UK out of Libya!

It seems that all of the major newspapers are endorsing military involvement in Libya. Even in leftist, typically dissenting circles there is a marked lack of comment opposing the current military action.

Well, for what it's worth.... I'm against UK military involvement in Libya. When I have time I'll try and write a considered piece explaining why. For now let me say that I don't trust Cameron et al as far as I can vomit. I don't for a single second think that they are instigating this action because they give a shit about the people of Libya.

Why has this military action started? Because the UK government and its allies want rid of Gaddafi, and they want a say in who controls resources in North Africa. They've involved themselves nefariously already, and now they're involving themselves in open warfare. Even as I write they're receiving criticism because enforcing a no-fly zone isn't quite as unambiguous as it sounds. And that's just the way this government likes it. As long as they can argue that they've got a legal framework to drop bombs, then drop bombs they will. And when the bombing is all done they'll be making sure that the right people come to power in Libya, whether the Libyan people want them or not.

The UK government has a hideous and tragic history of involvement in the politics of the Middle East. They should get out and stay out.

ASCM and anarchist spirituality

Much of this post appeared as a comment to this article on Bristol IndyMedia which referenced (somewhat disparagingly) the Student Christian Movement.

Firstly some background: I was a member of the Australian Student Christian Movement as a university student in Perth in the 90s. I credit ASCM with much of what is positive in my current life. I was brought up in a very conservative Christian household and was saddled with much of the baggage that goes with that sort of upbringing. Time with free-thinking caring people in ASCM gave me the time and space to shed (much of) that baggage, and to redefine myself free of some of the worst aspects of Christianity. You know the stuff I'm talking about: bigotry, homophobia, a permanent fear of hell etc

Now although my divorce from the institution of the Church couldn't come soon enough, my time with ASCM did not cause me to jettison every aspect of Christianity. I met some tremendously inspiring people who follow a Christian tradition of spirituality and combine that with a deep and profound commitment to peace, social justice, and the like. This is what Christianity could be.

Still, these days I'm as much agnostic as anything else. Or, put another way, I aspire to say with Gandhi ``I am a Muslim and a Hindu and a Christian and a Jew and so are all of you..." (I would particularly want to add humanist to that list .

So that's my background, now here's the rub: I'm getting all hot and bothered over the division between my anarchist comrades at the barricades, and the Christians bowed in prayer. In anarchist circles, it seems like the word ``Christian" is only a peg above ``Capitalist" or ``Tory" or ``person who watches X-factor" :-)

I understand that the label ``Christian" is associated with much of what is appalling in the modern West. I don't dispute that for an instant - the role of the Church in modern life is frequently (usually?) poisonous. It would be a mistake to equate all Christians with the Church however. More importantly - and this is my main point - it would be a mistake to equate spirituality with religion. The first is a ubiquitous and inescapable part of the human condition, the latter a frequently horrendous human construct.

Let me put it another way: it seems to me like anarchists need to do spirituality, and we need to do it well. This aint something to be left until after the revolution. If the example of Gandhi is not enough for you, then consider this quote from that doyen of revolutionaries, El Che:``At the risk of sounding ridiculous, a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." This is a statement of spirit; it concerns what goes on in the heart of the revolutionary, her essence.

I contrast this with the slogan ``No Gods! No Masters! which is a staple of the anarchist placard. To me this seems a statement of anarchist religion, and it is selling spirituality short. I find myself recoiling from it; at its absolutism, its blank stare. I know, of course, what it is aiming at: the priest and capitalist lying in bed with each other, a subservient society their ghastly love-child. It aims in the same direction as Billy Bragg when he sings

They make the laws to chain us well;
The clergy dazzle us with heaven, or they damn us into hell;
We will not worship the God they serve;
a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve.

A fine sentiment, but the slogan feels wrong because it leaves no room for dissent. What place for those who have a God? (And, don't forget, there are a lot of these.) It feels wrong too because it gives an impression of a cut-out anarchist, one with no soul. All angry fist-waving, no tears, no heart.

This does anarchism a disservice. I am an anarchist precisely I believe it to be a path-of-heart. The anarchists I know care; indeed they care so much that they'll wave their fist at the system, they'll cut themselves loose from the man, and they'll take the consequences. On top of that they are people who do spirituality, however it is named. Who are motivated by feelings of love, and light.

Given this it seems a damn shame that there is an inclination in anarchist circles to dismiss matters spiritual, confusing the matter with religion. This is a mistake. We are not cut-outs. We are humans who must deal with our condition, a condition that is at least in part spiritual. These are the terms: We have been born and we will die; we need each other, yet in some sense will be always alone; we are free, but chained; we see beauty, ugliness, laughter, tears...

We should not cut ourselves loose from spirituality, or cut ourselves apart from those who do their spirituality under another label. I am not advocating that we all take ourselves off post-haste to Church, or the mosque. No, I am asking that we reclaim spirituality from the religionists; we need to do spirituality and we need to do it our way, not the Pope's way.

Society needs an anarchist spirituality as much as it needs an anarchist politics. Because an anarchist spirituality will, by its very nature, allow space and freedom for all: the anarchists can do spirituality our way so that others can do spirituality their way. If people want to call themselves Christian, or Muslim, or Jew, and to do so in peace with each other, then let it be so.

* * *

Surprise, surprise, George Orwell said much that I want to say and he only needed a paragraph. Consider his characterisation of some of his Socialist comrades:

"Sometimes I look at a socialist... and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody... [but rather] a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery... but because it is untidy." (p156, The Road to Wigan Pier)

This is the loveless-revolutionary, the anarchist without heart, this is revolt minus spirit. This is a warning.

And, finally, a historical note. Anarchist spirituality aint new; check out the Catholic Workers at a demo near you...

First Great Satan

Let me present a compositum of recent days spent wrestling with the First Great Satan. (These are the fellows who run our public transport system.)

I wake and feed myself some lovely home-made muesli. Mmhmm. Now I must book me a train, for I need to go to Milton Keynes in three months. An hour later I have discovered that, although a single ticket will cost me £60, if I break the ticket into three and book Bristol-Cheltenham then Cheltenham-Birmingham then Birmingham-Milton Keynes, then I can make the journey on the same trains for half the price. Though the price still needles, forty minutes later I have achieved the triple booking. I will need to take a trip to Temple Meads to book my bike on, but that can wait for another day when I have a couple of hours spare.

It's a bad start to the day but I stay positive: today I am having a day off on my own. Hurrah! I have organised a bus ride out to Wells so I can walk through the Mendips to Cheddar. What could go wrong?

I arrive at the bus stop with five minutes to spare. Forty minutes later my bus arrives. The driver is apologetic - he'd broken down. I ask for a return to Cheddar; the driver says "That'll be seven pounds." I lose the ability to speak for a couple of seconds. Then: "But, surely sir, you are mistaken? For Wells is not far, and it is a popular town."

The driver is not mistaken but he is also rather nice. So he issues me a special ticket (for I have only £6.85 in my wallet) and tells me I should be able to get back on that. Thank you, sir, for your humanity. (But a pox on your employer.)

Between Wells and Cheddar there is nary a commercial outlet. I am alone with sheep and grass and hedgerows. I see a cloud of unidentified sparrow-like birds feeding in a farmer's field. And a rook, and a nuthatch, and some cows with big scary horns. I eat sandwiches sitting on a rock. A short paragraph of happiness in an essay of modern anguish.

I arrive at my destination and go to the bus stop. It takes me two hours to get from Cheddar to Bristol Temple Meads, though it be but a short distance. The first bus is full of old people on a trip out and the atmosphere is rather jolly. After that the journey gets a little wearing. I pass my time contemplating a map of the area - there are a great number of disused railways running in all directions. Thank you Mr Beeching for your good work.

From Temple Meads to home is a forty minute walk. I could catch the bus but it would take nearly as long and cost me £3. Most of my walk is on the cycle path; I praise Allah, Yahweh, and the Green Goddess that the good folk of people stopped the council and FGSatan from running a bus lane down the length of it.

I arrive home happy. I won't let the fuckers get me down.

Yoga, sex, Bill Hicks

A follow-up to my earlier post on matters yogic...

Harsh yogi? I took some leave over Christmas so was able to attend a yoga class for a change (I usually do my yoga at a home, using a manual). I went to a Mysore-style ashtanga session where everyone does their own thing and the yogi wanders round correcting things. Since I was new to the class the yogi introduced himself and told me to start with the very basics - so I duly started with a sun salutation A while he wandered round the class watching from afar. When I'd completed this most basic of manoeuvres, he came over and told me to pause. He then said,

I don't know what you're doing, but it's not ashtanga

Whoah tiger! Bit of a confidence-knocker that! Fortunately I had an idea that he was pretty harsh so I was kind of expecting it. Over the next two hours he completely took my basic postures apart, and started me off from scratch again. Although it was a pretty severe process it was exactly what I wanted: I've now got a hell of a lot of things to work on at home on my own...

Libidinous yoga. Or, as Derek and Clive might put it, yoga and the effing horn. Pootling about on the internet I came across this article about tantric yoga. It describes how yoga can be used to ease sexual dysfunction. I noted it because [cough] I'd noticed something similar myself. To put it bluntly, yoga turns you on.

How it does this is a good question. In the article above it says:

My opinion on the subject is that you’re getting more oxygen to your brain and increasing blood flow to all areas of the body.

... And so your libido increases. More subtly, it also places you more firmly in your own body, so that you become aware of the many different aspects of your body, including the sexual. Finally, I'd add that when I practice yoga my self-esteem is strengthened. Although I'm not very good (see earlier section!), at the end of a session I have a noticeable alpha-male type feeling. And we know what's on the mind of your average alpha-male...

Bill Hicks. My man the Stevenage responded to my earlier yoga posting with a link to a video of the late, great Bill Hicks. You can view it below; I'll leave you to decide how relevant it is to the subject at hand.

Magnificent murmurations

Yesterday I saw a massive flock of starlings - you can maybe just make them out in the photo above. It was absolutely incredible. I appreciate that one could not deduce this fact from the photo, so you'll have to trust me.

Every winter starlings form gigantic flocks which are known as murmurations. One of the biggest flocks in the country happens to be quite close to Bristol: up to one million starlings come together every evening throughout winter at a bird reserve called Ham Wall near Glastonbury.

I was at Ham Wall yesterday between 3pm and 4pm. During that time I saw three extraordinary ornithological sites: first, the starlings. Second, I saw a great white egret - there are thirteen of these in the whole of the UK; four of them live at Ham Wall. And thirdly, I saw a bittern. These were once extinct in the UK but they have recolonised and now breed in two or three places in the country. They're usually very shy and hard to see but this fellow flew right over my head!

Thank god for bitterns, egrets, and starlings. It's nice to know that, amidst all the scenes of environmental catastrophe, there are still places where nature can thrive. Just to reinforce this, I've made a list of some memorable birding moments that I've experienced recently around Bristol. It's worth reminding ourselves that we can still enjoy wonderful nature almost on our doorstep...

(Depressing aside though: as we headed out to Glastonbury to see the birds, we encountered a mighty snarl-up on the M5. We were a bit worried that we might spend the day in a traffic jam but, no, we soon realised that all the traffic was leaving the M5 and heading for Cribbs Causeway for the Boxing Day sales. Is the human race mad, or what?!)

American History Y and Z

I am currently a little bit obsessed with the history of the United States. I've used this blog before to quote from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. If you want a good overview of American history then there is no better source.

This time, though, I want to refer to a couple of more specific histories. The first is Randy Shilt's And the band played on, a history of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It's a thick tome but it reads like a thriller; I heartily recommend it. The tale starts in the late 1970s when a handful of Europeans and Americans started to fall ill and die in mysterious ways. (Some of) the medical fraternity really started to pay attention in the early 1980s when it became clear that gay American men were dying in greater numbers (and in the most bizarre and hideous ways - one guy died of a disease previously only found in sheep, many men went blind or suffered very distressing brain damage as the disease killed them).

However the AIDS epidemic is a tale of two tragedies. First is the horror of the disease. Second, and just as deadly, is the horror of prejudice and bigotry. For a long time it was just gay men that were dying. Then they were joined by Haitians and intravenous drug users. None of these groups count for diddley in the grand American system. So no one paid any attention - no media, no government officials, no one with any power to do anything...

Reagan assumed office as AIDS reared its ugly head, and his administration refused even the most basic funding to combat the disease. (He was spending all his money funding death squads in El Salvador, but that's a story to be told in a different history, thanks Noam Chomsky.) Indeed it was May 31, 1987 (near the end of his second term) before he even spoke the word "AIDS" in public". When he spoke, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died. The disease had spread to 113 countries, with more than 50,000 cases.

The media were just as bad. With a few very heroic exemptions (Shilts himself, for instance) the media virtually ignored the epidemic. The impression one receives on reading this account is that this silence not only killed people in the 1980s but it is klling people now. If scientists had received funding, and the people had received education, then AIDS could have been stopped in its tracks. As it is, HIV has infected millions of people around the globe and it is killing them. The first world finally woke up to the tragedy (after respectable heterosexuals started dying, initially through blood transfusions) and AIDS is now somewhat manageable with modern drugs... but not in Africa.

And now for another tragedy. I'm two thirds of the way through Dee Brown's Bury my heart at wounded knee; I'm reading it in stages as it is one of the most harrowing books I've ever read. It tells the story of the "conquering" of the American West by the white man; and it tells the story from the perspective of the original inhabitants. As Brown himself puts it:

Americans who have always looked westward when reading about this period should read this book facing eastward.

This book is not a tale of two tragedies, it is a tale of many. Or, perhaps, it's the tale of one tragedy repeated over and over and over. Native Americans living their traditional lives encounter the white man, first as an oddity, then as an irritation, then as a threat, and finally as an inexorable and appallingly destructive force. There are many tales of great heroism, as tribes people give their lives to protect their family, their country, and their way of life. But you read this book with ashes in your mouth - for the story always ends the same.

Sitting Bull

The book contains photos of many of the main protagonists and I find myself repeatedly drawn to look at their faces. These are heroes, heroes the like of which we may never see again. Their experience as humans could not be more different from my own yet, although I cannot imagine what it would have been like to live my whole life on the prairie, I am immediately drawn to the nobility and purity of their fight. They knew things about life, and love, and land, that white people may never know. That they were defeated in battle is all the more tragic, for the winners are now inevitably and completely defeating themselves...

Yoga!

Let me tell you about yoga. Forgive me if I sound like an insufferable hippy. (I'm really not. I wear socks with sandals really rather infrequently. And I dislike reggae intensely.)

Four years ago I thought yoga was for girls. I play football, end of story. Despite this, for various reasons not worth sharing now, I started to go along to yoga classes to support my partner. Six months later I was still going, and really enjoying it. Nonetheless my practice at this stage was a little sporadic, and yoga was languishing a long way behind football in my set of priorities.

Then a year ago I attended an ashtanga yoga class. It was 1 1/2 hours of serious work-out and I left shattered and very very intrigued. Over the last six months I've started to do ashtanga yoga regularly and now, it's fair to say, I LOVE IT. There are times (and I don't say this lightly) when I'd rather do yoga than play football.

My God.

Let me explain the attraction. Firstly the physical side of things. Football is great because it clears my mind, gives me an outlet for my physical energies, and leaves me mellow yet somewhat elated. Yoga also has that effect on me. Particularly ashtanga yoga which is more strenuous than other forms of yoga, and so appeals to my desire to be physically stretched. It gives me the high.

I also have a sense of progress. I am no natural yogi; I am bony and angular and not naturally flexible. When I started I had trouble sitting cross-legged. Yet now I can sit with cross legs, I can touch my toes with ease (even put my palms on the ground), I can stay in a head stand for a couple of minutes... in short, there are a multitude of postures that were once beyond me and now are quite achievable.

It has benefited my health. I used to suffer from chronic lower back pain but yoga has now got that under control. (As it happens I have had back troubles again recently, of a different sort, but this seems unrelated.) I have noticed a dramatic increase in lung capacity (all the positions in yoga are coordinated with the breath, so one learns to regulate one's breathing and to breath more deeply). The other day I swam a kilometre for the first time in my life (I'm shit at swimming); this was with almost no swimming practice, but lots of yoga.

I have much more control over different parts of my body. Whereas playing football benefits only a subset of the muscles in the body, yoga does the lot. Before I did yoga there were whole areas of my body that were weak and unutilised - that I didn't know were there. Now I have awareness of these areas, and can use them (for instance when lifting heavy things, instead of busting my back like I used to).

Yoga isn't just physical though. It also challenges and benefits my mental/ spiritual side. Firstly this takes place through regulating the breath. I have learned to breath deeply and slowly, thereby lowering the heart rate, and naturally calming the mind. This aids concentration and eases stress: when we're stressed our breathing tends towards shallowness and hyperventilation; by dealing with the physical symptoms of stress, some of the mental symptoms are also relieved.

Yoga also builds awareness of the present moment - what the Buddhists would call "mindfulness". Yoga requires awareness of one's whole body and full involvement in the here and now. Just as when I play football I am entirely focussed on the game without thought or worry of the past or future, so too in yoga I am freed of these distractions. Yoga seems somehow more beneficial though, because my mental state remains calm. (I'm not calm when I play football!)

I used to meditate regularly, but since having a child have found this very difficult. My yoga practice is a pretty good substitute. I find that the physicality of it allows me to maintain concentration in circumstances when I find sitting meditation impossible (e.g. with the child charging about the place). Many of the benefits of meditation - a calming and clearing of the mind, an awareness of the present, etc - can also be achieved through yoga.

Let me end by saying that I'm still shit at yoga. Or, to be more precise, I still can't do the vast majority of the poses in the ashtanga "full flow". Of course, that doesn't really mean I'm shit. Yoga is refreshingly non-competitive. While I admire very talented yoga practitioners (see video for an extreme example), a good session of yoga for me can be much more modest yet still push my physical and mental boundaries, and bring just as much benefit. With this in mind I'd recommend yoga to anyone, no matter what their state of physical health, for they will surely benefit.