce free-energy).
For example, in your hypothetical bar conversation, no matter how ambiguous the acoustics, you are more likely to hear "credit crunch" as opposed to "credit brunch." Here the high-level conceptual representation "credit crunch" provides contextual constraints on the words, which restrict the sounds predicted or heard, namely "c," not "b." If the bar is very noisy, you may find yourself watching your friend's mouth closely. This is because the cause (speaking) allows you to make both acoustic and visual predictions. Hierarchical optimization allows sounds to help you see and sights to guide hearing — binding different sensations into a coherent perceptual framework. This recurrent messagepassing leads to the self-organized brain dynamics that support perception and recognition.
The perspective afforded by this hierarchical Bayesian formulation is especially important for neuroscience, because hierarchy is a key architectural principle of brain anatomy — our brains are organized in successive layers, and we can measure the neural activity encoding prediction errors and representations. But this is not the end of the story. What follows is a new theory that considers what would happen if the free-energy principle applied not just to perception but to action as well.
Let's begin with the notion of an ensemble density — a probability distribution of the states you or I can occupy. Imagine I had 100 million copies of you, at different times in your daily life. If I could measure all your sensory states, I could construct a sample density or histogram that reflected the probability of your being in any particular state. Critically, for you to exist, the number of states you occupy must be small in relation to all possible states. For example, your temperature will always be in a certain range. Mathematically, this means your ensemble density has low entropy. Here, we meet a characteristic of adaptive biological agents (like you and I) in that they seem to resist the second law of thermodynamics (a universal tendency to disorder) by minimizing the entropy of their ensemble densities. What does minimizing entropy mean? It simply means that you will, on average, avoid surprising or improbable states (i.e., you will not find yourself at the bottom of the ocean or suddenly engulfed in flames). Though arcane, this implies something quite fundamental: To exist, you must avoid surprising states.
Adaptive agents like us are open systems that exchange with their environment. The environment acts on us, which produces sensory impressions, and we act on the environment to change its states: If you see an apple on a table, you can reach out to pick the apple up. If we can change the environment that causes sensory input, then, in principle, we can act to suppress surprising input. But there is a problem: How do we compute surprise? In fact, we do not need to compute surprise at all. Returning to Feynman's elegant methodology, all we need to do is to minimize free-energy, because free-energy is an upper boundary on surprise. This means that free-energy can be used not only to optimize perception, but also to prescribe action. This is the basis of the freeenergy principle, which states that all quantities associated with an agent will change to minimize free-energy. This line of reasoning prescribes an intimate relationship between perception and action, where both work in concert to suppress free-energy (that is, to minimize prediction errors or surprise) in our sensory experiences. In other words, we will actively sample sensory data so that it conforms to our expectations; we will constantly alter our relationship with our environment so that our expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. A simple example of this is turning one's head to get a better view of what seems to be a familiar face in peripheral vision, but this principle may encompass our entire navigation of the world to avoid the unexpected.
In terms of neuroscience, the key issue is not so much the information theoretic principles above, but how the brain realizes them. Multiple predictions follow from these ideas. For example, brain systems should be deployed hierarchically and connected reciprocally. Forward connections should be largely linear in their influences, whereas backward connections should embody the nonlinearities inherent in the causal structure of the world. We would expect that predictable stimuli evoke smaller responses, and unexpected stimuli larger ones. Scientists are now starting to confirm these conjectures with brain mapping, by comparing brain responses with stimuli that are coherent or incoherent, predictable or unpredictable. This principle also has implications beyond neuroscience, in the sense that it applies to all biological agents. Could single-cell organisms use the concentration of metabolites and kinetic rate-constants (as opposed to neuronal activity and connection strengths) to encode their implicit representations? In this speculative case as well as with the brain, the great challenge is to find the mapping between the internal states of a phenotype and representations that this theory mandates.
Returning to statistical machines, from which much of this work emerged, the theory suggests a profound revision of current approaches to reinforcement learning and optimal control in engineering artificial neural networks. It should be possible to teach automata (such as robots) complex adaptive behaviors by simply exposing them to a controlled environment (like a classroom), then returning them to their normal surroundings to seek out the new states they have learned to expect. The limitations of this approach are difficult to predict, but further synergy between theoretical neurobiology and machine learning, between a deeper understanding of our own minds and those we wish to create, appears inevitable.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
sunday down in bondi, the beach packed with bronzed bodies the water empty save for my brother and i as we surf in almost freezing temperatures. strange contrast. my lips are turning blue, out there as i wait for waves, i'm in shock. where s the iceberg, has it melted around the corner at bronte, why is it so freaking cold. later at the markets i meet the beautiful israeli girl ruth selling her trinkets and jewels, i buy my brother a necklace with some cabalistic jargon, i wander through dazed from the chill factor despite the soaring temperatures. we pass through the beautiful people, two non descript wanderers, i smile at the girls wave at the boys and fall into bookshops and cafes thinking about ruth and how beautiful she is.
monday tuesday i'm home organizing a pa, driving jake here and there, having lunch, drinking coffee, talking with gravy about the gig, i'm filthy and smell awful, it's time for me to get organized and start training and rehearsing and clean myself up. i sit down and write the music for my song, i think about sending ruth a valentines card, stupid commercial bullshit but what am i going to do? i can't let them all slip away. i have to try at least. i'll try in my own passive kinda way, what the hell. i'm lost before i even run but at least im going to run. it's been so long since i put any effort into having a date, i'm certain i'll be rejected in the nicest way, for all i know she's married. i didn't see a ring but then these days that doesn't mean anything. ah ruth i could easily love you but that's all i really know how to do, i'm pretty crap at the rest of it.
monday tuesday i'm home organizing a pa, driving jake here and there, having lunch, drinking coffee, talking with gravy about the gig, i'm filthy and smell awful, it's time for me to get organized and start training and rehearsing and clean myself up. i sit down and write the music for my song, i think about sending ruth a valentines card, stupid commercial bullshit but what am i going to do? i can't let them all slip away. i have to try at least. i'll try in my own passive kinda way, what the hell. i'm lost before i even run but at least im going to run. it's been so long since i put any effort into having a date, i'm certain i'll be rejected in the nicest way, for all i know she's married. i didn't see a ring but then these days that doesn't mean anything. ah ruth i could easily love you but that's all i really know how to do, i'm pretty crap at the rest of it.
the first notes arrive on the back of the previous track, the haunting song 'fly home' which i will talk about later, those final notes fade into the sonic cyclic drone of tone, the harmony that steve and marty attain is perfection, the wonderful picture, no make that a landscape painted with words, and dreamy choral echo of those guitars in loop. there's a beautiful little bit where the instruments just fade out and we are left with that lovely acoustic ring, then slowly as your mind accepts that it's the end, the song slips back in full regalia, it shimmers and shines like a precious jewel. and then the most unexpected 'whoosh' it soars above the clouds, i'd love to know how they came up with that bit, and before the surprise can register this wonderful hawkwind like harvey bainbridge synth takes the song into the stratosphere. it's just bliss.
towards the end a female voice starts to talk deep in the mix, my ears struggle to make out her message, what does she talk about, who is she and what is her message to the dead man? i struggle to decipher its meaning but i never have despite repeated listening and internet searching.
there's something narcotic about this track, it's the dead mans dream, slipping from consciousness to something else, the book of the dead charts the souls journey, the dead man's dream sees him in memory clinging to earthly things, between things of myth and magick, between a time of wizards and witches and machines and technology. it's a journey to another realm that once your sucked into its vortex, that moment of surrender you begin to think dying dreams are just like the living ones, for in life don't we all dream of magic and unicorns and the wonder of innocence.
i love this song and think the album it comes from is an underrated master piece.
i'd like you dear reader to give it a listen again, light up that jazz cigarette and dim the lights low, kick back with your girl and enter the realm of sometime anywhere.
towards the end a female voice starts to talk deep in the mix, my ears struggle to make out her message, what does she talk about, who is she and what is her message to the dead man? i struggle to decipher its meaning but i never have despite repeated listening and internet searching.
there's something narcotic about this track, it's the dead mans dream, slipping from consciousness to something else, the book of the dead charts the souls journey, the dead man's dream sees him in memory clinging to earthly things, between things of myth and magick, between a time of wizards and witches and machines and technology. it's a journey to another realm that once your sucked into its vortex, that moment of surrender you begin to think dying dreams are just like the living ones, for in life don't we all dream of magic and unicorns and the wonder of innocence.
i love this song and think the album it comes from is an underrated master piece.
i'd like you dear reader to give it a listen again, light up that jazz cigarette and dim the lights low, kick back with your girl and enter the realm of sometime anywhere.
Friday, February 06, 2009
it's early and i'm wandering along the beach at avalon, my feet burning on hot sand, the scorched earth, i look at the waves breaking below me, crystal clear, i'm wandering down into the ocean. my feet recoil at the freezing temperature. and then i'm in.
days like this are slow, the burnt land knows no sanctuary except the sea and today the sea is a staggered cathedral to reality, waves soar up above and then in the flash point of time freeze momentarily before the tremendous crash as they burst over me like liquid war. my body does what it needs, it dives under and through and finds the surface when it needs, my lungs grasp at air when it comes, and let it go when necessary. im thinking about sharks, my fin is a weapon, i can see the sharks eye, that eye scares me more than the sharks teeth, and reason takes hold, as i understand there is no shark but the one eating my mind.
i surf, catch waves and feel the hot sun incinerate my back.
later i meet Jake for lunch, he's looking like a wasted model from the 60's, trashed after a huge night clubbing and now recharging his batteries at the beach. we grab a 50 50 lunch. people stop us in the streets to talk, but we are hot, anti social and somewhat tired. words don't come easy, the chit chat, the small talk, the empty sentences, the hollow vowels and lazy consonants, it's an undead conversation. i go home. listen to shriek, loud, sleep in my hammock, it's mercurial and menacing in parts. whatever landscapes it takes me to i would dwell there momentarily before moving on, this cityscape is a strange cross dickens cross china melville place. steam punk engines and strings, mad people wander the streets but they are not different from the sane, there's a haunting hallucination like quality here, dead people in the land of the living. i'm gonna read the book.
days like this are slow, the burnt land knows no sanctuary except the sea and today the sea is a staggered cathedral to reality, waves soar up above and then in the flash point of time freeze momentarily before the tremendous crash as they burst over me like liquid war. my body does what it needs, it dives under and through and finds the surface when it needs, my lungs grasp at air when it comes, and let it go when necessary. im thinking about sharks, my fin is a weapon, i can see the sharks eye, that eye scares me more than the sharks teeth, and reason takes hold, as i understand there is no shark but the one eating my mind.
i surf, catch waves and feel the hot sun incinerate my back.
later i meet Jake for lunch, he's looking like a wasted model from the 60's, trashed after a huge night clubbing and now recharging his batteries at the beach. we grab a 50 50 lunch. people stop us in the streets to talk, but we are hot, anti social and somewhat tired. words don't come easy, the chit chat, the small talk, the empty sentences, the hollow vowels and lazy consonants, it's an undead conversation. i go home. listen to shriek, loud, sleep in my hammock, it's mercurial and menacing in parts. whatever landscapes it takes me to i would dwell there momentarily before moving on, this cityscape is a strange cross dickens cross china melville place. steam punk engines and strings, mad people wander the streets but they are not different from the sane, there's a haunting hallucination like quality here, dead people in the land of the living. i'm gonna read the book.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
fucking hell man it's so hot i'm sliding through my dreams, tossing and turning like a greasy chip in a deep frying machine, flipping and turning as i travel through dreamscapes and illusions, playing strange games with myself and myself. i awake already disorientated and stumble up to the bathroom where i piss for what seems like ages, standing there watching a yellow stream listening to that reassuring noise and wondering if this is the longest one ever, it seems to go on and on and i have to prop myself up against the sink. then when it's finally over i wander into the lounge room where the first thing i see is a huge giant mutant wasp. now i kid you not, this beasty is the size of my fist, it resembles an alien bug crossed with wasp dna, i can see it's intelligent but somewhat dazed as it hovers around the window looking for an exit.
i pick up some of it's transmissions
'this is killer wasp one (KW1) to base, i'm trapped in the subjects home, he's standing before me like a oaf, i'm attempting to exit before he exhibits human like fight responses'
'this is wasp command, try attacking first, preemptive strike, stingers on full power.'
we engage in some strange maneuvers, i'm still half asleep and know my reactions are slow, i attempt to help the wasp by opening the window wide.
the wasp flies out immediately.
it's now to hot to breath. sydney is melting, my vision is blurred, i'm covered in slime, sweat and my eyes water. i head for the shower and thus begins my day.
i pick up some of it's transmissions
'this is killer wasp one (KW1) to base, i'm trapped in the subjects home, he's standing before me like a oaf, i'm attempting to exit before he exhibits human like fight responses'
'this is wasp command, try attacking first, preemptive strike, stingers on full power.'
we engage in some strange maneuvers, i'm still half asleep and know my reactions are slow, i attempt to help the wasp by opening the window wide.
the wasp flies out immediately.
it's now to hot to breath. sydney is melting, my vision is blurred, i'm covered in slime, sweat and my eyes water. i head for the shower and thus begins my day.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
attempting to create a my space page for the deep fix is driving me nuts, i hate all the layouts and have no idea how to change them, i don't like all the adverts and it took forever to load two songs on there, anyway i'm flicking through a whole bunch of images and found a nice series of lips, which i think i will use as a theme.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
apart from having an awful infection of some sort, a genetically engineered virus at work in my system feels like my body is burning up and freezing at the same time, even when i'm sleeping at night the lights are far to bright and there's that awful exhaustion that permutes all muscle and flesh, there's also the terrible pain from my latest blow to the head, where i banged it last week. i think it took a few days for the bruise to show up. anyway i'm in the wars but not complaining, after all the weathers good, there's plenty of interesting things keeping me distracted like sleeping. for some strange reason i feel like sleeping all the time, it's very strange, my sleep is so deep and dreamless it's like being in a huge void of nothing, the same as being in a float tank. you know the type?
the type that just kicks in, zomp! from awareness to void.
anyways that sleep is seductive, it's calling me, beckoning like a siren, i know it's not really healthy to sleep so much but i can't help it. this virus doesn't help.
the type that just kicks in, zomp! from awareness to void.
anyways that sleep is seductive, it's calling me, beckoning like a siren, i know it's not really healthy to sleep so much but i can't help it. this virus doesn't help.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Transcript from interview with David Mitchell
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
Ramona Koval: David Mitchell's first book Ghostwritten was described by AS Byatt as 'the best novel I have ever read'. His second Number 9 Dream was shortlisted for the Booker and the James Tait Black Memorial prizes, and his third Cloud Atlas was hailed as spectacular by both critics and general readers alike, another Booker nominated work.
His latest novel is Black Swan Green, the story of 13 months in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the year his parents split up. A lot happens to him that year; he survives another year in the schoolyard, and a boy with a stammer doesn't have it easy, and he emerges as a young poet, although he publishes under an assumed name. That description is really very one-dimensional and as usual this David Mitchell book is very much multi-dimensional.
At our session in Wellington at Writers and Readers Week last week David began by reading from Cloud Atlas, and those who have read the book will know that the text has a very interesting structure, with the first half of the book being the first half of a series of stories (like ABCDE), and the second half completing them in a Russian doll-like stack (EDCBA), and with each of the chapters written in a different kind of English, from the language of an 18th century shipboard journal to a projected future language. So when he sat down to talk after his reading I asked him how we went about working out what these languages might sound like, what's his system?
David Mitchell: It depends if we're in the past, the present or the future.
Ramona Koval: Take your pick.
David Mitchell: In the past, if you've got an American narrator in the 19th century then Melville is a good place to start, so I read Moby Dick and cribbed down all the things that I wouldn't say myself, antiquated terms of phrase and items of vocabulary, and just worked them into the narrative as I wrote it. We speak 21st century English, so the present is not problem, and the future is the easiest of all because you can make it up and you won't get any angry letters from Tunbridge Wells to say 'I'm disgusted by Mr Mitchell's misuse of English.' So in the far future part, English sort of gets crushes and melded. I was teaching English in Japan at that time, so I based a lot of the English that might be spoken 600 years from now on my Japanese students' mistakes of English. So I used the way...their mistakes with irregular English verbs, for example.
Ramona Koval: But is that because you think English is going to be the global language probably? Or maybe Chinese will be, but anyway at the moment it looks like it's English, so English will accommodate itself to all the mistakes that everybody who is not an English speaker will make.
David Mitchell: It will, it does, and that's a fabulous thing. It's great how language evolves. It inches forwards by mistakes. I'm into very controversial linguistic areas here, I suppose, but it does seem that something like 'long time no see', which would once have been a native Chinese-speaker's misappropriation of 'I haven't seen you for a long time', that sort of gets adopted first with a sense of irony, and then even the irony evaporates and it becomes standard English. Isn't it fantastic? We're all a part of it, a great linguistic democracy. Great. Love it. Next question.
Ramona Koval: I'm just enjoying the pleasure you have in language, and obviously why wouldn't you have pleasure in language? But not every writer has that sort of pleasure.
David Mitchell: Maybe they do, they just don't whitter on about it so incessantly. But we're so lucky. Perhaps people in all language groups have a sneaking suspicion that however egalitarian they may wish to present themselves, really their own language has...it reaches the parts that other languages cannot reach. But English is this great central reservoir. We've got words like 'circumambulation' that I can't even pronounce without thinking. There in the depths we can kind of scoop up...but we've got more recent great American contributions coming into the language, and even from New Zealand as well. So I consider myself fortunate having English as my birthright, as a writer.
Ramona Koval: And you are interested in the building blocks of sentences as well as sentences, and I'm thinking now of the structures of your book and the engineering that goes into something like Cloud Atlas and the Dream book. So I wanted to talk to you about whether you perhaps wanted to be an engineer or an architect when you were a young man, because they seem so architectural. You can walk through these books and you can actually visualise the whole structure of them and you can actually climb on the scaffolding and look down.
David Mitchell: Thanks for the nice things you said about my writing there, Ramona. I did want to be an inventor, that was my very first thing, which is a pretty fair description of a novelist.
Ramona Koval: What did you invent?
David Mitchell: I invented spaceships. I made very elaborate cardboard spaceships and space station with UHU glue, who are not a sponsor of this festival. That smell of it...you shouldn't smell it too much, kids! But yes, I used to invent very elaborate space stations. Then I wanted to program computer games, and I did for a while on my Sinclair 48K ZX Spectrum, which was the future for a while. They no longer exist, so they haven't sponsored me, obviously. You can see the adult vocation in childhood forms of play, and I bet when you were a kid you were one of these kids who were always asking questions and wanted to interview people.
Ramona Koval: It's true, though it's not about me today, it's about you. Black Swan Green of course is a much more conventional book, although there are hidden worlds within the story, the world of Jason Taylor who has a hidden identity as a poet and even an assumed name. Tell me about the structure of this book, because actually there are worlds in this book too. It's small on the outside and big on the inside, if you know what I mean.
David Mitchell: Like Dr Who's spaceship, the TARDIS.
Ramona Koval: I was going to say TARDIS. Because sometimes you take us off the page into a magical space, not really magic realism in a way, but a kind of thrillingly invented language world that he finds himself when he's by himself.
David Mitchell: There's a few questions in there. It is a more conventional book, but for me after the first three, that was unconventional, if that makes sense.
Ramona Koval: So this is unconventional.
David Mitchell: It was for me, even though it looks like a conventional book from the outside at least, as you say. Perhaps to my satisfaction then I had exhausted the possibilities of novels with monkeyed-about-with structures, and so in a sense a more ordinary book was a more revolutionary next step for me. His language...it's tough when you're writing a novel narrated by a kid because unless you kind of cheat by making him a genius you're stuck between writing plausible 13-year-old but using his language and giving him a sufficiently interesting voice to retain an adult reader. Certainly when I was 13 the things I said weren't that interesting, and the idea of 300 pages of it would have sent me to sleep, certainly. However, what kids do do (and this was my way out of this fix really) is accidental poetry.
Kids of a certain age, hopefully 13, are on the cusp of acquiring an adult vocabulary but they'll still assemble and conjugate words that adults don't or that we could censor ourselves and prevent ourselves from saying. If a kid steps on a piece of crusty several-day-old snow that hasn't melted and it goes crunch, and it's very much like stepping on a Cadbury's Crunchie (who are also not sponsoring me) and we might not say that unless we are writers or eccentric or have some disorder, but a 13-year-old would; 'Wow, it's like stepping on a Crunchie.' So even though things Jason says aren't that coherent or articulate, in his own mind he's a poet, but most kids are, I think. I haven't been inside the heads of other kids, I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that that goes on.
Ramona Koval: He works at expressing himself in poetry, but he has difficulty in expressing himself aloud in the language that he loves.
David Mitchell: Yes, like me he has a stammer and I very much wanted to write about it, that was one of my motivations for the book. It's not talked about very much and well-meaning friends don't want to ask about it for fear of hurting my feelings, but this means I think it's probably much easier to find really good accounts of what it's like to be blind or deaf than it is to actually be fine but not be able to speak without an arsenal of techniques and evasions that people who stammer need to use. So I wanted to write about it and, perhaps in this area more than others, send...we're into Dr Who area again, but send a message to my 13-year-old self just containing all the things I wish someone had told me then. I think the science of speech therapy has advanced a lot since those days, and I think kids these days get a lot more useful help. But back in my day, not so great.
Ramona Koval: I was struck then by your description, equating it to blindness or deafness. Do you feel as if it is as big a disadvantage to you?
David Mitchell: No, of course not. I can see and I can hear and this allows me to interface with the world much more directly. Perhaps it isn't as major an inability as deafness or blindness, and this is why it has slipped under the radar of help and of knowledge for a long time. My book is one modest way to rectify that.
Ramona Koval: So you just talked then about strategies that you employ to get a sentence out, and if we had a tickertape of your brain going up behind us here...
David Mitchell: I'd be arrested.
Ramona Koval: ...apart from those lines, we would probably see a whole lot of instructions to yourself about the sentence that's coming up and how to negotiate it, a kind of map of what you want to say.
David Mitchell: Yes, you would.
Ramona Koval: Can you tell us a little bit about that map?
David Mitchell: It's complex. The relationship of a stammer with spoken language is very complex and it's largely beyond my understanding. Of course I have a greater understanding that a non-stammerer would, but why I can speak in front of a few hundred people and not be afflicted...dunno, I don't really know. I can draw up a general list of rules and these include...when it's really important that I don't stammer, like now, I don't. This is one rule. Rules can be broken, and they're listed in a book folks, but in terms of your question, what does happen is...I do this less now, I've come to a more useful working accommodation with my stammer and it tends not to sort of mug me as much, but what I used to do more was to examine the sentence ahead and if necessary engineer it so that I would be avoiding a word that I thought I might stammer on.
Really severe cases, if someone is asking you if you would like water or milk and you know that you tend to stammer on words beginning with 'M'...there's always one or two key consonants at any one time, and interestingly these consonants alter through life. So at the moment, say, I would have a hard time with 'Ks', hard 'Cs' and 'Ss', whereas years ago I remember being unable to say words beginning with 'Y'. I dreaded being 12 years old because then I couldn't say words beginning with 'T', say. But now I can do these fine. How come? I don't know. But water or milk, can't say words beginning with 'M', the worst thing, even if you want milk you'd ask for water because you can't say 'milk'. You live with it and you devise coping strategies. Compared to what a lot of people live with happily, it's a lucky break really.
Ramona Koval: I'm just thinking now about how it might have influenced the way you've written, the idea of...the breaking down of things, the geography of the sentences that you're about to speak, the geographies of these words that you create.
David Mitchell: Linguistically it doesn't change how I write because of course I'm totally free on the page...
Ramona Koval: No, but it changes how you think though, surely?
David Mitchell: As a kid it gives you a whacking vocabulary really early. You do need other ways to get around words. It gives you a sensitivity for language register, by which I mean if you don't think you can say 'pointless' because you're stammering on words beginning with 'P' at that point, and it's more likely you will know substitute words like 'futile', however this brings you up against the other problem whereby if you use the word 'futile' amongst 13-year-old they'll do yer bleedin' 'ead in because a 13-year-old has no right to be using a word of a higher register like 'futile'. So this is useful stuff for a writer and it's stuff that I still use now. All writers do but I was aware of it from a much earlier age, which does show what we think of as our handicaps and our inabilities can actually be teachers, they can actually have very useful functions. Would I wish my stammer away? I'd like to wish it away but I certainly wouldn't want to pay for that wish by losing what I'd learnt about language through it.
Ramona Koval: Jason develops this idea of his stammer as 'hangman' because the stammer is so pervasive that it has an ego and it has a kind of presence.
David Mitchell: It does rather feel like that. When you're a kid especially you personify abstracts in order to understand them better and in order to feel as though you're doing business with them and interacting with them. So it made sense for Jason to do that.
Ramona Koval: This is a cousin to all the books that you've written before because we have characters that reappear from the other books. They're a different age and they're referred to. This Madame...now I'm going to mispronounce... Crommelynck...
David Mitchell: Unless we have any Belgians in the audience, it's Madame de Crommelynck, and if we do then they're very welcome to come up and correct me afterwards.
Ramona Koval: She's a character from that, and she's just fantastic. In one of these magical moments he goes in to see this woman who is this Belgian countess, I suppose, she's been everywhere, she knows everything...
David Mitchell: She's like you, Ramona.
Ramona Koval: She's like me, thank you. I thought she was probably about 40 years older than me.
David Mitchell: Okay, she's like how you will be in 40 years time.
Ramona Koval: We're all a bit demented in our own ways. She was very wise and she was prefect for a young poet, wasn't she, she knew what he should read and what he should listen to. She was talking straight to him. She was a gift.
David Mitchell: She was. Well, he deserves a gift after everything else I put him through. I wanted an opportunity to talk about art in the book and there wasn't one, and wasn't really one when I was a kid either. But I advertised this vacancy amongst the cast of people I'd already written, and she applied for it and she passed the interview unanimously. So bring her in and hopefully she brings with her the ontological certainty. If you read this book and believe it's real, then in theory someone from this book who then appears in this will bring that realness with them and make Black Swan Green a more real place as well. So there's a technical reason for doing it as well, but it's also just kind of fun.
Ramona Koval: But you do want everything to connect, don't you.
David Mitchell: I stand accused. Yes, I'm guilty, I suppose. Yes. Nothing more profound really. Isn't it great when things do? Doesn't it remind you to be happy that you're alive when things like this happen, when something from a long time ago that you thought would never re-enter your life, it does, hopefully not in a negative way. When you see an old friend that you haven't seen for 15 years who you never expected to see, they just pop up. Isn't that wonderful? Maybe I do a little bit...
Ramona Koval: How important is music to you for that, old songs?
David Mitchell: As everybody knows (which is a Leonard Cohen song of course), songs bring things back instantly, in as undiluted a way as smell. Songs are companions in life as well. We might have a song that we knew when we were 13 years old and if it's art it evolves as we do and we can listen to it when we're 80 and it's a touchstone, all the way back. I couldn't...I would live without music of course but I'm very glad I don't have to.
Ramona Koval: So this young poet, Jason...you wrote poetry too when you were this age. You published under the name of James Bolivar.
David Mitchell: How do you know that?
Ramona Koval: I know stuff, I'm so old now, I know stuff, it's not hard. What happened to the poetry with you?
David Mitchell: Realistic assessment of my own gifts happened...
Ramona Koval: By you or others?
David Mitchell: By me. Of course when I was 15 I thought I was absolutely wonderful, and then luckily for me and posterity I read some real poets and met one or two, and realised that it is a higher art that I can't really attain. It's not where my vocation is and it's not...what gifts I may have, poetry isn't what these equip me for best. You can't make a single mistake in poetry, every last word and inflection has to be perfect. Short stories are higher than novels for this reason. Short stories are somewhere between the novel and poem.
Ramona Koval: Because the novel is more forgiving?
David Mitchell: Yes, novel comes with getaway cars. You can write a duff scene or a half-duff scene and if the next one is brilliant then the half-duff scene can still earn its keep. But a half-duff scene in a short story and the short story is dead. I've written a few, I know.
Ramona Koval: Is originality more important to you than telling a story or creating characters?
David Mitchell: What's important is a really simple question; is it good or not? Is it any good or not? If you are true to yourself then originality happens by default because every single person in the world has original a personality as their iris. It seems that it's not original when we...I haven't had this thought before and it might be a load of nonsense, so I apologise in advance if it is...but it seems that we are like other people and one book is like another book if we allow our true selves to be overly doctored or influenced by the 'other' or rather the 'others'. But I think if you (I hideously mix my metaphors)...if you mine yourself deep enough then the metals you will find will be precious and original. So originality isn't a thing, it's the absence of other things, which is great news.
Ramona Koval: It's not really a young person's book, is it?
David Mitchell: Yes, a few schools from around where I grew up have adopted it. So certainly a few hundred schoolkids in Worcestershire are reading it this year and perhaps hating me because I'm...
Ramona Koval: Have you had any communications from them?
David Mitchell: A few, yes. Luckily people who take the time to write you a letter about a book usually do it because they love it rather than they hate it. I haven't had any hate mail, no, not yet.
Ramona Koval: You've spoken before about going to live in Japan in 1994 as the beginning of your life as a proper writer. You were a foreigner with little Japanese and you say it afforded you the luxury of having no social belonging and probably no real responsibilities, I guess, and also you didn't have to talk, I suppose. What did that...so they think about your stammer, or that was a way of presenting yourself without a problem?
David Mitchell: My evasive strategies were sufficiently developed by then for that to not really be a factor.
Ramona Koval: Did that feel like you were a different person?
David Mitchell: I went there because of wanderlust more than anything else really. I feel like a different person every few years actually, I guess we all do, we become a dad or get married or get unmarried or change your job or have a near death experience, this sort of nudges you along the great journey.
Ramona Koval: But also it probably provided you with a kind of writer's retreat, like in a bubble. You were always in a writer's retreat because you didn't have to communicate with people, you couldn't read anything, you couldn't watch television. Was that something that stimulated you towards the page, because what else were you going to do?
David Mitchell: Yes, I think so, I'm sure it helped. I've been looking for a good way to articulate this for years and you've just supplied it. Japan was my writer's retreat. That's great. Is it okay if I use that in the future?
Ramona Koval: Of course, feel free. What about in Ireland? You live in Ireland now.
David Mitchell: I'm a dad, as I've said about three times already. I've got some photos to show you later.
Ramona Koval: They're very beautiful children, I've seen them before.
David Mitchell: And of course when you become a dad everything becomes very simple; what's best for the kids? We went back to Japan last year just for a year so that our daughter could learn the language, which she did in about three weeks. I've been doing it for nine years and it's still very ugly. Then we realised that, for who we are, West Cork is the place, so we went back to Ireland.
Ramona Koval: So do you feel like an outsider there?
David Mitchell: It's good with an international marriage to live in a third country because then it's no one's fault when things go wrong, and things in Ireland do go wrong. It's not a systems society, it's a leisurely...which is a great Irish word...if you don't have much on this afternoon you say, 'I'm quite leisurely this afternoon,' and there's something very Irish about that...which does mean that if you want an electrician this afternoon, forget it. You'll get one next month maybe. But it also means that people are less stressed, I think, and it's a good place for children.
Ramona Koval: And what about a good place for writers? Because we have this idea that it's a place full of writers and they don't pay tax and everyone's a poet. Is that true?
David Mitchell: It's a place for writers...anywhere is a place for a writer. Humanity is so fascinating and our work is to put that fascinating-ness into the book. Yes, it's true that there are generous tax breaks and it's disingenuous of me to not mention that when people say, 'So why do you live in Ireland?' 'Well, the environment is great, a good place for kids,' and they're waiting for me to mention this. But it is being reduced, which is fine as well. The midwife who helped deliver my son...I don't know if I mentioned I'm a dad, by the way...but she is of more value to Irish society than I am, and if anyone deserves a tax break it's her and not me. But my principles are not that strong that I will insist on making voluntary donations to the state, I haven't gone there yet. Have I answered your question?
Ramona Koval: Yes, you have. I've got a question about the work you're working on now, and I believe we're going to Japan and we're going back in time, and we're going to a place where language is very important again.
David Mitchell: We are. It's the Napoleonic era in Europe, and while Japan was closed to the outside world for 248 years or so there was one exception that no one outside Holland really knows about which was an artificial island, very small, perhaps about the size of this theatre, in Nagasaki Harbour called Deshima, and on this for the whole of those two and a half centuries the Dutch East Indies company was permitted to trade with the Japanese, and it was staffed by about 10 or 15 Dutch guys a long way from home.
The ships would come once a year from Batavia, which is now Jakarta, and they weren't allowed off the island, and the only three categories of people who were allowed on were the merchants who did business with them, the prostitutes who also did business with them, and the interpreters who belonged to a hereditary caste, it was passed on from father to son. The Dutch officially weren't allowed to learn Japanese, although they tend to be such gifted linguists that they did, but officially they weren't allowed to. And no Japanese other then the interpreters and a few academics towards the end of the period as well were allowed to learn Dutch. So language is power, and the interpreters had it.
Ramona Koval: But then how are you going to translate that into English with all of those different kinds of languages and the importance of which language you speak?
David Mitchell: With difficulty. The other thing about originality that I didn't say earlier, the more...to use an adjective I've just borrowed from Christian Bok the poet who's also at this festival, he talks about Sisyphean constraints, and the more Sisyphean the constraints, provided you can...just to turn Houdini into a verb...as long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.
Ramona Koval: That was a triple somersault with pike, wasn't it!
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
Ramona Koval: David Mitchell's first book Ghostwritten was described by AS Byatt as 'the best novel I have ever read'. His second Number 9 Dream was shortlisted for the Booker and the James Tait Black Memorial prizes, and his third Cloud Atlas was hailed as spectacular by both critics and general readers alike, another Booker nominated work.
His latest novel is Black Swan Green, the story of 13 months in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the year his parents split up. A lot happens to him that year; he survives another year in the schoolyard, and a boy with a stammer doesn't have it easy, and he emerges as a young poet, although he publishes under an assumed name. That description is really very one-dimensional and as usual this David Mitchell book is very much multi-dimensional.
At our session in Wellington at Writers and Readers Week last week David began by reading from Cloud Atlas, and those who have read the book will know that the text has a very interesting structure, with the first half of the book being the first half of a series of stories (like ABCDE), and the second half completing them in a Russian doll-like stack (EDCBA), and with each of the chapters written in a different kind of English, from the language of an 18th century shipboard journal to a projected future language. So when he sat down to talk after his reading I asked him how we went about working out what these languages might sound like, what's his system?
David Mitchell: It depends if we're in the past, the present or the future.
Ramona Koval: Take your pick.
David Mitchell: In the past, if you've got an American narrator in the 19th century then Melville is a good place to start, so I read Moby Dick and cribbed down all the things that I wouldn't say myself, antiquated terms of phrase and items of vocabulary, and just worked them into the narrative as I wrote it. We speak 21st century English, so the present is not problem, and the future is the easiest of all because you can make it up and you won't get any angry letters from Tunbridge Wells to say 'I'm disgusted by Mr Mitchell's misuse of English.' So in the far future part, English sort of gets crushes and melded. I was teaching English in Japan at that time, so I based a lot of the English that might be spoken 600 years from now on my Japanese students' mistakes of English. So I used the way...their mistakes with irregular English verbs, for example.
Ramona Koval: But is that because you think English is going to be the global language probably? Or maybe Chinese will be, but anyway at the moment it looks like it's English, so English will accommodate itself to all the mistakes that everybody who is not an English speaker will make.
David Mitchell: It will, it does, and that's a fabulous thing. It's great how language evolves. It inches forwards by mistakes. I'm into very controversial linguistic areas here, I suppose, but it does seem that something like 'long time no see', which would once have been a native Chinese-speaker's misappropriation of 'I haven't seen you for a long time', that sort of gets adopted first with a sense of irony, and then even the irony evaporates and it becomes standard English. Isn't it fantastic? We're all a part of it, a great linguistic democracy. Great. Love it. Next question.
Ramona Koval: I'm just enjoying the pleasure you have in language, and obviously why wouldn't you have pleasure in language? But not every writer has that sort of pleasure.
David Mitchell: Maybe they do, they just don't whitter on about it so incessantly. But we're so lucky. Perhaps people in all language groups have a sneaking suspicion that however egalitarian they may wish to present themselves, really their own language has...it reaches the parts that other languages cannot reach. But English is this great central reservoir. We've got words like 'circumambulation' that I can't even pronounce without thinking. There in the depths we can kind of scoop up...but we've got more recent great American contributions coming into the language, and even from New Zealand as well. So I consider myself fortunate having English as my birthright, as a writer.
Ramona Koval: And you are interested in the building blocks of sentences as well as sentences, and I'm thinking now of the structures of your book and the engineering that goes into something like Cloud Atlas and the Dream book. So I wanted to talk to you about whether you perhaps wanted to be an engineer or an architect when you were a young man, because they seem so architectural. You can walk through these books and you can actually visualise the whole structure of them and you can actually climb on the scaffolding and look down.
David Mitchell: Thanks for the nice things you said about my writing there, Ramona. I did want to be an inventor, that was my very first thing, which is a pretty fair description of a novelist.
Ramona Koval: What did you invent?
David Mitchell: I invented spaceships. I made very elaborate cardboard spaceships and space station with UHU glue, who are not a sponsor of this festival. That smell of it...you shouldn't smell it too much, kids! But yes, I used to invent very elaborate space stations. Then I wanted to program computer games, and I did for a while on my Sinclair 48K ZX Spectrum, which was the future for a while. They no longer exist, so they haven't sponsored me, obviously. You can see the adult vocation in childhood forms of play, and I bet when you were a kid you were one of these kids who were always asking questions and wanted to interview people.
Ramona Koval: It's true, though it's not about me today, it's about you. Black Swan Green of course is a much more conventional book, although there are hidden worlds within the story, the world of Jason Taylor who has a hidden identity as a poet and even an assumed name. Tell me about the structure of this book, because actually there are worlds in this book too. It's small on the outside and big on the inside, if you know what I mean.
David Mitchell: Like Dr Who's spaceship, the TARDIS.
Ramona Koval: I was going to say TARDIS. Because sometimes you take us off the page into a magical space, not really magic realism in a way, but a kind of thrillingly invented language world that he finds himself when he's by himself.
David Mitchell: There's a few questions in there. It is a more conventional book, but for me after the first three, that was unconventional, if that makes sense.
Ramona Koval: So this is unconventional.
David Mitchell: It was for me, even though it looks like a conventional book from the outside at least, as you say. Perhaps to my satisfaction then I had exhausted the possibilities of novels with monkeyed-about-with structures, and so in a sense a more ordinary book was a more revolutionary next step for me. His language...it's tough when you're writing a novel narrated by a kid because unless you kind of cheat by making him a genius you're stuck between writing plausible 13-year-old but using his language and giving him a sufficiently interesting voice to retain an adult reader. Certainly when I was 13 the things I said weren't that interesting, and the idea of 300 pages of it would have sent me to sleep, certainly. However, what kids do do (and this was my way out of this fix really) is accidental poetry.
Kids of a certain age, hopefully 13, are on the cusp of acquiring an adult vocabulary but they'll still assemble and conjugate words that adults don't or that we could censor ourselves and prevent ourselves from saying. If a kid steps on a piece of crusty several-day-old snow that hasn't melted and it goes crunch, and it's very much like stepping on a Cadbury's Crunchie (who are also not sponsoring me) and we might not say that unless we are writers or eccentric or have some disorder, but a 13-year-old would; 'Wow, it's like stepping on a Crunchie.' So even though things Jason says aren't that coherent or articulate, in his own mind he's a poet, but most kids are, I think. I haven't been inside the heads of other kids, I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that that goes on.
Ramona Koval: He works at expressing himself in poetry, but he has difficulty in expressing himself aloud in the language that he loves.
David Mitchell: Yes, like me he has a stammer and I very much wanted to write about it, that was one of my motivations for the book. It's not talked about very much and well-meaning friends don't want to ask about it for fear of hurting my feelings, but this means I think it's probably much easier to find really good accounts of what it's like to be blind or deaf than it is to actually be fine but not be able to speak without an arsenal of techniques and evasions that people who stammer need to use. So I wanted to write about it and, perhaps in this area more than others, send...we're into Dr Who area again, but send a message to my 13-year-old self just containing all the things I wish someone had told me then. I think the science of speech therapy has advanced a lot since those days, and I think kids these days get a lot more useful help. But back in my day, not so great.
Ramona Koval: I was struck then by your description, equating it to blindness or deafness. Do you feel as if it is as big a disadvantage to you?
David Mitchell: No, of course not. I can see and I can hear and this allows me to interface with the world much more directly. Perhaps it isn't as major an inability as deafness or blindness, and this is why it has slipped under the radar of help and of knowledge for a long time. My book is one modest way to rectify that.
Ramona Koval: So you just talked then about strategies that you employ to get a sentence out, and if we had a tickertape of your brain going up behind us here...
David Mitchell: I'd be arrested.
Ramona Koval: ...apart from those lines, we would probably see a whole lot of instructions to yourself about the sentence that's coming up and how to negotiate it, a kind of map of what you want to say.
David Mitchell: Yes, you would.
Ramona Koval: Can you tell us a little bit about that map?
David Mitchell: It's complex. The relationship of a stammer with spoken language is very complex and it's largely beyond my understanding. Of course I have a greater understanding that a non-stammerer would, but why I can speak in front of a few hundred people and not be afflicted...dunno, I don't really know. I can draw up a general list of rules and these include...when it's really important that I don't stammer, like now, I don't. This is one rule. Rules can be broken, and they're listed in a book folks, but in terms of your question, what does happen is...I do this less now, I've come to a more useful working accommodation with my stammer and it tends not to sort of mug me as much, but what I used to do more was to examine the sentence ahead and if necessary engineer it so that I would be avoiding a word that I thought I might stammer on.
Really severe cases, if someone is asking you if you would like water or milk and you know that you tend to stammer on words beginning with 'M'...there's always one or two key consonants at any one time, and interestingly these consonants alter through life. So at the moment, say, I would have a hard time with 'Ks', hard 'Cs' and 'Ss', whereas years ago I remember being unable to say words beginning with 'Y'. I dreaded being 12 years old because then I couldn't say words beginning with 'T', say. But now I can do these fine. How come? I don't know. But water or milk, can't say words beginning with 'M', the worst thing, even if you want milk you'd ask for water because you can't say 'milk'. You live with it and you devise coping strategies. Compared to what a lot of people live with happily, it's a lucky break really.
Ramona Koval: I'm just thinking now about how it might have influenced the way you've written, the idea of...the breaking down of things, the geography of the sentences that you're about to speak, the geographies of these words that you create.
David Mitchell: Linguistically it doesn't change how I write because of course I'm totally free on the page...
Ramona Koval: No, but it changes how you think though, surely?
David Mitchell: As a kid it gives you a whacking vocabulary really early. You do need other ways to get around words. It gives you a sensitivity for language register, by which I mean if you don't think you can say 'pointless' because you're stammering on words beginning with 'P' at that point, and it's more likely you will know substitute words like 'futile', however this brings you up against the other problem whereby if you use the word 'futile' amongst 13-year-old they'll do yer bleedin' 'ead in because a 13-year-old has no right to be using a word of a higher register like 'futile'. So this is useful stuff for a writer and it's stuff that I still use now. All writers do but I was aware of it from a much earlier age, which does show what we think of as our handicaps and our inabilities can actually be teachers, they can actually have very useful functions. Would I wish my stammer away? I'd like to wish it away but I certainly wouldn't want to pay for that wish by losing what I'd learnt about language through it.
Ramona Koval: Jason develops this idea of his stammer as 'hangman' because the stammer is so pervasive that it has an ego and it has a kind of presence.
David Mitchell: It does rather feel like that. When you're a kid especially you personify abstracts in order to understand them better and in order to feel as though you're doing business with them and interacting with them. So it made sense for Jason to do that.
Ramona Koval: This is a cousin to all the books that you've written before because we have characters that reappear from the other books. They're a different age and they're referred to. This Madame...now I'm going to mispronounce... Crommelynck...
David Mitchell: Unless we have any Belgians in the audience, it's Madame de Crommelynck, and if we do then they're very welcome to come up and correct me afterwards.
Ramona Koval: She's a character from that, and she's just fantastic. In one of these magical moments he goes in to see this woman who is this Belgian countess, I suppose, she's been everywhere, she knows everything...
David Mitchell: She's like you, Ramona.
Ramona Koval: She's like me, thank you. I thought she was probably about 40 years older than me.
David Mitchell: Okay, she's like how you will be in 40 years time.
Ramona Koval: We're all a bit demented in our own ways. She was very wise and she was prefect for a young poet, wasn't she, she knew what he should read and what he should listen to. She was talking straight to him. She was a gift.
David Mitchell: She was. Well, he deserves a gift after everything else I put him through. I wanted an opportunity to talk about art in the book and there wasn't one, and wasn't really one when I was a kid either. But I advertised this vacancy amongst the cast of people I'd already written, and she applied for it and she passed the interview unanimously. So bring her in and hopefully she brings with her the ontological certainty. If you read this book and believe it's real, then in theory someone from this book who then appears in this will bring that realness with them and make Black Swan Green a more real place as well. So there's a technical reason for doing it as well, but it's also just kind of fun.
Ramona Koval: But you do want everything to connect, don't you.
David Mitchell: I stand accused. Yes, I'm guilty, I suppose. Yes. Nothing more profound really. Isn't it great when things do? Doesn't it remind you to be happy that you're alive when things like this happen, when something from a long time ago that you thought would never re-enter your life, it does, hopefully not in a negative way. When you see an old friend that you haven't seen for 15 years who you never expected to see, they just pop up. Isn't that wonderful? Maybe I do a little bit...
Ramona Koval: How important is music to you for that, old songs?
David Mitchell: As everybody knows (which is a Leonard Cohen song of course), songs bring things back instantly, in as undiluted a way as smell. Songs are companions in life as well. We might have a song that we knew when we were 13 years old and if it's art it evolves as we do and we can listen to it when we're 80 and it's a touchstone, all the way back. I couldn't...I would live without music of course but I'm very glad I don't have to.
Ramona Koval: So this young poet, Jason...you wrote poetry too when you were this age. You published under the name of James Bolivar.
David Mitchell: How do you know that?
Ramona Koval: I know stuff, I'm so old now, I know stuff, it's not hard. What happened to the poetry with you?
David Mitchell: Realistic assessment of my own gifts happened...
Ramona Koval: By you or others?
David Mitchell: By me. Of course when I was 15 I thought I was absolutely wonderful, and then luckily for me and posterity I read some real poets and met one or two, and realised that it is a higher art that I can't really attain. It's not where my vocation is and it's not...what gifts I may have, poetry isn't what these equip me for best. You can't make a single mistake in poetry, every last word and inflection has to be perfect. Short stories are higher than novels for this reason. Short stories are somewhere between the novel and poem.
Ramona Koval: Because the novel is more forgiving?
David Mitchell: Yes, novel comes with getaway cars. You can write a duff scene or a half-duff scene and if the next one is brilliant then the half-duff scene can still earn its keep. But a half-duff scene in a short story and the short story is dead. I've written a few, I know.
Ramona Koval: Is originality more important to you than telling a story or creating characters?
David Mitchell: What's important is a really simple question; is it good or not? Is it any good or not? If you are true to yourself then originality happens by default because every single person in the world has original a personality as their iris. It seems that it's not original when we...I haven't had this thought before and it might be a load of nonsense, so I apologise in advance if it is...but it seems that we are like other people and one book is like another book if we allow our true selves to be overly doctored or influenced by the 'other' or rather the 'others'. But I think if you (I hideously mix my metaphors)...if you mine yourself deep enough then the metals you will find will be precious and original. So originality isn't a thing, it's the absence of other things, which is great news.
Ramona Koval: It's not really a young person's book, is it?
David Mitchell: Yes, a few schools from around where I grew up have adopted it. So certainly a few hundred schoolkids in Worcestershire are reading it this year and perhaps hating me because I'm...
Ramona Koval: Have you had any communications from them?
David Mitchell: A few, yes. Luckily people who take the time to write you a letter about a book usually do it because they love it rather than they hate it. I haven't had any hate mail, no, not yet.
Ramona Koval: You've spoken before about going to live in Japan in 1994 as the beginning of your life as a proper writer. You were a foreigner with little Japanese and you say it afforded you the luxury of having no social belonging and probably no real responsibilities, I guess, and also you didn't have to talk, I suppose. What did that...so they think about your stammer, or that was a way of presenting yourself without a problem?
David Mitchell: My evasive strategies were sufficiently developed by then for that to not really be a factor.
Ramona Koval: Did that feel like you were a different person?
David Mitchell: I went there because of wanderlust more than anything else really. I feel like a different person every few years actually, I guess we all do, we become a dad or get married or get unmarried or change your job or have a near death experience, this sort of nudges you along the great journey.
Ramona Koval: But also it probably provided you with a kind of writer's retreat, like in a bubble. You were always in a writer's retreat because you didn't have to communicate with people, you couldn't read anything, you couldn't watch television. Was that something that stimulated you towards the page, because what else were you going to do?
David Mitchell: Yes, I think so, I'm sure it helped. I've been looking for a good way to articulate this for years and you've just supplied it. Japan was my writer's retreat. That's great. Is it okay if I use that in the future?
Ramona Koval: Of course, feel free. What about in Ireland? You live in Ireland now.
David Mitchell: I'm a dad, as I've said about three times already. I've got some photos to show you later.
Ramona Koval: They're very beautiful children, I've seen them before.
David Mitchell: And of course when you become a dad everything becomes very simple; what's best for the kids? We went back to Japan last year just for a year so that our daughter could learn the language, which she did in about three weeks. I've been doing it for nine years and it's still very ugly. Then we realised that, for who we are, West Cork is the place, so we went back to Ireland.
Ramona Koval: So do you feel like an outsider there?
David Mitchell: It's good with an international marriage to live in a third country because then it's no one's fault when things go wrong, and things in Ireland do go wrong. It's not a systems society, it's a leisurely...which is a great Irish word...if you don't have much on this afternoon you say, 'I'm quite leisurely this afternoon,' and there's something very Irish about that...which does mean that if you want an electrician this afternoon, forget it. You'll get one next month maybe. But it also means that people are less stressed, I think, and it's a good place for children.
Ramona Koval: And what about a good place for writers? Because we have this idea that it's a place full of writers and they don't pay tax and everyone's a poet. Is that true?
David Mitchell: It's a place for writers...anywhere is a place for a writer. Humanity is so fascinating and our work is to put that fascinating-ness into the book. Yes, it's true that there are generous tax breaks and it's disingenuous of me to not mention that when people say, 'So why do you live in Ireland?' 'Well, the environment is great, a good place for kids,' and they're waiting for me to mention this. But it is being reduced, which is fine as well. The midwife who helped deliver my son...I don't know if I mentioned I'm a dad, by the way...but she is of more value to Irish society than I am, and if anyone deserves a tax break it's her and not me. But my principles are not that strong that I will insist on making voluntary donations to the state, I haven't gone there yet. Have I answered your question?
Ramona Koval: Yes, you have. I've got a question about the work you're working on now, and I believe we're going to Japan and we're going back in time, and we're going to a place where language is very important again.
David Mitchell: We are. It's the Napoleonic era in Europe, and while Japan was closed to the outside world for 248 years or so there was one exception that no one outside Holland really knows about which was an artificial island, very small, perhaps about the size of this theatre, in Nagasaki Harbour called Deshima, and on this for the whole of those two and a half centuries the Dutch East Indies company was permitted to trade with the Japanese, and it was staffed by about 10 or 15 Dutch guys a long way from home.
The ships would come once a year from Batavia, which is now Jakarta, and they weren't allowed off the island, and the only three categories of people who were allowed on were the merchants who did business with them, the prostitutes who also did business with them, and the interpreters who belonged to a hereditary caste, it was passed on from father to son. The Dutch officially weren't allowed to learn Japanese, although they tend to be such gifted linguists that they did, but officially they weren't allowed to. And no Japanese other then the interpreters and a few academics towards the end of the period as well were allowed to learn Dutch. So language is power, and the interpreters had it.
Ramona Koval: But then how are you going to translate that into English with all of those different kinds of languages and the importance of which language you speak?
David Mitchell: With difficulty. The other thing about originality that I didn't say earlier, the more...to use an adjective I've just borrowed from Christian Bok the poet who's also at this festival, he talks about Sisyphean constraints, and the more Sisyphean the constraints, provided you can...just to turn Houdini into a verb...as long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.
Ramona Koval: That was a triple somersault with pike, wasn't it!
Friday, January 23, 2009
i'm listening to the church soundtrack of shriek, so far it's awesome, space rock boogie with ambient tonal drifts and some exceptional words by the author jeff vandermeer.
heat strong enough to melt clocks these last few days and nights, i get myself into the ocean and catch waves, cooling my body and mind, i can't really move just slip into hammocks and chairs and sleep languidly like a chubby lizard. i've discovered 'acaci' a substance from the amazon that you eat frozen, just like ice cream without the cream but it's fantastic, tasty and nutritious. i'm gonna live on acaici all summer.
i meet my comrades from left as in sinister, a very nice crew of musicians, val explains things to us, apparently i'm gonna have a t- shirt although i'd prefer lingerie. vals a genius, his mind works on millions of things at once, you can see his mental process is always in hyper-drive.
in the surf i catch another wave, suddenly i feel my solar plexus charka explode. this is awakening for me, this is exactly what i require.
i'm reading john birminghams book ''without warning' it's ot something i would normally read but it's my first australian sci fi and it reads like an airport thriller, trashy and clique as if he's writing for the movie. i'm curious to see how it ends but i'm kinda already bored.
heat strong enough to melt clocks these last few days and nights, i get myself into the ocean and catch waves, cooling my body and mind, i can't really move just slip into hammocks and chairs and sleep languidly like a chubby lizard. i've discovered 'acaci' a substance from the amazon that you eat frozen, just like ice cream without the cream but it's fantastic, tasty and nutritious. i'm gonna live on acaici all summer.
i meet my comrades from left as in sinister, a very nice crew of musicians, val explains things to us, apparently i'm gonna have a t- shirt although i'd prefer lingerie. vals a genius, his mind works on millions of things at once, you can see his mental process is always in hyper-drive.
in the surf i catch another wave, suddenly i feel my solar plexus charka explode. this is awakening for me, this is exactly what i require.
i'm reading john birminghams book ''without warning' it's ot something i would normally read but it's my first australian sci fi and it reads like an airport thriller, trashy and clique as if he's writing for the movie. i'm curious to see how it ends but i'm kinda already bored.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
i finish reading micheal pollens book, the omnivores dilemma, a great read for anyone interested in food. how it grows where it comes from, if it's good and i have to say the book was a revelation. he basically asks, 'what should we eat for dinner?' following the food chain he observes and participates in the process that sustains us, from industrial foods to organic. i'm particularly amused and fascinated by the trend in america where the farmers basically say they farm grass. grass is essential to the food chain, and the animals that eat it are basically turning sunlight into energy for us via their grass consumption. in the end we are all stars. or at least part of the sun.
i also just finished 'song of kali' by the tremendous writer dan simmons who captures calcutta in this modern horror novel that leaves you feeling some what haunted. the idea of kali is amazing. the goddess of time and change although in the book she is the goddess of death and destruction.
Kali's most common four armed iconographic image shows each hand carrying variously a sword, a trishul (trident), a severed head and a bowl or skull-cup (kapala) catching the blood of the severed head.
Two of these hands (usually the left) are holding a sword and a severed head. The Sword signifies Divine Knowledge and the Human Head signifies human Ego which must be slain by Divine Knowledge in order to attain Moksha. The other two hands (usually the right) are in the abhaya and varada mudras or blessings, which means her initiated devotees (or anyone worshiping her with a true heart) will be saved as she will guide them here and in the hereafter.
She has a garland consisting of human heads, variously enumerated at 108 (an auspicious number in Hinduism and the number of countable beads on a Japa Mala or rosary for repetition of Mantras) or 51, which represents Varnamala or the Garland of letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, Devanagari. Hindus believe Sanskrit is a language of dynamism, and each of these letters represents a form of energy, or a form of Kali. Therefore she is generally seen as the mother of language, and all mantras.
She is often depicted naked which symbolizes her being beyond the covering of Maya since she is pure (nirguna) being-consciousness-bliss and far above prakriti. She is shown as very dark as she is brahman in its supreme unmanifest state. She has no permanent qualities — she will continue to exist even when the universe ends. It is therefore believed that the concepts of color, light, good, bad do not apply to her — she is the pure, un-manifested energy, the Adi-shakti.
There's a deep similarity to kabalistic concepts here, i wonder if much research has been done on this.
The other book i just enjoyed was a book on the HGA which gave some interesting steps on the process.
i also just finished 'song of kali' by the tremendous writer dan simmons who captures calcutta in this modern horror novel that leaves you feeling some what haunted. the idea of kali is amazing. the goddess of time and change although in the book she is the goddess of death and destruction.
Kali's most common four armed iconographic image shows each hand carrying variously a sword, a trishul (trident), a severed head and a bowl or skull-cup (kapala) catching the blood of the severed head.
Two of these hands (usually the left) are holding a sword and a severed head. The Sword signifies Divine Knowledge and the Human Head signifies human Ego which must be slain by Divine Knowledge in order to attain Moksha. The other two hands (usually the right) are in the abhaya and varada mudras or blessings, which means her initiated devotees (or anyone worshiping her with a true heart) will be saved as she will guide them here and in the hereafter.
She has a garland consisting of human heads, variously enumerated at 108 (an auspicious number in Hinduism and the number of countable beads on a Japa Mala or rosary for repetition of Mantras) or 51, which represents Varnamala or the Garland of letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, Devanagari. Hindus believe Sanskrit is a language of dynamism, and each of these letters represents a form of energy, or a form of Kali. Therefore she is generally seen as the mother of language, and all mantras.
She is often depicted naked which symbolizes her being beyond the covering of Maya since she is pure (nirguna) being-consciousness-bliss and far above prakriti. She is shown as very dark as she is brahman in its supreme unmanifest state. She has no permanent qualities — she will continue to exist even when the universe ends. It is therefore believed that the concepts of color, light, good, bad do not apply to her — she is the pure, un-manifested energy, the Adi-shakti.
There's a deep similarity to kabalistic concepts here, i wonder if much research has been done on this.
The other book i just enjoyed was a book on the HGA which gave some interesting steps on the process.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
off to play with my brother at bondi beach, i'm chatting to his girl friend about the church and who should i see walking around the corner but the wizard of oz himself with his wonderful family, we break out into a smile at that moment of recognition, apparently they were just talking about me as they had passed a huge san pedro in the street. i display my fin and say i'll call by later. down on the beach it's throbbing with to many people but we find a nice spot and some good but small surf. two hours later i head back to the wizards place but no one seems home so i leave a real estate paper on the door step and make my way back to my brothers around the corner. it's stinking hot, everything radiates with excess heat, the girls look good, the ocean looks amazing, the trees sway with the breeze that come's through, i check out the san pedro, its magnificent. everything is perfect at this time of the evening. at bondi junction there's a meeting to support israel and i go. i get grilled by the security, my terrorist beard probably didn't help. inside i listen to a short fat jewish man talking about peace and hoping for peace and a palestinian state. i hear him ask us to hope that Gilad Shalit be returned in good health. people there all were quiet and introspective, listening to various people talk and an isreali version of simon and garfunkel.
later i went for dinner at some place in bondi, ate salad and generally watched a storm over the ocean while some lady tried vainly to flirt with me.
later i went for dinner at some place in bondi, ate salad and generally watched a storm over the ocean while some lady tried vainly to flirt with me.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Dateline: January 3rd 1944
Fury continues to mount worldwide about the senseless loss of civilian life in Germany caused by England`s callous bombing of German cities including Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden.
As of today many innocent German women and children have died in these utterly brutal bombing missions. And now there are ground offensives starting on mainland Europe.
The English have claimed that they are merely retaliating against the V-1 flying bombs being launched indiscriminately by Nazis at their civilian population in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry and other cities. The English point out that their enemy is sworn to its utter destruction and has used the missiles and flying bombs against its civilians without any regard to English loss of life. Moreover it makes the case that their own bombing missions are specifically directed to military targets that the German army has intentionally planted in the heart of civilian populations to try and deter English counter-attacks.
These points may of course be true - but they are utterly besides the point.
Of course England has a right to exist. Of course England has a right to defend itself. But it should ensure that its responses are PROPORTIONATE.
Since many more Germans are dying than English - the English should either tone down the success and accuracy of their bombing - or allow the Germans to catch up on the death count.
To be honest - if more English women and children were dying - we wouldn`t feel quite so bad about the number of Germans dying. But it`s just so UNFAIR that more Germans are dying...
Perhaps some English people could arrange to kill themselves to match the number of Germans dying as a result of the English retaliation bombing? It would be so considerate - and it might help England`s critics feel less miserable about the number of Nazis dying. Something that is causing them so much concern.
It would also put paid to that wretched proportionality argument.
Alternatively, perhaps the English could arrange to be less effective in their bombing? Or only bomb military targets that are nowhere near civilians - even though the vast majority of the V-1 rockets are intentionally being launched from the heart of civilian population centers.
Now the English will argue that the Germans have INTENTIONALLY positioned all their launch pads for the V-1 rockets in the middle of civilian populations to inhibit the English from bombing those launch sites. Well - tough noogies to the Brits! Sorry - but if the Germans are smarter or more skillful at cynically using their civilians as human shields than you - tough luck!
You can`t have it both ways. If you truly wish to save your nation from being annihilated by Nazi missiles you`d better stop looking to win a popularity contest. The Nazis are waging this war to win and to utterly destroy England. If all you Brits care about is popularity - then you may as well resign yourself to speaking German...
It`s about time that little nations who wish to defend themselves wised up to their responsibilities.
Otherwise the same stupid complaints will be made at some point in the 21st Century when some little nation finds itself under constant attack from rockets fired at its civilian population by a terrorizing enemy that has sworn to destroy it....
Fury continues to mount worldwide about the senseless loss of civilian life in Germany caused by England`s callous bombing of German cities including Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden.
As of today many innocent German women and children have died in these utterly brutal bombing missions. And now there are ground offensives starting on mainland Europe.
The English have claimed that they are merely retaliating against the V-1 flying bombs being launched indiscriminately by Nazis at their civilian population in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry and other cities. The English point out that their enemy is sworn to its utter destruction and has used the missiles and flying bombs against its civilians without any regard to English loss of life. Moreover it makes the case that their own bombing missions are specifically directed to military targets that the German army has intentionally planted in the heart of civilian populations to try and deter English counter-attacks.
These points may of course be true - but they are utterly besides the point.
Of course England has a right to exist. Of course England has a right to defend itself. But it should ensure that its responses are PROPORTIONATE.
Since many more Germans are dying than English - the English should either tone down the success and accuracy of their bombing - or allow the Germans to catch up on the death count.
To be honest - if more English women and children were dying - we wouldn`t feel quite so bad about the number of Germans dying. But it`s just so UNFAIR that more Germans are dying...
Perhaps some English people could arrange to kill themselves to match the number of Germans dying as a result of the English retaliation bombing? It would be so considerate - and it might help England`s critics feel less miserable about the number of Nazis dying. Something that is causing them so much concern.
It would also put paid to that wretched proportionality argument.
Alternatively, perhaps the English could arrange to be less effective in their bombing? Or only bomb military targets that are nowhere near civilians - even though the vast majority of the V-1 rockets are intentionally being launched from the heart of civilian population centers.
Now the English will argue that the Germans have INTENTIONALLY positioned all their launch pads for the V-1 rockets in the middle of civilian populations to inhibit the English from bombing those launch sites. Well - tough noogies to the Brits! Sorry - but if the Germans are smarter or more skillful at cynically using their civilians as human shields than you - tough luck!
You can`t have it both ways. If you truly wish to save your nation from being annihilated by Nazi missiles you`d better stop looking to win a popularity contest. The Nazis are waging this war to win and to utterly destroy England. If all you Brits care about is popularity - then you may as well resign yourself to speaking German...
It`s about time that little nations who wish to defend themselves wised up to their responsibilities.
Otherwise the same stupid complaints will be made at some point in the 21st Century when some little nation finds itself under constant attack from rockets fired at its civilian population by a terrorizing enemy that has sworn to destroy it....
Saturday, January 10, 2009
i was already packed an ready to go, just checking my passport was safe and the visa details were all correct when i noticed the strange bug crawling across my ceiling, it was grasshopper green, mantis like but not quite as threatening, it seemed to be plodding along purposely on some sort of insect mission. i didn't really have time to deal with it, i don't like bugs but i'm also loath to kill them and over the years have developed various non lethal trapping devices to contain them. this bug was quite different from the usual cockroaches and spiders that i normally evict, it was well it appeared to be, quite harmless exude a kind of benevolence. anyways the taxi was here, so i locked up and left. two weeks away relaxing in italy, here we come.
on return i shuffled up the staircase, my bags heavy with the usual gifts and souvenirs, people generally expect all this nonsense and my sense of obligation was tested when i wandered along the amalfi coastline looking at trinkets and various tourist junk.
i stuck my key in the lock and pushed open the door, a waft of stale air hit me and i threw the bags on the floor and rushed to the windows. but as i walked through the rooms there was a fine layer of silk over everything. it was as if a spider web had fallen from the ceiling over the furniture, the chairs, my bed, the stereo almost everything was covered in this misty delicate substance.
jesus i thought, i'm going to have to vacuum the whole place and call the carpet cleaners in. i bent over to inspect the stuff, it was sticky and slimy, it was heavier than i first thought, not quite the silky weight.
i wandered from room the room, it was no different, this strange material was everywhere, even my bathroom was filled with it. there was one room left to check. the library. before i even opened the door i knew something was wrong, i could feel it in my guts. i turned the handle slowly and threw open the door fast.
there sitting in my leather reading chair was the green coloured bug. only it was huge, almost man size. 'fucking hell.' i said reacting to the impossible.
the bug just looked at me and in perfect english said, 'excuse me?'
i froze, rubbed my eyes, pinched myself and froze again. was this a dream, have i gone nuts?
the bug started to speak again. 'look you can't just come barging in here using that kind of language, it's quite unnecessary.'
putting down his book he said, 'now what seems to be the problem.'
i noticed he was reading martin amis. 'well,' i said self conciously, 'you are in my home.'
'no. you are in my home.' the bug retorted.
'look you're a talking bug, it's just impossible for you to even exist.'
'how dare you insult me like that.' the big gave me a fierce stare.
'what are you anyway?'
'i could ask the same thing of you.'
oh my god i thought as i noticed the bug had a cup of tea sitting on the armrest of the chair.
the bug continued, 'my name is chartuse, we may as well be civil to one another.'
'im captain mission. i'm kinda bewildered at your presence here. i mean i've never noticed you before.'
'you saw me as you were about to leave for holiday, i even waved at you.'
'that's ridiculous, you have grown so much. you were just a bug now your almost a human type bug, reading, drinking bloody tea and talking like a retired librarian.'
'and, your point...?'
'you can't stay here.'
'i live here. i've lived here all my life.'
'but these are my books, i pay the rent, i own all this stuff,' i waved my arms around.
'i have no problem with you being here, i can share.'
'i don't want to share. i want you out.'
'what are you going to do?'
i walked out of the room slamming it shut and headed to the phone. on the way i stopped at the fridge and noticed that it was filled with cacti. there were rows and rows of fat cylindrical bodies all recognisable as being from my sun room. chartuse had been feasting on my mescal supply.
i made my call and went back to him. he was half asleep, martin amis resting in his lap. 'okay chartuse, i'm giving you one last warning, leave now or face the consequences.'
'why can't you just leave me alone, we can share this space, i've enjoyed reading your books, i'm planning to listen to your music soon.'
'you also chopped up my cacti.'
'yes, and...?'
'but it's mine, for my use.'
'share?'
'jeez i didn't think there were communist bugs.'
'i'm no commie. i follow a spiritual path, political constructs can only lead to chaos and unhappiness.'
'yeah i agree.'
'see we have some things in common, plus i've enjoyed reading your books.'
'you read all these?'
'almost. i enjoyed the chaos magick books especially raw and peter carroll.'
'you read the peter carroll stuff?'
'yes although i think he needs to accept the universe is an just one of many all within the realm of a supreme being.'
'you believe in god?'
'yes. how can i not. carroll seems at war with the transcendentalists whereas i think he needs to recognise he is a splinter of god himself. it's like he just can't make that leap.
'mmm, yes i think that to. have you practiced any magick? i ask.
'yes i am immersed in a magickal realm of humanity at the moment. that will explain my presence here perhaps.'
'so you are from....?'
'a different dimension maybe. physics dosn't really explain it. let's say i exist in one of the 22 aethers.'
'so did i summon you?'
'no i summoned you. really captain mission, you do need to think about this differently from your usual egocentric framework.'
'why did you summon me.'
'i was invoking our version of kali, the destroyer. it's a stage of my magickal evolution to face my fear.'
'but my fear is bugs so it's part of my evolution to.'
'mmm, that's interesting, maybe it is.'
'besides i'm hardly kali like am i?'
that's when the exterminator arrived.
on return i shuffled up the staircase, my bags heavy with the usual gifts and souvenirs, people generally expect all this nonsense and my sense of obligation was tested when i wandered along the amalfi coastline looking at trinkets and various tourist junk.
i stuck my key in the lock and pushed open the door, a waft of stale air hit me and i threw the bags on the floor and rushed to the windows. but as i walked through the rooms there was a fine layer of silk over everything. it was as if a spider web had fallen from the ceiling over the furniture, the chairs, my bed, the stereo almost everything was covered in this misty delicate substance.
jesus i thought, i'm going to have to vacuum the whole place and call the carpet cleaners in. i bent over to inspect the stuff, it was sticky and slimy, it was heavier than i first thought, not quite the silky weight.
i wandered from room the room, it was no different, this strange material was everywhere, even my bathroom was filled with it. there was one room left to check. the library. before i even opened the door i knew something was wrong, i could feel it in my guts. i turned the handle slowly and threw open the door fast.
there sitting in my leather reading chair was the green coloured bug. only it was huge, almost man size. 'fucking hell.' i said reacting to the impossible.
the bug just looked at me and in perfect english said, 'excuse me?'
i froze, rubbed my eyes, pinched myself and froze again. was this a dream, have i gone nuts?
the bug started to speak again. 'look you can't just come barging in here using that kind of language, it's quite unnecessary.'
putting down his book he said, 'now what seems to be the problem.'
i noticed he was reading martin amis. 'well,' i said self conciously, 'you are in my home.'
'no. you are in my home.' the bug retorted.
'look you're a talking bug, it's just impossible for you to even exist.'
'how dare you insult me like that.' the big gave me a fierce stare.
'what are you anyway?'
'i could ask the same thing of you.'
oh my god i thought as i noticed the bug had a cup of tea sitting on the armrest of the chair.
the bug continued, 'my name is chartuse, we may as well be civil to one another.'
'im captain mission. i'm kinda bewildered at your presence here. i mean i've never noticed you before.'
'you saw me as you were about to leave for holiday, i even waved at you.'
'that's ridiculous, you have grown so much. you were just a bug now your almost a human type bug, reading, drinking bloody tea and talking like a retired librarian.'
'and, your point...?'
'you can't stay here.'
'i live here. i've lived here all my life.'
'but these are my books, i pay the rent, i own all this stuff,' i waved my arms around.
'i have no problem with you being here, i can share.'
'i don't want to share. i want you out.'
'what are you going to do?'
i walked out of the room slamming it shut and headed to the phone. on the way i stopped at the fridge and noticed that it was filled with cacti. there were rows and rows of fat cylindrical bodies all recognisable as being from my sun room. chartuse had been feasting on my mescal supply.
i made my call and went back to him. he was half asleep, martin amis resting in his lap. 'okay chartuse, i'm giving you one last warning, leave now or face the consequences.'
'why can't you just leave me alone, we can share this space, i've enjoyed reading your books, i'm planning to listen to your music soon.'
'you also chopped up my cacti.'
'yes, and...?'
'but it's mine, for my use.'
'share?'
'jeez i didn't think there were communist bugs.'
'i'm no commie. i follow a spiritual path, political constructs can only lead to chaos and unhappiness.'
'yeah i agree.'
'see we have some things in common, plus i've enjoyed reading your books.'
'you read all these?'
'almost. i enjoyed the chaos magick books especially raw and peter carroll.'
'you read the peter carroll stuff?'
'yes although i think he needs to accept the universe is an just one of many all within the realm of a supreme being.'
'you believe in god?'
'yes. how can i not. carroll seems at war with the transcendentalists whereas i think he needs to recognise he is a splinter of god himself. it's like he just can't make that leap.
'mmm, yes i think that to. have you practiced any magick? i ask.
'yes i am immersed in a magickal realm of humanity at the moment. that will explain my presence here perhaps.'
'so you are from....?'
'a different dimension maybe. physics dosn't really explain it. let's say i exist in one of the 22 aethers.'
'so did i summon you?'
'no i summoned you. really captain mission, you do need to think about this differently from your usual egocentric framework.'
'why did you summon me.'
'i was invoking our version of kali, the destroyer. it's a stage of my magickal evolution to face my fear.'
'but my fear is bugs so it's part of my evolution to.'
'mmm, that's interesting, maybe it is.'
'besides i'm hardly kali like am i?'
that's when the exterminator arrived.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
the captain is sluggish in the heat of the morning, it slows him down as his rampant thoughts start to melt like molasses dripping into salvidor dali clocks over a frying pan of hot butter. even time is slow today, dragged down by the weight of humidity and the current state of humanity. i'm immersed in a dream, it's so real i feel i lived it yet now i can't even recal any detail. it blends into the phone ringing and i'm summoned to autistic central where the heat seems even more oppressive and my time is spent slothing around avoiding any movement or work, until i take my little friend for a drive. we head of for an ice cream. it's the only reasonable thing to do and we find ourselves in a huge mass of people thinking the same thing.
malls are strange places, i don't like them, they make me uncomfortable because i stand out, i look like i don't belong there, i don't fit in at all. everyone else knows that as well.
while im wandering around looking for a decent ice cream place i notice that there's a sale on in the dvd shop and i pick up the introductory short film, the pilot to the new battlestar galactica. okay battlestar galactica is an old cheesy 80's series that i saw one episode of and gave up on. this however is a new re imagined series. it's mind blowingly good. everything about this is different, it's gritty, unpredictable, morally ambigious. it's the second best show i've seen ever. it's got robots, sex, drugs, politics, war, sex, inter species relationships, mental illness, myth, gods, humanity and space ships. but don't take my word for it, check it out on dvd.
malls are strange places, i don't like them, they make me uncomfortable because i stand out, i look like i don't belong there, i don't fit in at all. everyone else knows that as well.
while im wandering around looking for a decent ice cream place i notice that there's a sale on in the dvd shop and i pick up the introductory short film, the pilot to the new battlestar galactica. okay battlestar galactica is an old cheesy 80's series that i saw one episode of and gave up on. this however is a new re imagined series. it's mind blowingly good. everything about this is different, it's gritty, unpredictable, morally ambigious. it's the second best show i've seen ever. it's got robots, sex, drugs, politics, war, sex, inter species relationships, mental illness, myth, gods, humanity and space ships. but don't take my word for it, check it out on dvd.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
sun day and the sun burst forth outta blue skies and through the treetops, in golden amber liquid light, pouring into my neo cortex and diffusing the several million things into it's beautiful chaos of people and circumstance. im thinking about liberating a massive cactus plant that lives in a friends old garden, it's huge a multi fronded monument, church like in it's magnificent stance, hailing the sun, the moon like a giant tuning fork sticking from the soil, waiting for us to tune in.
saturday afternoon and i visit my friend, she takes me to a large garden center and introduces me to a friend of hers called charlie a rather aggressive and loud cockatoo who imitates people and sneezes while displaying his yellow crest. i don't like birds in cages whereas i don't mind fish in tanks. is that hypocritical, how does that work?
im thinking a lot about obtaining more cacti and enter a little daydream...
somewhere up the coast me and my mysterious girlfriend own a large farm house on a huge block of land, with a private beach. we grow hemp and ayahuscia and masses amounts of san pedro. we work together, mostly we sleep a lot, take plant medicine and have sex or make slow love. there's no one else disturbing us, it's perfect. one day a few friends come to visit and we all drink the vine, healing occurs, and there's a lot of positive energy being generated. in the mornings i write my book, a novel and semi autobiography, it's called 'revelation' and in it's pages are secrets. the secrets of life, the hidden schools, the mystery schools.
a hollywood director is interested in making a movie, i say that's okay as long as i get to play myself.
saturday afternoon and i visit my friend, she takes me to a large garden center and introduces me to a friend of hers called charlie a rather aggressive and loud cockatoo who imitates people and sneezes while displaying his yellow crest. i don't like birds in cages whereas i don't mind fish in tanks. is that hypocritical, how does that work?
im thinking a lot about obtaining more cacti and enter a little daydream...
somewhere up the coast me and my mysterious girlfriend own a large farm house on a huge block of land, with a private beach. we grow hemp and ayahuscia and masses amounts of san pedro. we work together, mostly we sleep a lot, take plant medicine and have sex or make slow love. there's no one else disturbing us, it's perfect. one day a few friends come to visit and we all drink the vine, healing occurs, and there's a lot of positive energy being generated. in the mornings i write my book, a novel and semi autobiography, it's called 'revelation' and in it's pages are secrets. the secrets of life, the hidden schools, the mystery schools.
a hollywood director is interested in making a movie, i say that's okay as long as i get to play myself.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
im watching fireworks from a balcony of a luxury apartment in potts point, surrounded by my brother and his friends and our lovely host who has laid on some beautiful food and lots of drinks, everyone is smashed, there's a strange energy in the air and suddenly these amazing fireworks start lighting up the sky.
i've never really liked fireworks, i hate the noise and i hate the idea that money should be wasted like that when we could build a hospital etc but as i watched this strange ritual i realized there is a up side, millions of people watching something beautiful is a good thing, the mass reflection on the years past and the one looming is like a meditation, the release of a city of spectators just being happy for a few seconds and kissing complete strangers has to be good and the general good behaviour and mood of those who attend. i had fun. the display was like a dmt trip, patterns forming, ever changing, cascading and suddenly the skies were filled with information. but it was chaos with meaning, the pyrotechnics were re creating the creation myth of the aboriginals. thunder, lightning, rain, waterfalls, it was all there in the sky, fire reigning down on us all, like a huge mas wedding sydney was reborn into 2009.
strangely amongst all the people there i found a man who was interested in ayahuscia, he was from colombia and had a beautiful girlfriend. We spoke a bit about fear, ego, architecture and women, his name was Andreas.
Free sydney transport through the night made it easy for me to return home, safe and sound and feeling good about the future despite the fact humanity is heading for the comedown.
i've never really liked fireworks, i hate the noise and i hate the idea that money should be wasted like that when we could build a hospital etc but as i watched this strange ritual i realized there is a up side, millions of people watching something beautiful is a good thing, the mass reflection on the years past and the one looming is like a meditation, the release of a city of spectators just being happy for a few seconds and kissing complete strangers has to be good and the general good behaviour and mood of those who attend. i had fun. the display was like a dmt trip, patterns forming, ever changing, cascading and suddenly the skies were filled with information. but it was chaos with meaning, the pyrotechnics were re creating the creation myth of the aboriginals. thunder, lightning, rain, waterfalls, it was all there in the sky, fire reigning down on us all, like a huge mas wedding sydney was reborn into 2009.
strangely amongst all the people there i found a man who was interested in ayahuscia, he was from colombia and had a beautiful girlfriend. We spoke a bit about fear, ego, architecture and women, his name was Andreas.
Free sydney transport through the night made it easy for me to return home, safe and sound and feeling good about the future despite the fact humanity is heading for the comedown.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
end of the year sale
what have i done?
list achievements here
list new years resolutions there
i resolute to spend less time working for the man
i will record another cd
i will launch 'adventures' with my band
i will write new songs and a few new short stories
i will go to the amazon and drink ayahuscia with the cat people
i will get myself a giant robot like gort
i will get healthy and slim
i will learn new skills
i will learn old ones i have forgotten
i will increase my social network
i will save the planet (with assistance from gort)
i will tell people i love them and i am happy that they are my friend
i will meditate
i will do yoga
i will surf
i will go to gym
i will write blogs better
i will dream more
i will love better
i will not live in fear
i will fix my bathroom
i will attempt to be friendly to the people downstairs
i will attempt to be kinder
i will attempt to be less grumpy
i will take more plant medicines
i will get up early
i will enjoy the wind
i will walk in rain
i will feed the ducks
i will stop and smell the flowers
i will take much more dmt
i will dance on the head of a needle
i will attempt to push a camel through its eye
i will eat all the food on my plate unless it is animal
i will drink from the fountain of truth and youth
i will dance
i will trance
i will bring back gifts
i will travel light
i will lighten my load
ok
tonight i have to meet my brother to watch fireworks from a luxury apartment in the city. i have never even been in a luxury apartment before so im kinda nervous. what do i wear. do i have to bring anything. do i need to mind my ps and qs?
i'll report in tomorrow with the answers
have a safe and wonderful night.
what have i done?
list achievements here
list new years resolutions there
i resolute to spend less time working for the man
i will record another cd
i will launch 'adventures' with my band
i will write new songs and a few new short stories
i will go to the amazon and drink ayahuscia with the cat people
i will get myself a giant robot like gort
i will get healthy and slim
i will learn new skills
i will learn old ones i have forgotten
i will increase my social network
i will save the planet (with assistance from gort)
i will tell people i love them and i am happy that they are my friend
i will meditate
i will do yoga
i will surf
i will go to gym
i will write blogs better
i will dream more
i will love better
i will not live in fear
i will fix my bathroom
i will attempt to be friendly to the people downstairs
i will attempt to be kinder
i will attempt to be less grumpy
i will take more plant medicines
i will get up early
i will enjoy the wind
i will walk in rain
i will feed the ducks
i will stop and smell the flowers
i will take much more dmt
i will dance on the head of a needle
i will attempt to push a camel through its eye
i will eat all the food on my plate unless it is animal
i will drink from the fountain of truth and youth
i will dance
i will trance
i will bring back gifts
i will travel light
i will lighten my load
ok
tonight i have to meet my brother to watch fireworks from a luxury apartment in the city. i have never even been in a luxury apartment before so im kinda nervous. what do i wear. do i have to bring anything. do i need to mind my ps and qs?
i'll report in tomorrow with the answers
have a safe and wonderful night.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
and another poor attempt at reverse propaganda here's melanie philips post
Groundhog Day For The Fifth Column Of Malice
MONDAY, 29TH DECEMBER 2008
So there is indeed now a war. In Gaza. Actually, there are two wars going on: one involving rockets and warplanes, and the other involving the media, as Barry Rubin notes:
Nothing is clearer than Hamas’s strategy. It gives Israel the choice between rockets and media, and Hamas thinks it is a situation of, ‘We win or you lose.’...The smug smiles are wiped off the faces of Hamas leaders. Yet they have one more weapon, their reserves, they call up the media. Those arrogant, heroic, macho victors of yesterday--literally yesterday as the process takes only a few hours--are transformed into pitiful victims. Casualty figures are announced by Hamas, and accepted by reporters who are not on the spot. Everyone hit is, of course, a civilian. No soldiers here. And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way. If necessary, sympathetic photographers take pictures of children who pretend to be injured, and once they are published in Western newspapers these claims become fact.
All too predictable – and going to plan, with assistance from the Club of Terror UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who condemned ‘excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians’, and Navi Pillay, the ludicrous UN High Commissioner for ‘Human Rights’, who ‘strongly condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force.’ Of course, the Club of Terror UN has been silent about the actual violations of international law by the Palestinians, as pointed out here by Justus Reid Weiner and Avi Bell:
The Palestinian attacks violate one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law: the rule of distinction, which requires combatants to aim all their attacks at legitimate targets - enemy combatants or objects that contribute to enemy military actions. Violations of the rule of distinction - attacks deliberately aimed at civilians or protected objects as such - are war crimes.
Furthermore, say Weiner and Bell, Israel actually has a legal duty to take action against Hamas under the Genocide Convention:
In carrying out their attacks on Israeli Jews as part of a larger aim to kill Jews, as demonstrated by the Hamas Covenant, many of the Palestinian terrorists are also violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, Israel and other signatories are required to ‘prevent and punish’ not only persons who carry out such genocidal acts, but those who conspire with them, incite them to kill and are complicit with their actions. The Convention thus requires Israel to prevent and punish the terrorists themselves, as well as leading figures that have publicly supported the Palestinian attacks. Article 2 of the Convention defines any killing with intent ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’ as an act of genocide.
But for exercising its legal duty in accordance with international law, Israel is condemned and told to stop by politicians such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The moral inversion is staggering. Miliband has called for an immediate ceasefire by Israel. The implication is that Israel should suffer the Palestinian rockets attacks indefinitely.
If anything has been ‘disproportionate’, it’s been Israel’s refusal to take such action during the years when its southern citizens have been terrorised by rockets and other missiles raining down on them from Gaza. No other country in the world would have sat on its hands for so long in such circumstances. But whenever Israel defends itself militarily, its response is said to be ‘disproportionate’. The malice, ignorance and sheer idiocy of this claim is refuted here comprehensively by Dore Gold, who points out that Israel’s actions in Gaza are wholly in accordance with international law. This permits Israel to launch such an operation to prevent itself from being further attacked. Moreover, it defines ‘disproportionate’ force as when
force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians.
But Israel has demonstrably not been targeting civilians but Hamas terrorists. Despite the wicked impression given by the media, most of the casualties in this operation have been Hamas operatives. Even Hamas itself has admitted that the vast majority of sites Israel has hit were part of their military infrastructure. UNRWA officials in the Gaza Strip have put the number of deaths at 310, of whom 51 were civilians. The rest were Hamas terrorists.
Certainly, some civilian casualties are regrettably inevitable in any such situation – but particularly so in Gaza, since Hamas has deliberately sited its terrorist infrastructure amongst the civilian population.
Those who scream ‘disproportionate’ think – grotesquely -- that not enough Israelis have been killed. But that’s in part because Israel cares enough about human life to construct air raid shelters where its beleaguered civilians take cover; Hamas deliberately stores its rockets and other apparatus of mass murder below apartment blocks and in centres of population in order to get as many of its own people killed as possible as a propaganda weapon. Hamas is thus guilty of war crimes not just against Israelis but against the Palestinian people. Yet on this there is – fantastically, surreally – almost total silence in the west, which blames Israel instead. Historical resonances, anyone?
In any event, if by ‘disproportionate’ is meant merely an imbalance in the numbers who are killed on either side, this is actually inescapable if the infrastructure of aggression is to be defeated. Many more died in Afghanistan than in the 9/11 attacks; yet that war was necessary to destroy the Taleban. Many more died in Nazi Germany or Japan than in Britain or America during World War Two. Yet the scale of the Allied offensive was necessary to defeat Nazism and prevent yet more carnage amongst its designated victims.
The disgusting fifth column in the Gaza conflict, however, is – as ever – the western media. It was telling to witness the sight of British TV camera crews heading out to Israel on Saturday night. The point was that they weren’t already there – because their editors had not thought it necessary to send them to cover the resumed rocket attacks on southern Israel. Indeed, hardly anyone in Britain is aware that Israel is only now finally responding to some 6000 rocket attacks since 2001, with a fifty per cent increase after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. British journalists were only dispatched to the battle zone when Israel finally retaliated – because, appallingly, it is only Jewish violence that is ever the story.
As a result, Israel is painted – wholly unjustly and untruthfully -- as the aggressor. The ineffable BBC reported in radio bulletins on Saturday that Israel’s attack had ‘put back the chance of peace in the region’. Most sane people would think that the reason peace in the region had been put back was that Hamas was continuing to wage aggressive war. And indeed, even now it is still firing rockets at Israel, including Katyushas and Iranian Grads which are reaching as far as Ashkelon and Ashdod. Today they killed another Israeli in Ashkelon and injured many more -- including several Israeli Arabs.
If the media have mentioned the attacks on Israel at all, they have done so as an afterthought. The main story is ‘disproportionate’ Israeli violence. As far as I can see, there has been no mention of the extraordinary fact that on the day prior to the start of the Israeli operation, a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip was admitted to hospital in Israel for medical treatment for a severe wound -- inflicted upon him by a stray Hamas rocket which had been fired at Israel.
What other country would treat its enemies in its own hospitals – which Israel does routinely with Palestinians from Gaza -- even when they are wounded as a direct consequence of their own side trying to murder yet more Israelis? What other country would provide or enable the supply of electricity, gas and other essentials to people who use such facilities to continue trying to murder as many of its cititzens as possible? On Sunday, for instance, as Ha’aretz reported, the Kerem Shalom crossing was opened to let through 26 trucks carrying food and medical equipment. Today it was opened again and about 40 trucks had entered with food and medical supplies by midday. Yet organizations such as Amnesty International have condemned Israel's imposition of all ‘blockades’ on the Gaza Strip as ‘collective punishment’, and Jeremy Hobbs, Director of Oxfam International, has called on Israel ‘immediately [to] lift its inhumane and illegal siege’.
Yet it is Hamas that is refusing wounded Gazans access into Egypt for treatment -- and indeed the Egyptians even opened fire on them. So where are the screams about Egyptian and Hamas brutality? Where are Amnesty and Oxfam’s condemnation of Hamas and Egypt? And might all those from the Foreign Secretary down screaming about a ‘humanitarian disaster’ in Gaza pause for one second and look at the well-fed, healthy Gazans parading across their TV screens? If that’s a ‘humanitarian disaster’ – with supplies constantly pouring through the illegal tunnels from Egypt, along with billions of dollars-worth of missiles with which to commit mass murder -- what do they call what’s happening in Zimbabwe, which for some unaccountable reason inspires among the high-minded merely indifference?
Such bigotry and malice are not confined to British media and NGOs. On Salon, Glenn Greenwald whines about
America’s one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.
Oh really? Well, Hamas has been blamed for this war by Mahmoud Abbas, who said Hamas could have avoided this attack if it had prolonged its ‘cease-fire’. It has been blamed for this war by Egypt; and Arab states which are terrified of Islamism in general and Iran in particular are privately rooting for Israel to wipe Hamas out. Even the Israeli left is supporting this operation. The only people taking the side of the genocidal terrorists of Hamas are the western media, parroting their propaganda and thus inciting yet more to join the murderous rampage against Israel as well as ratcheting up the pressure on world leaders to force Israel to stop before Hamas is destroyed.
Isn’t there a case for legal action against these media outlets on account of their blood libels, for indirectly aiding the perpetrators of attempted genocide
Groundhog Day For The Fifth Column Of Malice
MONDAY, 29TH DECEMBER 2008
So there is indeed now a war. In Gaza. Actually, there are two wars going on: one involving rockets and warplanes, and the other involving the media, as Barry Rubin notes:
Nothing is clearer than Hamas’s strategy. It gives Israel the choice between rockets and media, and Hamas thinks it is a situation of, ‘We win or you lose.’...The smug smiles are wiped off the faces of Hamas leaders. Yet they have one more weapon, their reserves, they call up the media. Those arrogant, heroic, macho victors of yesterday--literally yesterday as the process takes only a few hours--are transformed into pitiful victims. Casualty figures are announced by Hamas, and accepted by reporters who are not on the spot. Everyone hit is, of course, a civilian. No soldiers here. And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way. If necessary, sympathetic photographers take pictures of children who pretend to be injured, and once they are published in Western newspapers these claims become fact.
All too predictable – and going to plan, with assistance from the Club of Terror UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who condemned ‘excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians’, and Navi Pillay, the ludicrous UN High Commissioner for ‘Human Rights’, who ‘strongly condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force.’ Of course, the Club of Terror UN has been silent about the actual violations of international law by the Palestinians, as pointed out here by Justus Reid Weiner and Avi Bell:
The Palestinian attacks violate one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law: the rule of distinction, which requires combatants to aim all their attacks at legitimate targets - enemy combatants or objects that contribute to enemy military actions. Violations of the rule of distinction - attacks deliberately aimed at civilians or protected objects as such - are war crimes.
Furthermore, say Weiner and Bell, Israel actually has a legal duty to take action against Hamas under the Genocide Convention:
In carrying out their attacks on Israeli Jews as part of a larger aim to kill Jews, as demonstrated by the Hamas Covenant, many of the Palestinian terrorists are also violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, Israel and other signatories are required to ‘prevent and punish’ not only persons who carry out such genocidal acts, but those who conspire with them, incite them to kill and are complicit with their actions. The Convention thus requires Israel to prevent and punish the terrorists themselves, as well as leading figures that have publicly supported the Palestinian attacks. Article 2 of the Convention defines any killing with intent ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’ as an act of genocide.
But for exercising its legal duty in accordance with international law, Israel is condemned and told to stop by politicians such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The moral inversion is staggering. Miliband has called for an immediate ceasefire by Israel. The implication is that Israel should suffer the Palestinian rockets attacks indefinitely.
If anything has been ‘disproportionate’, it’s been Israel’s refusal to take such action during the years when its southern citizens have been terrorised by rockets and other missiles raining down on them from Gaza. No other country in the world would have sat on its hands for so long in such circumstances. But whenever Israel defends itself militarily, its response is said to be ‘disproportionate’. The malice, ignorance and sheer idiocy of this claim is refuted here comprehensively by Dore Gold, who points out that Israel’s actions in Gaza are wholly in accordance with international law. This permits Israel to launch such an operation to prevent itself from being further attacked. Moreover, it defines ‘disproportionate’ force as when
force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians.
But Israel has demonstrably not been targeting civilians but Hamas terrorists. Despite the wicked impression given by the media, most of the casualties in this operation have been Hamas operatives. Even Hamas itself has admitted that the vast majority of sites Israel has hit were part of their military infrastructure. UNRWA officials in the Gaza Strip have put the number of deaths at 310, of whom 51 were civilians. The rest were Hamas terrorists.
Certainly, some civilian casualties are regrettably inevitable in any such situation – but particularly so in Gaza, since Hamas has deliberately sited its terrorist infrastructure amongst the civilian population.
Those who scream ‘disproportionate’ think – grotesquely -- that not enough Israelis have been killed. But that’s in part because Israel cares enough about human life to construct air raid shelters where its beleaguered civilians take cover; Hamas deliberately stores its rockets and other apparatus of mass murder below apartment blocks and in centres of population in order to get as many of its own people killed as possible as a propaganda weapon. Hamas is thus guilty of war crimes not just against Israelis but against the Palestinian people. Yet on this there is – fantastically, surreally – almost total silence in the west, which blames Israel instead. Historical resonances, anyone?
In any event, if by ‘disproportionate’ is meant merely an imbalance in the numbers who are killed on either side, this is actually inescapable if the infrastructure of aggression is to be defeated. Many more died in Afghanistan than in the 9/11 attacks; yet that war was necessary to destroy the Taleban. Many more died in Nazi Germany or Japan than in Britain or America during World War Two. Yet the scale of the Allied offensive was necessary to defeat Nazism and prevent yet more carnage amongst its designated victims.
The disgusting fifth column in the Gaza conflict, however, is – as ever – the western media. It was telling to witness the sight of British TV camera crews heading out to Israel on Saturday night. The point was that they weren’t already there – because their editors had not thought it necessary to send them to cover the resumed rocket attacks on southern Israel. Indeed, hardly anyone in Britain is aware that Israel is only now finally responding to some 6000 rocket attacks since 2001, with a fifty per cent increase after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. British journalists were only dispatched to the battle zone when Israel finally retaliated – because, appallingly, it is only Jewish violence that is ever the story.
As a result, Israel is painted – wholly unjustly and untruthfully -- as the aggressor. The ineffable BBC reported in radio bulletins on Saturday that Israel’s attack had ‘put back the chance of peace in the region’. Most sane people would think that the reason peace in the region had been put back was that Hamas was continuing to wage aggressive war. And indeed, even now it is still firing rockets at Israel, including Katyushas and Iranian Grads which are reaching as far as Ashkelon and Ashdod. Today they killed another Israeli in Ashkelon and injured many more -- including several Israeli Arabs.
If the media have mentioned the attacks on Israel at all, they have done so as an afterthought. The main story is ‘disproportionate’ Israeli violence. As far as I can see, there has been no mention of the extraordinary fact that on the day prior to the start of the Israeli operation, a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip was admitted to hospital in Israel for medical treatment for a severe wound -- inflicted upon him by a stray Hamas rocket which had been fired at Israel.
What other country would treat its enemies in its own hospitals – which Israel does routinely with Palestinians from Gaza -- even when they are wounded as a direct consequence of their own side trying to murder yet more Israelis? What other country would provide or enable the supply of electricity, gas and other essentials to people who use such facilities to continue trying to murder as many of its cititzens as possible? On Sunday, for instance, as Ha’aretz reported, the Kerem Shalom crossing was opened to let through 26 trucks carrying food and medical equipment. Today it was opened again and about 40 trucks had entered with food and medical supplies by midday. Yet organizations such as Amnesty International have condemned Israel's imposition of all ‘blockades’ on the Gaza Strip as ‘collective punishment’, and Jeremy Hobbs, Director of Oxfam International, has called on Israel ‘immediately [to] lift its inhumane and illegal siege’.
Yet it is Hamas that is refusing wounded Gazans access into Egypt for treatment -- and indeed the Egyptians even opened fire on them. So where are the screams about Egyptian and Hamas brutality? Where are Amnesty and Oxfam’s condemnation of Hamas and Egypt? And might all those from the Foreign Secretary down screaming about a ‘humanitarian disaster’ in Gaza pause for one second and look at the well-fed, healthy Gazans parading across their TV screens? If that’s a ‘humanitarian disaster’ – with supplies constantly pouring through the illegal tunnels from Egypt, along with billions of dollars-worth of missiles with which to commit mass murder -- what do they call what’s happening in Zimbabwe, which for some unaccountable reason inspires among the high-minded merely indifference?
Such bigotry and malice are not confined to British media and NGOs. On Salon, Glenn Greenwald whines about
America’s one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.
Oh really? Well, Hamas has been blamed for this war by Mahmoud Abbas, who said Hamas could have avoided this attack if it had prolonged its ‘cease-fire’. It has been blamed for this war by Egypt; and Arab states which are terrified of Islamism in general and Iran in particular are privately rooting for Israel to wipe Hamas out. Even the Israeli left is supporting this operation. The only people taking the side of the genocidal terrorists of Hamas are the western media, parroting their propaganda and thus inciting yet more to join the murderous rampage against Israel as well as ratcheting up the pressure on world leaders to force Israel to stop before Hamas is destroyed.
Isn’t there a case for legal action against these media outlets on account of their blood libels, for indirectly aiding the perpetrators of attempted genocide
i know political and legal stuff is boring and i know that i'm the minority, i also know that no one will read this and change their mind about anything because the world hates jews and wants israel wiped off the planet but i'm gonna post it anyway, not to change your mind but just to prove to myself that i tried to educate people as to the other side of the usual media crazed left wing hatred for us. this is an article i found online.
Did Israel Use "Disproportionate Force" in Gaza?
By Dore Gold
Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001. Rocket attacks increased by 500 percent after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. During an informal six-month lull, some 215 rockets were launched at Israel.
The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it.
Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead." The numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties. What is critical from the standpoint of international law is that if the attempt has been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful."
Luis Moreno-Orampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court "permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur." The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does).
After 9/11, when the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda's attack. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis. To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
Israel is currently benefiting from a limited degree of understanding in international diplomatic and media circles for launching a major military operation against Hamas on December 27. Yet there are significant international voices that are prepared to argue that Israel is using disproportionate force in its struggle against Hamas.
Israeli Population Centers Under Rocket Attack
There are good reasons why initial criticism of Israel has been muted. After all, Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001.1 The majority of those attacks were launched after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Indeed, rocket attacks increased by 500 percent (from 179 to 946) from 2005 to 2006.
Moreover, lately Hamas has been extending the range of its striking capability even further with new rockets supplied by Iran. Hamas used a 20.4-kilometer-range Grad/Katyusha for the first time on March 28, 2006, bringing the Israeli city of Ashkelon into range of its rockets for the first time. That change increased the number of Israelis under threat from 200,000 to half a million.2 Moreover, on December 21, 2008, Yuval Diskin, Head of the Israel Security Agency, informed the Israeli government that Hamas had acquired rockets that could reach Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, and even the outskirts of Beersheba.3 The first Grad/Katyusha strike on Ashdod, in fact, took place on December 28. There had been no formal cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, but only an informal six-month tahadiya (lull), during which 215 rockets were launched at Israel.4 On December 21, Hamas unilaterally announced that the tahadiya had ended.
Critical Voices
On December 27, 2008, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesmen issued a statement saying that while the Secretary-General recognized "Israel's security concerns regarding the continued firing of rockets from Gaza," he reiterated "Israel's obligation to uphold international humanitarian and human rights law." The statement specifically noted that he "condemns excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians [emphasis added]."5
A day later, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights "strongly condemned Israel's disproportionate use of force." French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, also condemned Israel's "disproportionate use of force," while demanding an end to rocket attacks on Israel.6 Brazil also joined this chorus, criticizing Israel's "disproportionate response."7 Undoubtedly, a powerful impression has been created by large Western newspaper headlines that describe massive Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, without any up-front explanation for their cause.
Proportionality and International Law: The Protection of Innocent Civilians
The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it (Israel is not expected to make Kassam rockets and lob them back into Gaza).
When international legal experts use the term "disproportionate use of force," they have a very precise meaning in mind. As the President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Rosalyn Higgins, has noted, proportionality "cannot be in relation to any specific prior injury - it has to be in relation to the overall legitimate objective of ending the aggression."8 In other words, if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it. By implication, force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians. The pivotal factor determining whether force is excessive is the intent of the military commander. In particular, one has to assess what was the commander's intent regarding collateral civilian damage.9
What about reports concerning civilian casualties? Some international news agencies have stressed that the vast majority of those killed in the first phase of the current Gaza operation were Hamas operatives. Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead."10 It is far too early to definitely assess Palestinian casualties, but even if they increase, the numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties.
During the Second Lebanon War, Professor Michael Newton of Vanderbilt University was in email communication with William Safire of the New York Times about the issue of proportionality and international law. Newton had been quoted by the Council on Foreign Relations as explaining proportionality by proposing a test: "If someone punches you in the nose, you don't burn down their house." He was serving as an international criminal law expert in Baghdad and sought to correct the impression given by his quote. According to Newton, no responsible military commander intentionally targets civilians, and he accepted that this was Israeli practice.
What was critical from the standpoint of international law was that if the attempt had been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful."11 Numbers matter less than the purpose of the use of force. Israel has argued that it is specifically targeting facilities serving the Hamas regime and its determined effort to continue its rocket assault on Israel: headquarters, training bases, weapons depots, command and control networks, and weapons-smuggling tunnels. This way Israel is respecting the international legal concept of proportionality.
Alternatively, disproportionality would occur if the military sought to attack even if the value of a target selected was minimal in comparison with the enormous risk of civilian collateral damage. This point was made by Luis Moreno-Orampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, on February 9, 2006, in analyzing the Iraq War. He explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court "permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks [emphasis added] against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur." The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does) or when "the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage."12 In fact, Israeli legal experts right up the chain of command within the IDF make this calculation before all military operations of this sort.
Proportionality as a Strategic Issue
Moving beyond the question of international law, the charge that Israel is using a disproportionate amount of force in the Gaza Strip because of reports of Palestinian casualties has to be looked at critically. Israelis have often said among themselves over the last seven years that when a Hamas rocket makes a direct strike on a crowded school, killing many children, then Israel will finally act.
This scenario raises the question of whether the doctrine of proportionality requires that Israel wait for this horror to occur, or whether Israel could act on the basis of the destructive capability of the arsenal Hamas already possesses, the hostile declarations of intent of its leaders, and its readiness to use its rocket forces already. Alan Dershowitz noted two years ago: "Proportion must be defined by reference to the threat proposed by an enemy and not by the harm it has produced." Waiting for a Hamas rocket to fall on an Israeli school, he rightly notes, would put Israel in the position of allowing "its enemies to play Russian Roulette with its children."13
The fundamental fact is that in fighting terrorism, no state is willing to play Russian Roulette. After the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda's attack. Given that al-Qaeda was seeking non-conventional capabilities, it was essential to wage a campaign to deny it the sanctuary it had enjoyed in Afghanistan, even though that struggle continues right up to the present.
Is There Proportionality Against Military Forces?
And in fighting counterinsurgency wars, most armies seek to achieve military victory by defeating the military capacity of an adversary, as efficiently as possible. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis; most armies seek to decisively eliminate as many enemy forces as possible while minimizing their own losses of troops. There are NATO members who have been critical of "Israel's disproportionate use of force," while NATO armies take pride in their "kill ratios" against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Moreover, decisive military action against an aggressor has another effect: it increases deterrence.14 To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
The loss of any civilian lives is truly regrettable. Israel has cancelled many military operations because of its concern with civilian casualties. But should civilian losses occur despite the best efforts of Israel to avoid them, it is ultimately not Israel's responsibility. As political philosopher Michael Walzer noted in 2006: "When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible - and no one else is - for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire."15
International critics of Israel may be looking to craft balanced statements that spread the blame for the present conflict to both sides. But they would be better served if they did not engage in this artificial exercise, and clearly distinguish the side that is the aggressor in this conflict - Hamas - and the side that is trying to defeat the aggression - Israel.
Did Israel Use "Disproportionate Force" in Gaza?
By Dore Gold
Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001. Rocket attacks increased by 500 percent after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. During an informal six-month lull, some 215 rockets were launched at Israel.
The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it.
Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead." The numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties. What is critical from the standpoint of international law is that if the attempt has been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful."
Luis Moreno-Orampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court "permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur." The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does).
After 9/11, when the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda's attack. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis. To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
Israel is currently benefiting from a limited degree of understanding in international diplomatic and media circles for launching a major military operation against Hamas on December 27. Yet there are significant international voices that are prepared to argue that Israel is using disproportionate force in its struggle against Hamas.
Israeli Population Centers Under Rocket Attack
There are good reasons why initial criticism of Israel has been muted. After all, Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001.1 The majority of those attacks were launched after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Indeed, rocket attacks increased by 500 percent (from 179 to 946) from 2005 to 2006.
Moreover, lately Hamas has been extending the range of its striking capability even further with new rockets supplied by Iran. Hamas used a 20.4-kilometer-range Grad/Katyusha for the first time on March 28, 2006, bringing the Israeli city of Ashkelon into range of its rockets for the first time. That change increased the number of Israelis under threat from 200,000 to half a million.2 Moreover, on December 21, 2008, Yuval Diskin, Head of the Israel Security Agency, informed the Israeli government that Hamas had acquired rockets that could reach Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, and even the outskirts of Beersheba.3 The first Grad/Katyusha strike on Ashdod, in fact, took place on December 28. There had been no formal cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, but only an informal six-month tahadiya (lull), during which 215 rockets were launched at Israel.4 On December 21, Hamas unilaterally announced that the tahadiya had ended.
Critical Voices
On December 27, 2008, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesmen issued a statement saying that while the Secretary-General recognized "Israel's security concerns regarding the continued firing of rockets from Gaza," he reiterated "Israel's obligation to uphold international humanitarian and human rights law." The statement specifically noted that he "condemns excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians [emphasis added]."5
A day later, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights "strongly condemned Israel's disproportionate use of force." French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, also condemned Israel's "disproportionate use of force," while demanding an end to rocket attacks on Israel.6 Brazil also joined this chorus, criticizing Israel's "disproportionate response."7 Undoubtedly, a powerful impression has been created by large Western newspaper headlines that describe massive Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, without any up-front explanation for their cause.
Proportionality and International Law: The Protection of Innocent Civilians
The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it (Israel is not expected to make Kassam rockets and lob them back into Gaza).
When international legal experts use the term "disproportionate use of force," they have a very precise meaning in mind. As the President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Rosalyn Higgins, has noted, proportionality "cannot be in relation to any specific prior injury - it has to be in relation to the overall legitimate objective of ending the aggression."8 In other words, if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it. By implication, force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians. The pivotal factor determining whether force is excessive is the intent of the military commander. In particular, one has to assess what was the commander's intent regarding collateral civilian damage.9
What about reports concerning civilian casualties? Some international news agencies have stressed that the vast majority of those killed in the first phase of the current Gaza operation were Hamas operatives. Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead."10 It is far too early to definitely assess Palestinian casualties, but even if they increase, the numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties.
During the Second Lebanon War, Professor Michael Newton of Vanderbilt University was in email communication with William Safire of the New York Times about the issue of proportionality and international law. Newton had been quoted by the Council on Foreign Relations as explaining proportionality by proposing a test: "If someone punches you in the nose, you don't burn down their house." He was serving as an international criminal law expert in Baghdad and sought to correct the impression given by his quote. According to Newton, no responsible military commander intentionally targets civilians, and he accepted that this was Israeli practice.
What was critical from the standpoint of international law was that if the attempt had been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful."11 Numbers matter less than the purpose of the use of force. Israel has argued that it is specifically targeting facilities serving the Hamas regime and its determined effort to continue its rocket assault on Israel: headquarters, training bases, weapons depots, command and control networks, and weapons-smuggling tunnels. This way Israel is respecting the international legal concept of proportionality.
Alternatively, disproportionality would occur if the military sought to attack even if the value of a target selected was minimal in comparison with the enormous risk of civilian collateral damage. This point was made by Luis Moreno-Orampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, on February 9, 2006, in analyzing the Iraq War. He explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court "permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks [emphasis added] against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur." The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does) or when "the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage."12 In fact, Israeli legal experts right up the chain of command within the IDF make this calculation before all military operations of this sort.
Proportionality as a Strategic Issue
Moving beyond the question of international law, the charge that Israel is using a disproportionate amount of force in the Gaza Strip because of reports of Palestinian casualties has to be looked at critically. Israelis have often said among themselves over the last seven years that when a Hamas rocket makes a direct strike on a crowded school, killing many children, then Israel will finally act.
This scenario raises the question of whether the doctrine of proportionality requires that Israel wait for this horror to occur, or whether Israel could act on the basis of the destructive capability of the arsenal Hamas already possesses, the hostile declarations of intent of its leaders, and its readiness to use its rocket forces already. Alan Dershowitz noted two years ago: "Proportion must be defined by reference to the threat proposed by an enemy and not by the harm it has produced." Waiting for a Hamas rocket to fall on an Israeli school, he rightly notes, would put Israel in the position of allowing "its enemies to play Russian Roulette with its children."13
The fundamental fact is that in fighting terrorism, no state is willing to play Russian Roulette. After the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda's attack. Given that al-Qaeda was seeking non-conventional capabilities, it was essential to wage a campaign to deny it the sanctuary it had enjoyed in Afghanistan, even though that struggle continues right up to the present.
Is There Proportionality Against Military Forces?
And in fighting counterinsurgency wars, most armies seek to achieve military victory by defeating the military capacity of an adversary, as efficiently as possible. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis; most armies seek to decisively eliminate as many enemy forces as possible while minimizing their own losses of troops. There are NATO members who have been critical of "Israel's disproportionate use of force," while NATO armies take pride in their "kill ratios" against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Moreover, decisive military action against an aggressor has another effect: it increases deterrence.14 To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
The loss of any civilian lives is truly regrettable. Israel has cancelled many military operations because of its concern with civilian casualties. But should civilian losses occur despite the best efforts of Israel to avoid them, it is ultimately not Israel's responsibility. As political philosopher Michael Walzer noted in 2006: "When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible - and no one else is - for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire."15
International critics of Israel may be looking to craft balanced statements that spread the blame for the present conflict to both sides. But they would be better served if they did not engage in this artificial exercise, and clearly distinguish the side that is the aggressor in this conflict - Hamas - and the side that is trying to defeat the aggression - Israel.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
good grief. i'm older and none the wiser. for a moment there i thought i was but i was deluding myself. this of course effects my entry into the blog as i have nothing really of any significance to say. i spent the day with my little autistic friend. he phases out quite a lot, just starts waving his arms like a humming bird and his head fixates on something above him. he is obviously very happy when he does this and it's usually cued by some trigger like the knowledge of an ice cream or cake. people have spent years trying to understand this gesture but i have a feeling he's in an ecstatic state when he is doing this. he quite literally leaves his body. travels down the astral highways and it takes a while for him to return. i usually bring him back by joining in. im not sure if this is right or wrong but if i didn't intervene the hours would fly by and the day would pass. anyways i love it when he goes into that state, it makes me feel ecstatic myself.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
painkiller gig
music transmuted down to it's raw purest form, as an energy. an energy with the power to assist travel into different realms. an energy with the power to do what rock and roll is designed to do, move you. with music and words steve and the band took a small but privileged few on a journey into a place where the transcendental meets the cosmos. all you have to do is surrender and follow the flow. amazing sounds astounding music.
Monday, December 22, 2008
travel over the harbour bridge or was it the under the tunnel, either way i;m heading south, to bondi where my firstly i pop in on the wonderful wizard of oz who greets me and the sun with yoga poses and a smile. he wears a hat and a priest = aura t shirt and it feels really good to see him. i hand over some interdimensional plant life and my two faveroute movies 'smoke' the brilliant story of a strange bunch of charachters who inhabit a cigar shop in broklyn. and the other is the poetic beauty of my fave film 'dead man' we eat stolen pears and talk about strange things from the future, stuff i don't want to hear but already know, then it's of to my brothers, we wander through the markets, i buy him a book on girls, and then we go for a swim at the famous bondi beach, water warm, crowded and filled with seaweed.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
i often imagine my expansive vision of the universe in a similar way to that last shot in that silly men in black movie. there's two dimensions that i have to think about at first, the microscopic and macroscopic, so for example i start on the end of my nose, or my 3rd eye. taking the macroscopic imagine a camera focused on the end of my nose pulling back, as if getting further away, the nose becoming part of a face, the face recognisably me, the me in an environment, the environment being a garden, the me in the garden sitting in a street, the st in a suburb the suburb a county the county a state the state a country the country a continent, etc until we are out past the further reaches of the galaxy, ultimate black or white. then using the same process i imagine the end of my nose but the camera zooms into the microscopic, until we travel along the same kind of white or blackness we perceived in the macroscopic. okay now that's a weird thing to do, but i'm sure it's something that crosses people's minds once in a lifetime.
now what separates the weird from the eccentric is to imagine the process with the other dimensions, so start by using length, breath and then depth but now apply time, so the same process is happening along the time lines, then the other dimensions, the one's i cannot express without resorting to pure maths (to be honest i can hardly conceive them really but for the sake of this post lets say i can), there's an infinite amount of probability's and possibilities including the one we create. now when you look at all these dimensions as one, do you see god?
or does god see you?
i seem to be good at manifesting reality to suit me but it's a power that i think once learnt is best to put aside and just enjoy the simple things. the ego less need to desire or create. the need just to be. even gods have their days off. i imagine the gods at play, and what they choose to make is our existence. and we underneath it all are the gods at play. while i want to play with art and design and live like the characters from the legends at the end of time, everyone else wants to play war games or build financial structures . we need to play more people, we need to just let it all go and relax.
relax
now what separates the weird from the eccentric is to imagine the process with the other dimensions, so start by using length, breath and then depth but now apply time, so the same process is happening along the time lines, then the other dimensions, the one's i cannot express without resorting to pure maths (to be honest i can hardly conceive them really but for the sake of this post lets say i can), there's an infinite amount of probability's and possibilities including the one we create. now when you look at all these dimensions as one, do you see god?
or does god see you?
i seem to be good at manifesting reality to suit me but it's a power that i think once learnt is best to put aside and just enjoy the simple things. the ego less need to desire or create. the need just to be. even gods have their days off. i imagine the gods at play, and what they choose to make is our existence. and we underneath it all are the gods at play. while i want to play with art and design and live like the characters from the legends at the end of time, everyone else wants to play war games or build financial structures . we need to play more people, we need to just let it all go and relax.
relax
my autistic friend loves kylie, his mother whom i have known for 7 years bought me tickets to take him along to see the concert. i took with me timothy leary's 'the psychedelic experience' a book i read when i was in my early teens, i figured i'd read a few pages while kylie did her stuff. on the way we stopped at mcdonalds in ryde. pretty obscure for a vegetarian, and anti mcdonalds man like myself but i figured that i should let my friend make his own choices and mcdonalds has been programmed into all institutionalized people at an early age, besides it's his big night. so im waiting for him to eat his burger when some one yells out my name, it's my son jakob who is also a vegetarian. he has stopped with his three girlfriends on the way to see kylie as well. so we all sit together and then depart. at the dome by pure fate and chance i see jake and his friends are sitting in the row in front, i'm sitting in the wheelchair section.
kylie comes onstage and puts on a show. it's bright and energetic, dancing singing and i find myself actually enjoying it. she preforms one of my fave songs, 'can't get you outta my head' which i believe to be the perfect pop song. it is after all everything a pop song should have plus the added advantage of once heard impossible to get out off your head. it's what i call a mind bomb.
i notice as the show progresses there's a high level of esoteric symbolic used, giant crystal skulls, oriental mysticism, some references to death and rebirth. in the interval i read a few pages of leary where these themes are mentioned and am reminded the 'the psychedelic experience' is his interpretation of the tibetan book of the dead.
kylie was entertaining. the maya in all it's glory.
'the psychedelic experience' is brilliant. i'm amazed at how far ahead of his time leary was. even now a formidable explorer, i see why he thought he was crowley reincarnated. he must have written 'the psychedelic experience' as part of his initiation in to the upper realms of magus. he has served humanity.
i'm watching the new version of battle star galactica on dvd, despite the fact i don't have a tv i am able to watch it on my computer. it's great, almost as good as deadwood. the themes this series covers are amazing, it's gritty, realistic and had brilliant characters and the whole show bears little resemblance to the original tv show. i guess like all things the test will be in it's conclusion but i have to say i'm enjoying the journey with this one.
kylie comes onstage and puts on a show. it's bright and energetic, dancing singing and i find myself actually enjoying it. she preforms one of my fave songs, 'can't get you outta my head' which i believe to be the perfect pop song. it is after all everything a pop song should have plus the added advantage of once heard impossible to get out off your head. it's what i call a mind bomb.
i notice as the show progresses there's a high level of esoteric symbolic used, giant crystal skulls, oriental mysticism, some references to death and rebirth. in the interval i read a few pages of leary where these themes are mentioned and am reminded the 'the psychedelic experience' is his interpretation of the tibetan book of the dead.
kylie was entertaining. the maya in all it's glory.
'the psychedelic experience' is brilliant. i'm amazed at how far ahead of his time leary was. even now a formidable explorer, i see why he thought he was crowley reincarnated. he must have written 'the psychedelic experience' as part of his initiation in to the upper realms of magus. he has served humanity.
i'm watching the new version of battle star galactica on dvd, despite the fact i don't have a tv i am able to watch it on my computer. it's great, almost as good as deadwood. the themes this series covers are amazing, it's gritty, realistic and had brilliant characters and the whole show bears little resemblance to the original tv show. i guess like all things the test will be in it's conclusion but i have to say i'm enjoying the journey with this one.
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