Indian MP Mahua Moitra 7 sign of rising fascism speech wins plaudits

This and that

It's almost the end of January. We start the year with such hopes and lose steam somewhere in the middle of the first month. I realise that if I don't bother about results, if I just track my habits and see the ticks where ticks are supposed to be, I am more likely to climb back up on that bandwagon.

Today, I started out going to the gym and sweating profusely. Which made me feel saintly and flushed with ...I don't know, endorphins?

Anyway, I am listening to The Waves by Virginia Woolf on Audible:

I bind my hair with a white ribbon, so that when I leap across the court the ribbon will stream out in a flash, yet curl around my neck, perfectly in its place. Not a hair shall be out of place.

I listened to Wind in the Willows twice. Now I realise I luxuriate in the beauty of the descriptions, the whimsical flights of fancy, as well as the description of all that good food. It's what I listen for in The Christmas Carol as well. My favourite description there has to do with fat onions that resemble Spanish friars.

I think I may listen to The Secret Garden next. But I have yet to find a recording that I like.

This is my message from The Universe today.

Do you know what I'd really, really like, Jennifer?

For you to know that I think about you every moment of every day.

K?

The Universe

And that your happiness is the point of this all, Jennifer. And that chocolate was not an accidental discovery.

I'm back at work after a lovely four-day holiday. During that time, I went to Backyard to see in Mark's birthday with him and give him his presents, decided to make achari chicken tart (still haven't assembled all the ingredients - what on earth are nigella seeds?), visited my father twice, got back on the treadmill and exercise bike and made the 10,000 steps every day.

Read a book or two.

Went to Bookexcess to get a heap of presents (and wrapping paper).

Met Anita for tea to give her (finally) her Christmas present.

I've been a busy bee. And I thought I just spent my holiday sleeping.

Cha-no-yu

The four great qualities which the Seikasha -- the Tea Drinker -- was to celebrate and cultivate over the sacred cup were hospitality, courtesy, purity, and tranquility. The apartment must be plain, but elegant, with spotless mats and simple joinery; the utensils must be uncostly, but exquisite in shape and fitness. Temperance must be absolute; if food and wine mingled with the little feast nobody must exceed one bowl of rice and three saucers of sake. Nor was it solely for love of grace and the four chief virtues of the tearoom, Ka-kei-sei-jaku, that the famous tycoon inaugurated the cult of the tea leaf. His great mind saw that if he could give Japan a national and tranquil habit, easy of practice for the poor and attractive to the rich, he would do as much to sheathe the sword and humanise his people, and so it has turned out. Never, in truth, had a statesman's subtle device such grand success. The teacup, as I have said, is today the central fact of this fair and gentle land. It decides the architecture, binds together the societies, refreshes the fatigue, and rewards the day's work of high and low in Japan. The perspiring jinriksha man is satisfied with the warm infusion; the Minister and the Mikado himself are only happy when the "honourable tea" exhales its delicate fragrance from the hands of the kneeling musume. And there are little gracious ceremonies even about the most ordinary tea drinking in humblest houses, which everywhere elevate it above a mere beverage. Good manners in Japan prescribe a soft sort of solemnity whenever the little cup is being filled, and no hut is so lowly but it's kettle, it's teapot, and its tea equipage display something about them of distinction, taste, and the love of a chaste and perfect art.

But the Cha-no-yu, as Hideyoshi and Sen-no-rikiu settled it forever, carries these ceremonials to a grave perfection. To be quite orthodox the tearoom must be very small, one of but four and a half mats, roofed, if possible, with a single finely grained plank, or else thatched with bamboo grass. The few honoured guests should be called to the pavilion by wooden clappers, washing their hands first in pure water. No discontented person must be present, nor any scandal, or unkind words be heard. The host himself should mend the fire, light the incense, brush the mats, fill the white-pine ewer, and lay the ladle of red-pine; as well as see that the single picture is hung and the single flower-pot fairly set in its place. The tea should be of the finest green powder, from a beautiful but common little jar; placed in a cup of ancient design holding, perhaps, half a pint. The 'honourable' hot water is poured upon it, and then stirred in with a small bamboo whisk, which article itself, like the tiny spoon of the same material used for taking out the tea powder, must be of a certain form, and if possible, ancient, and famous for its artistic origin.

Even about the boiling of the water there is orthodox tradition, there is solemnity, I had almost said there is religion. The sumi in the brazier must be piled up in the outline of a glowing Fuji-san. The kettle of beaten iron must have no touch of modern vulgarity in its shape, the water must be drawn from the purest source, and -- at the moment of use -- in the third state of boiling. The first state is known by its low murmuring, and the appearance on the surface of the large slow bubbles distinguished as "fish eyes", gyo-moku; the second is when steam comes with quickly rising foam; the third is when the steam disappears in a tranquil, steady simmer, and the fluid is now "honourable old hot water." This is the propitious moment for the admixture, which being compounded appears in the guise of a light-green frothy compound, delicately fragrant and invigoratingly hot, contained in the antique cup, which, neatly folded in a fair cloth, should be handed now to the principal guest. Drinking reverently from it, he should tenderly wipe the rim at the spot where he has quaffed, but the next guest must drink at the very same place, for such is the "Kiss of brotherhood", in harmony with the friendly inspirations of this ceremony. The last guest must be heedful to drain the bowl to its dregs; then he passes it round to be examined, criticised, and made the subject of pleasant talk about the old days, the cannons of true art in pottery, or any other topic lightly arising from the graceful moment, as the tender fragrance of the tea leaf wafts itself about the air of the little spotless chamber and among the kneeling, happy, tranquil companions of the occasion.

At a glance, it will be seen how imperiously these elegant ceremonies, once established and received, have dictated to Japan the pure simplicity of her ceramic and metal work, and how they have passed down into all ranks of the people, constituting a standard of sweet and simple manners and of high-bred tastes which they were quicker to accept than any other nation. Perhaps nowhere except in Japan would it have been possible even for the great Hideyoshi and the astute Sen-no-rikiu to have indoctrinated a whole people with so pure and refined a passion. But the commonest Japanese have this charming tendency to a delicate sobriety of appetite and taste; they love the touch of art which elevates, the glimpse of grace, which dignifies. They have the nature rather of birds and butterflies than of ordinary human beings, and when you send out to your Kurumaya a cup of tea and a saucer of boiled rice, and hear afterwards his grateful words, you wonder whether he is of the same race as that which you left quaffing half-and-half and eating rump-steaks on the banks of the Thames. Of course the austere etiquette of the Cha-no-yu is special; but its spirit, as the central ceremony of tea drinking, has palpably passed through all Japan, where everything begins and ends with the tetsubin and the teacup. Nor is it too much to declare that to Buddhism, which brought in her religious ideas and the tea leaf, and to Hideyoshi, who taught her how to honour, enjoy, and infuse it, is due much, if not most, of the existing aspect of social and civic Japan.

(From Sake and Tea by Sir Edwin Arnold, Tokyo, Japan, Dec 19,1889)

The humanity of captors and torturers

China's most famous artist, Ai Weiwei, was arrested and detained for 81 days. When he was released from jail, he refused to talk to journalists. In fact, he refused all interviews about his experience inside, until he was approached by Barnaby Martin, who wrote, not an article, but a book, Hanging Man, named for one of  Weiwei's most famous pieces of art.

Here, at the end of the book, he talks about the humanity of his jailers and how they were victims themselves, trapped in a system they no longer believed in. 

It was a chastening realisation.

And so, the book ends on a note of hope.

"By the way," I say, "last night in the youth hostel, I went through all we said yesterday and I kept thinking that it would make a great play one day."

"Yes," says Weiwei. "When I was in there, I sometimes thought that too. The whole situation was so dramatic, it was so full of paradoxes. I was a prisoner of course but so were the guards who had to stand by me day and night, and so were the people watching me from outside, trying to figure out what to do with me. Everyone was stuck. It was a very dramatic situation. And we talked so much about the meaning of art, about politics, about freedom and all the time I tried to answer their questions but at the same time I had to be on my guard because you always have to be very cautious and very careful because you don't know what's really going on. You only know that you are in absolute danger but at the same time you are desperate to limit the danger and even though you are in absolute danger and cut off from reality, you must still make sure that you don't hurt somebody on the outside or make the problem even bigger by saying the wrong thing. And there was so much confrontation, so much hostility, and the interrogators were not allowed to get to know me or even to say anything that would make me a person. I was just a number. Number 1135. That's my room number. But even this becomes completely dramatic and surreal because the soldiers who are guarding me are young and they have their own past, their own lives, and nobody cares about them at all. They are just soldier A or B or C or D. So confusing. The situation really examines the very essential questions, the very philosophical questions. How this esoteric society maintains itself and how it will now work and what happens to human nature in those circumstances. It's significant that sooner or later all the soldiers, except one -- their leader didn't talk to me -- but all of the others all secretly talk to me. But though they all secretly talked to me none of them know that the other ones were also secretly talking to me because of course it's not allowed. They were so bored, wanting to pass the time somehow. They said, "Weiwei, can you tell us a joke?? This was such a crazy situation. How can I tell them a joke?  I am in jail; I have no idea what is about to happen to me -- I might end up in jail for twenty years. I said, "I'm very sorry. If I had known that I was going to be arrested I would have memorised two hundred jokes!"

"Time passes so slowly, for you and for them, and you try to memorise everything that happened  in your life but after twenty days you have nothing left, it's completely empty! You have remembered every detail, no one has more than that. I remembered every person, every occasion, every meeting, every conversation, from when you are very young right up to that day and then suddenly you are completely empty. It's crazy. Then I try to hold on to something, to think about my son, my wife, my mum. Just to hold on. But then that becomes so painful to think about because they are just as completely innocent as you are and it is unbearable and the outside world also seems like a jail because you can never really communicate to them. So then every time I think of them there were tears pouring down my face and the soldiers say, "Are you thinking about your wife, your son again? Don't do that. You have to forget about this. You have to forget it all." So I think I really do have to forget about this otherwise I cannot go on. It's so painful, thinking ten years in jail...You know, it's just like that...So many conflicts about reality, imagination, crime. The whole thing is a paradox. And it continues, even when you leave. It has infected your outside reality. So two of the soldiers were meant to go home by this 25 December. I gave them my number. They already called me.

"No. Really?"

"Yes. They said, "Are you out?" Because they don't know -- they don't have any news in the army. One day they are moved to guard another room and they would never know then what happened in this room. They said, 'We were so worried about you, we kept thinking about you, we are so happy you are out...' It was so shocking. And after my release, the interrogator sometimes comes to see me. It's very strange. I said to him, 'Why do you do this, you shouldn't monitor me now.'"

"But he is coming to check up on you?"

"Yes. And he says, 'Weiwei, just let this one year pass. Come on! You will not die if you don't say a word for one year. Let it pass, then everything will be fine.' And I wonder if that's how this nation will change because now there are a lot of individuals who have their own sensibilities and they have their own judgement. Even after all the kingdoms and dynasties of China, this has never happened before. But now people are beginning to have their own judgement, their own opinion."

"So this is partly to do with the passage of time. Twenty years ago the individual in those roles would still have had a belief in the ideology. Why is it that nowadays these relatively senior people, even if they are not actually in a revolution, they personally, don't want to tarnish their integrity? What is it that's changed?"

"I think that the only reason for the change is because there is so much more information. So much information happens every day and even with such censorship people can still receive a lot of news from the world. Basically I believe a person is a container of all this information, knowledge, judgements. The state of course is still so strong but the Party cannot limit the information any more. There are too many ways round. And with this information people start to form their own view of the world."....

"But you know, from the very first second I realise even here there is humanity. Even when they put the black hood on me, when the two soldiers were holding me, one soldier grabbed me very tight but the other just pretended to grab me but in fact he held me very loose. So even sitting there, they try to give me more space, not to really hurt me..."

"Really?"

"Yes! So then you realise that there are two people sitting here, two other human beings. One obeys the command, the other just tries to use his own judgement and thinks, 'I don't see why we have to do this.' And that small thing, that tiny sense of humanity, certainly made me much more comfortable in this one-hour road to that secret place. And every time, when they put a handcuff on me, some of them just did it so carefully, first one tooth, then two teeth, so it's very loose, still comfortable. So loose in fact that you even can take your hand out. And somebody would even very carefully put my shirtsleeve under the handcuff so that the metal would not directly touch my skin. They didn't have to do all those things. It's just a job, why should they care? I didn't even care. But they carefully did that. It shows a lot of humanity, it shows they're different. It shows they think and they decide that they don't believe in this. And some police would always say,"Do you want tea?" They would keep asking. I don't want tea at the start but they keep pouring tea, trying to make me feel good. There was a lot of nice or warm situations there. A lot of humanity."

Giorgio Morandi

Like so many Chinese artists and writers of his generation, Weiwei is very knowledgeable about the early Soviet experiments in art. We talked about Tatlin and the constructivists and the lives of Malevich and Lissitzky and then we moved onto Giorgio Morandi, the Italian painter who died in 1964, whom Weiwei greatly admires. On the face of it, Morandi was not at all a political painter, nor was he involved in any kind of radical or conceptual work, so it would be easy to assume that Weiwei had no strong views on his work and that there was no connection between the two artists. Today, to most people, or rather to most non-painters, Morandi is not a household name and even within the international art world his reputation was not cemented until late in his career.

Perhaps his relatively modest standing has something to do with the obscure lifestyle that he forged for himself. By today's standards he appears at first glance to be thoroughly uncharismatic. He was neither a socialite nor a womaniser, he was never in the public eye and he wasn't particularly interested in commenting on anything that was happening in the outside world. His father died when he was eleven. He never married. He lived with his mother and his three sisters in the same house for fifty years. He habitually dressed in a formal suit; his hair was short, parted on the right. He was the sort of man whom one might expect to find in the same seat at the same restaurant every day, ordering the same meal. It is true that he was professor of etching at Bologna University for some years and that in the summers he would make it up into the hills of Grizzana, but there is nothing in his biography that would justify a biopic. Morandi was interested in one thing -- painting his next picture. When he was asked by a curator towards the end of his career about the whereabouts of some of his works, his reply captured his ethic perfectly:

I cannot give you any indication because I'm afraid I have never made a note of where my paintings have ended up ... I am always at work and work is my sole passion. And unfortunately I have become aware that I must always start from the beginning, and ought to burn what I've done in the past.

Consequently, for many years Morandi was mistaken for a dry, religious, almost insipid man of monkish habits and few outside interests. To make matters worse, his work appeared to some foreign curators and collectors to be thoroughly repetitious and provincial. Day after day, year after year, decade after decade, he painted the same handful of pots, bottles, jars, clocks, compote bowls and mannequins, occasionally running off the odd landscape, though these were equally repetitious. Carefully, and over decades Morandi built up a collection of these humble objects, finding them in junk shops or making them himself, allowing them to stand for months to gather dust. Like Duchamp, Morandi believed in dust. Along with the elaborate system of curtains and blinds that he employed in order to create a uniform zenithal light, the dust dulled the edges of the objects and helped them on their way into the solitude and obscurity that he prized so highly. Eventually, after a lengthy period of repose, an object might finally be picked out from among the crowd and moved carefully onto a shelf, nearer to the drama of the stage, Selected objects were then arranged on a table, rearranged countless times, over weeks, until Morandi felt that the balance was right. Later in his life he worried that three weeks was never enough time to arrange a natura morte and he regretted his impatience, wishing that he had spent longer, months possibly or years, making sure that he had the light just right and the perfect selection of objects.

Here, it must have seemed, was a slightly weird, reclusive man of modest talents and little originality -- in short, a minor painter who would not leave any kind of mark on the world. Today however those who become acquainted with Morandi's work are usually astonished by what they discern within it.

Like Ai Weiwei, Morandi is a political artist in the sense that he was trying to capture his own vision of reality, a vision that was radically at odds with that of his time. And like Weiwei, he found inspiration in the ordinary or the banal. In Morandi's case, this exercise of his freedom of expression didn't put him in danger, it just meant that it took several decades for audiences to begin to fully appreciate his work, but his urge to paint springs from the same source as Ai Weiwei's -- from the urge to renovate our vision of the world and to find new meaning. And this gets to the heart of the inevitable conflict between artists and repressive regimes. In the past, I had talked with Weiwei about the great icon painters of Russia and Weiwei emphasised this same point. The forms of art are endless, what counts is the individual's engagement with the world, and their own personal attempt to find meaning.

For Ai Weiwei, or Morandi, or any other artist practising today, perspective, or realism in general, is of course a series of conventions. It is not reality. It is a schema and that is all. One schema among many. An orthography that we can choose to use, in the same way that for millennia the priests of Sais chose to use their own canonical orthography, with crocodile-headed deities and ibis beaks and the whole plethora of dynastic symbols all rendered without perspective but with something else, and some other fifth element. The cave painters of Lascaux or the conceptual artists of the late twentieth century used another. But the idea that realism is merely one way of seeing among many is anathema to Maoism.

Totalitarian regimes, like the regime in China (though it is rapidly becoming less totalitarian, not voluntarily but because its censorship mechanisms fail to cope with the internet and civil society continues to expand), cannot abide alternative articulations of reality. Mao, as an accomplished poet himself, understood very well the link between form and content, and that if you limit the forms of art you also limit the possible content. He knew full well that by controlling forms of artistic expression you are able to control people's inner lives. But it couldn't last forever. Art doesn't stand still. As time passes the old ways of seeing grow stale and only new ways of seeing will do, and there was nothing Mao nor any of his successors could do about this.

"I believe," said Morandi, "there is nothing more surreal and nothing more abstract than reality. What has value in art is an individual way of seeing things: nothing else counts at all."

"Morandi," began Weiwei, "has been very influential on so many artists, not only painters. There are so many characters in his painting. It's very -- how can you say -- religious. And also he is like Van Gogh. Because the act itself is so believable, so pure, so purified, so cut off from others. He paints what he sees. The reality he sees. We have to catch up. So he leaves us a perfect example. Yes. You can always take that kind of action as the perfect kind of quality, the most convincing quality. Everything is related to integrity. The persistence to believe, to never get confused."

"And so Morandi persisted but he wasn't in danger as you are. You find yourself in a different position because you're not just being ignored by a critical establishment, you are coming up against people who don't want to know about your way of looking at the world and instead of just traducing or ignoring your art, they are putting you in jail."

"We all somehow have to be honest enough to face our condition and of course the artist always, always is the one who recognises a certain kind of reality and tries to announce it. You know poets, writers or artists, at first they are the only ones who see it. They have to announce it. They hear a kind of voice or they see some possibilities so clearly. But that all comes from the inner core, from the kind of nature they have. If there is anything valuable then it comes out because their nature perfectly reflects everybody's nature or instinct at that time."

From Hanging Man, Barnaby Martin

 

Liao Yiwu

Liao Yiwu, the writer, has a lot in common with Ai Weiwei so I thought that by talking to him I might be better able to put Ai Weiwei and his fellow dissidents in some sort of context. For one thing Liao Yiwu has been arrested because of his writings and he has spent time in jail, in his case more than three years. He is also from the same generation as Ai Weiwei and so he and his family went through all the horrors of famine and the Cultural Revolution. And also like Weiwei, he understands the power of the most simple gestures and his unadorned writing, which is banned in China and which so infuriates the authorities that he has suffered imprisonment and torture, really consists of nothing more than pointing out: "Hey! Listen to what this perfectly ordinary person has to say about tehir experience of life in China today." He is like the little boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes; the Chinese Communist Party cannot bear it.

Like Ai Weiwei, he is constantly at loggerheads with the regime because he speaks his mind and rejects the Communist Party's view of reality, instead articulating his own vision of Chinese society and the vision of the people that he meets. He is indefatigable and personally courageous.

At the time I went to find him, in April 2011, Liao was living in Dali, an ancient and extremely beautiful city that sits on the shores of Lake Erhai, at the base of the sacred Mount Cangai. One of the most amazing things about China is its vastness and consequent incredible variety: variety of languages, of peoples, of landscapes. There are jungles, there are deserts, there are glaciers; there is the Tibetan Plateau, the oasis towns of the northwest; there are villages without electricity and then there is Shanghai's Bund. China is diverse in its diversity because it is one hundred countries yoked together.

Dali, in the province of Yunan, is as different from Beijing as a small town in Romania is from London or Frankfurt. Its city walls are short by Chinese standards, only six kilometres long. The landscape here is mountainous but the vegetation is subtropical -- forests of emerald green -- and the soil is as red as the face of Mars. Flying into Kunming, near Dali.

It was Liao Yiwu's epic poem 'Massacre', composed in response to the 1989 student uprising, that landed him in jail. A howling dirge -- part funeral oration, part shamanistic chant -- it was passed around literary circles in Beijing on old-fashioned magnetic cassette tapes. Magnitizdat, this was called in the Soviet Union: the technological extension of the samizdat culture. From the perspective of the internet age it was unbelievably labour-intensive.

When Liao finally got out of prison and made his way home to Chengdu, he discovered that his wife had left him and taken their infant son; his former friends were too frightened to speak to him; his registration permit had been cancelled, so he couldn't find work and he could at any moment he expelled to the countryside. He was penniless and his only possession was a wooden flute that he had made in prison. So began Liao's new life as an itinerant busker on the streets of Chengdu.

One of the characteristics that most defines Liao is his incredible resourcefulness, or rather not so much resourcefulness as his ability to continue his work without any resources at all. Just prior to his imprisonment, Liao's writing had taken a new turn: he had begun to interview ordinary Chinese people, people with poor chances in life, the diceng as the Chinese call them: those on the bottom rung of the ladder, the innumerable dispossessed and hopeless whose stories no one ever hears. The reality of everyday life for the mass of ordinary Chinese citizens is not something that the government wants to see portrayed. Prison was intended to bring to an end Liao's subversive activities but instead he simply began to interview his fellow inmates, and when he was finally released to wander the streets of Chengdu he quickly befriended the prostitutes, beggars and restaurateurs of his new milieu and set about interviewing them as well. It is a shared characteristic of many of the brave and inspiring people I met in China that even in the depths of despair they still attempted to preserve their individual voice (though I should point out that while in jail, Liao was subjected to such inhuman treatment that he did attempt to commit suicide on two occasions). One month before I met Liao the government had imposed yet another travel ban on him to prevent him from attending the International PEN Festival in New York.

Today, Liao's writing only has an audience at all because of the efforts of a handful of total strangers, devoted people who have ever even met Liao but who found themselves deeply moved by his work and who were determined that it should see the light of day. Wenguang Huang, a Chinese American, first heard of Liao's stories on public radio in 1990 and immediately recognised its freshness and significance. He wrote to Liao and offered to translate his work, and to find it a publisher in the west. For years, they collaborated without having a chance to meet. But they were both crystal clear about what they were trying to do: show China as it really is, not as it is presented in the government-controlled media. Then came Peter Bernstein, a New York literary agent and the son of Robert L. Bernstein, who founded Human Rights Watch and Human Rights Watch China. Though Wenguang Huang and Liao Yiwu were unknown in the US, Peter Bernstein took Wenguang's approach seriously and instantly recognised the quality of Liao's work. The third angel of serendipity was Philip Gourevitch, a New York-based writer who at the time had just been made editor of the Paris Review. Gourevitch read a story by Liao that Wenguang sent him and decided that it had to be published. None of these three men has met Liao but thanks to their efforts on his behalf, Liao's work has now been widely disseminated. His collection of interviews with diceng, with the translated title The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, was published in the US in 2008 by Pantheon Books (a division of Random House), translated by Wenguang and with a foreword by Gourevitch. The interviewees include "the professional mourner", "the leper", "the peasant emperor", "the retired official", "the mortician", "the former red guard", "the Tianamen father", "the Falun Gong practitioner", "the illegal border crosser", "the grave robber", "the safecracker", "the migrant worker" and "the survivor". As Gourevitch writes in his foreword:

[Liao Yiwu] is a medium for whole muffled swathes of Chinese society that the Party would like to pretend do not exist: hustlers and drifters, outlaws and street performers, the officially renegade and the physically handicapped, those who deal with human waste and with the wasting of humans, artists and shamans, crooks , even cannibals -- and every one of them speaks more honestly than the official chronicles of Chinese life that are put out by the state in the name of the "people."

It is no exaggeration to say that Liao is a totemic figure among certain sections of the community of Chinese writers. And thanks to Bernstein, Wenguang and Gourevitch, and others who have backed his work in the west, he is now rated, as Gourevitch explains, with writers "as diverse as Mark Twain and Jack London, Nikolai Gogol and George Orwell, Francois Rabelais and Primo Levi".

On the way to Dali I had been overtly followed and as we made our way to a cafe, we were joined by two secret service agents. It was only Liao Yiwu's aloofness and utter contempt for them that steeled my nerves. The interview, which I had hoped to conduct in the same way that Liao conducts his own interviews with the diceng -- that is to say, in an informal manner that encourages the interviewee to explore even the most troubling aspects of his or her life -- ended up being somewhat surreal, and not just because it was being overheard by two members of the secret police. 

Because Liao's English is even worse than my Chinese, and I didn't want to misrepresent his words in any way, I had decided that we would need a translator. There was no way to arrange this from Hong Kong so I had gambled on finding someone in Dali. It is a tourist resort, so I hoped there would be plenty of English speakers around. However, this was a risky strategy for two reasons: first, I only planned to be in Dali for a few hours. The light aircraft that I'd flown in on, bumping over mountain tops like a rollercoaster, was returning to Kunming at midday. The second problem was that there was a distinct possibility that as soon as anyone started translating Liao's words they would realise who he was and the risks they were taking in helping him to talk to a foreigner, and they would stop. The two secret policemen weren't helping either. We made a strange-looking group as we shuffled through the old city searching for a translator: Liao slightly hunched, with a permanent expression of weary defiance; myself tall, white, more and more paranoid as the minutes passed; and then the two policemen skulking along behind us.

Thankfully, as this was Yunan province and we were far from Beijing, the police were comparatively relaxed. Liao told me that occasionally, depending on who was tailing him, he could persuade them o have a drink with him. After half an hour, just as I was beginning to panic, we found a youth hostel in a large, elegant old Qing dynasty-style villa, threadbare but copiously decorated with carved wood and red lacquer. I approached the manager, a middle-aged man with a kind, sensitive face. Although the weather was mild he was wearing a heavy brown leather jacket. His English was excellent and he agreed to translate. However, at this point, he still didn't know who Liao Yiwu was, though I did try to explain, to give him the chance not to get involved if he didn't want to risk it.

We sat down at the coffee table. The police agents, who hadn't taken off their coats, sat down at the next table. "Can you tell me your earliest memory?" I asked Liao. It's a question that he often asked his own interviewees. The translator duly translated the question, Liao nodded and paused and then said something back in Chinese. The translator, looking a little shocked, turned to me:

"He says his earliest memory is almost dying of starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Famine came and he was only four years old and he swelled up like a loaf of bread. Everyone thought he was going to die but then his mother took him to see a doctor and the doctor held him over a boiling cauldron filled with herbs. The herb steam cured him."

The translator glanced at Liao again -- who was sitting patiently, waiting for the next question -- and then he turned back to me and said, "Who is this guy?' I tried to explain again that he was a writer who had suffered at the hands of the government and whose work had been censored and suppressed. I thought that the interviewer would now call it a day but he didn't; he only became more interested, and he too was strangely unmoved by the presence of the secret police.

The questions continued and Liao's stories became more and more incredible. "The corpse walker," he said, "whose job it is to carry the dead body back to its final resting place in its home village, has a special code for communicating with hotel owners in rural Sichuan. They knock on the door and then shout out in a loud voice, "The god of happiness is here." That way the hotel is warned that the prospective guest has a dead body strapped to his back, hidden under a cloak, and he can either turn the corpse walker away quietly, or give him a room at the back and charge some extra dough. After the Cultural Revolution the Communists tried to crack down on this but of course it still goes on all the time because it is very important that they take their dead home for burial, whatever the Communists like to think."

I asked Liao about the people that he had interviewed. Several of his interviewees had made a particularly strong impression on me. Two of them he had met while in jail; one 'the peasant emperor', was an old man who claimed to be the emperor of China and insisted on everyone, prison staff included, addressing him as 'Your Highness'. He explained to Liao that he was in prison voluntarily as it was the only way for him to escape the constant and exhausting sexual demands that were otherwise made on him by the young women of his kingdom.

Another interviewee whose story had particularly compelled me was 'the safecracker'. His account of his own life was especially moving because it was quite clear that he was a highly intelligent, sensitive human being who had fallen into a life of crime because of a complete lack of opportunities. He was a very good safecracker and he was also charismatic and highly resourceful. At one point in his colourful career he was caught and sent to prison. It was one of the old prisons built by the Nationalists during the war and it had high, strong walls but the safecracker was determined to escape. Finally he figured out how to do it. Over the wall, he could hear the cleaners when they came to empty the prison toilets. He deduced that the cleaners didn't need to enter the compound because the cesspit beneath the toilet holes extended right under the walls, so that it could be accessed from the street outside. Unappealing as the prospect was, it was obvious to him what he would have to do to escape and so the next day, during the exercise period, he went to the toilet and then squirmed his way through the toilet hole and dropped like a bomb into the murk below. Luckily his theory was correct and he only had to swim for twenty feet, although he said that it felt like a lot further than that at the time and he thought he was going to go mad. He clambered out the other side onto the street, ran down the mountainside and eventually found his way into a student dormitory where he showered and stole some clothes. He went back to safecracking and became a rich man, with lots of villas in the north and more money than he knew what to o with. But he was bored and depressed. Because he was an intelligent, thoughtful man, he felt his life was shallow and worthless. Eventually, on a job in Beijing he had to crack the newest and best kind of safe. Naturally, he succeeded, but for some reason that he couldn't explain he just sat there with the safe door open, slowly setting fire to the bundles of money. When the police arrived, he went with them without complaining.

I asked Liao what had happened to the safecracker -- was he still in touch with him?

"He was executed," said Liao bluntly, drawing his finger across his throat.

As the interview went on, the translator became more and more involved. I would ask a question and he would translate it for Liao and then Liao would answer back in Chinese, but instead of immediately translating Liao's answer back into English, the translator would ask his own question and after a while the pair of them would be deep in conversation. Occasionally, they would remember my existence and the translator would turn round and summarise some aspect of Liao's life or thoughts for me.

"Lao Liao [lao means old and is a mark of friendly respect] says that many of the dissidents today start out as ordinary people with an ordinary gripe. Take for example the protests over the polluted baby formula milk. The parents who dared to complain and insist that the government do something were slapped down but they had lost their children and so they were angry and they didn't care any more about government threats and instead of being quiet they began to support other people's causes as well. You see the government creates dissidents out of people who have legitimate local grievances. Lao Liao says that they do this again and again because they can't handle even very minor criticism and so they end up turning anyone who opposes them into an extremist, even though all these people wanted in the first place was to complain that their cooking oil was full of shit or that the local Party had sold off a corner of their field to a property developer or something simple like that. It's the same with the case of Ai Weiwei. He was so shocked by the earthquake that he went down to Sichuan and spoke to the mothers and fathers. He heard about the poor-quality tofu-dregs houses and about the corruption and kickbacks to local politicians. He got involve and tried to help. Then the police attacked him and gave him a beating and he almost died and because of this he became even more of a rallying point and everyone wants to listen to his criticisms of the government. They are control freaks who can't handle criticism.

"Lao Liao says all he wanted to do, the only thing, was to describe what he saw around him every day. He wasn't calling for the overthrow of the Party, or demanding for the laws to be changed. He is just a historian a chronicler. A chronicler in cold blood who will say what he sees. But the government hated that so much that they threw him in jail. So then he wrote about what he saw in the jail. That made them even more mad. All he wanted was to be like Sima Qian, the old historial who wrote Records of the Grand Historian. Sima Qian was very objective and he wrote the first good history in China and he wrote lots of honest biographies of people. Nothing more. But the government can't bear Lao Liao saying out loud what is happening in front of everyone's noses. They are embarrassed  and ashamed. And when Ai Weiwei started to do it they couldn't bear him either. First they beat him, then when he doesn't stop but instead starts to criticise them for other things as well, they arrested him. But all they had to do was listen in the first place, then they wouldn't have created an international dissident."

Liao said he would show me his rented room, which was in a block a little way up the hillside. The translator came with us, but strangely the secret police didn't follow us there. When we left the cafe, I expected them to come along, but after a while I realised they had gone elsewhere. Liao's room was very peaceful, and from the balcony there was a view over the old city, all the way to Lake Erhai. At my request, Liao took out the bamboo flute that he had made in prison and played us a couple of tunes. I asked him how well he knew Weiwei and he said that he didn't know him well at all but he he met him in Chengdu in 2008, just after the Sichuan earthquake, when they had both gone there to investigate what lay behind the official government story. A mutual friend had introduced them.

"The mutual friend has since been disappeared," said Liao, matter-of-factly.

It was time for me to leave. I thanked Liao and then walked back with the translator to the youth hostel.

"He's an incredible man," said the translator. "That generation has been through so much."

With the help of a Chinese lawyer, Liao Yiwu is now suing the government for human rights abuses. His determination is undimmed: "I am trying to overcome, little by little, the fear that has been inflicted on me," he is quoted as saying in Wenguang Huang's translator's introduction to The Corpse Walker. "By doing so, I try to preserve my sanity and inner freedom."

Not long after our meeting, Liao left Dali and went by bus to a small village near the Chinese border with Vietnam. Following in the footsteps of one of his most famous interviewees, 'the border crosser', Liao packed a bag with supplies and headed off into the jungle. The border crosser had stumbled into a camp filled with remnants of the ultra-red Chinese forces, preparing for the next leg of a war that ended decades ago. He was forced to become a soldier until he finally managed to retreat back to China. Liao had obviously learned from this unfortunate man's blunder: after a journey the details of which have still not been fully clarified, though it includes transfers in Hanoi and Warsaw, Liao arrived in Berlin on 6 July 2011.

Artful

I've just finished reading Hanging Man by Barnaby Martin. It's about the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and it's utterly fascinating, especially if you would like to know about the art scene in China. Of course, this book was written in 2013 so much has happened since then. Over tea today, I learned that Weiwei has left China and is in exile. But this book introduced me to the sturdy spirits in China, who after a lifetime of Communism and being asked to subjugate their thoughts and feelings continue with heads bloody, but unbowed. Here, I excerpt some of my favourite parts of the book, which I will be running over the next few days.

The Stars group was founded by two factory workers, Ma Desheng and Huang Rui -- but to say that it was "founded" over-formalises its initial inception. It began as a small group of friends and acquaintances discussing the strange ideas that they held so dear, among them the possibility that there were better ways to gain access to reality than through revolutionary realism.

The story of the Stars group is an essential episode in the history of contemporary Chinese art. Although many of the Stars participants are still alive and can easily be tracked down and interviewed, and although many of the poets and writers who were part of the same extended social milieu are also happy to share their thoughts, it is nevertheless very difficult to piece together any kind of objective, reliable historical account of those early days. Over the intervening years many of the people involved have fallen out, some have travelled to the other end of the political spectrum and they all remember the key events very differently.

The group took their name from one of the concepts that regularly came up in their meetings, ziwo back into art after decades spent following the depersonalising rules of revolutionary realism. They believed above all else in the inalienable right of human beings to express themselves as they pleased. As Ma Desheng said: "Every artist is a star ... We called our group 'Stars' in order to emphasise our individuality. This was directed against the drab uniformity of the Cultural Revolution."

Together, they would meet and discuss their illegal counter-revolutionary ideas: their belief in the necessity of cultivating an individual outlook, of subjectivity and freedom of expression. 

So I missed a day....

I wasn't in the mood yesterday. And I was out till late. Which is not an excuse and I don't offer it as one.

And I was wondering whether to continue. Then I read this today, my daily Note from the Universe....and I thought, why not?

If you can get that there was once a "time" before "space", Jennifer, when all that existed was "Divine Intelligence..."

Then you can also get that there could never, later, be anything that wasn't "Divine Intelligence." Because what would it be made of? Where would it have come from?

Then you'd get that you must therefore be pure "Divine Intelligence" yourself and that there's only one explanation for you being you, here and now:

From the pinnacle of your royal magnificence, the zenith of your heavenly godhood, as pure "Divine Intelligence," you, exactly as you now are, with every freckle and blemish, are exactly who you, God, most wanted to be. And you knew exactly what you were doing.

Thy kingdom come,
The Universe

Halcyon Days

There is a beautiful passage in one of Montaigne's essays about the halcyon days (I never knew what that expression came from although I knew what it evoked, having read numerous mentions in so many different circumstances) last year when I was ploughing through his essays and I thought this would be a great place to share it. 

But that which seamen by experience know, and particularly in the Sicilian Sea, of the quality of the halcyons, surpasses all human thought. Of what kind of animal has nature even so much honoured the birth? The poets indeed say that one only island, Delos, which was before a floating island, was fixed for the service of Latona's lying in: but God has ordered that the whole ocean should be stayed, made stable and smooth, without waves, without winds or rain, while the halcyon produces her young which is just about the solstice, the shortest day of the year; so that by her privilege we have seven days and seven nights in the very heart of winter wherein we may sail without danger. Their females never have to do with any other male but their own whom they serve and assist all their lives, without ever forsaking him. If he becomes weak and broken with age, they take him upon their shoulders and carry him from place to place, and serve him till death. But the most inquisitive into the secrets of nature could never yet arrive at the knowledge of the wonderful fabric wherewith the halcyon builds her nest for her little ones, nor guess at the materials. Plutarch, who has seen and handled many of them, thinks it is the bones of some fish which she joins and binds together, interlacing them, some lengthwise and others across, and adding ribs and hoops in such manner that she forms at last a round vessel fit to launch; which being done, and the building finished, she carries it to the beach, where the sea beating gently against it shows where she is to mend what is not well jointed and knit, and where better to fortify the seams that are leaky, that open at the beating of the waves; and on the contrary, what is well built and has had due finishing, the beating of the waves does so close and bind together that it is not to be broken or cracked by blows either of stone or iron without very much ado. And that which is more to be admired is the proportion and figure of the cavity within, which is composed and proportioned after such a manner as not to receive or admit any other thing than the bird that built it: for to anything else it is so impenetrable, close, and shut, nothing can enter, not so much as the water of the sea. This is a very clear description of the building, and borrowed from a very good hand; and yet methinks it does not give us sufficient light into the difficulty of this architecture. Now from what vanity can it proceed to despise and look down upon, and disdainfully to interpret, effects that we can neither imitate nor comprehend?

A Feast of Reason

And so on Friday, after a night of not enough sleep (recidivist Netflix activity), I wake up late and move through the day sluggishly. There is an interview to transcribe (one hour and fifty minutes of it, because I waffled and went off-topic over and over again) and I am way behind on steps.

So after transcribing 30 minutes of it, I get up and take a walk downstairs to bring my total up to 5,000. When I come back to the office, it's 6,052.

So I think, I'll transcribe another 30 minutes and go for another 2,500 step walk.

I listen to "The Doctor Who Sat For A Year" on Audible as I walk. Which is kinda nice as the doctor is meditating, noting his thoughts, commenting on everything all over creation...I love how discursive his thoughts are. It's like listening to an essay by Montaigne (I spent more than 49 hours last year listening to essays by Montaigne - and I also read the book).

My intention is sidetracked because W is feeling stressed and we decide that going out for dinner would be a good thing to take her mind off the intense pressure of work.

It does. We talk about Korean drama serials instead. She talks about Voice and Let's Eat. And I talk about Hotel Del Luna.

I end the day 2,000 short of my target 10,000, but spending time with a good friend is always worth it.

We drink Bundaberg gingerbeer - a feast of reason, a flow of soul.

Beautiful Sunday

I have Miss Buncle Married queued up on Audible, two of my cats in bed with me...

It's going to be a lazy Sunday. 

If I can stop one heart from breaking...

This poem was popular in the 1990s, especially during the height of the Chicken Soup for the Soul phenomenon. But after that, it seemed to disappear into obscurity once more. At least, I have not seen it quoted in decades. So I thought I would share it here:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

More Tea

I've just gone for a walk to post a letter. The postbox was at some distance but that was a good thing because it helped me to reach my 10,000 steps today. (There was some doubt as I was far short when I got home and the new season of Grace and Frankie is out and that would usually have me glued to the TV until way past midnight.

But I only watched one episode while wolfing down my dinner, followed by 3 episodes of Big Bang Theory and then I decided to post my letter. And what do you know? It gave me exactly the number of steps I needed

But I'm not here to talk about tgat. I'm here to share yet another story from my book of tea which I have been reading every day religiously. 

One story a day.

No more. No less. 

And here it is. Tea to Last Lifetimes (by Aaron Fisher)

One of the most amazing experiences of my life happened when my whole family, including my very aged grandfather and great uncle, came to visit me in Taiwan. I took the whole group to see a tea master. The eight of them sat around the table chit-chatting about how exotic the tea room was, with its walls and walls of tea, waterfalls, and bonsai trees. Eventually, my teacher passed me a sly grin and reached behind him to a jar of very old pu-erh tea. Brewing the deep and dark liquor - - leaves ancient and wise, connected to the spirit of Nature -- changed the entire atmosphere of the room. Within minutes, it was enshrouded in a deep and peaceful silence, only the waterfall singing in the background. For the next two hours, I sat with my family in complete quiet, connected to one another as never before: never in my entire life before that day had my family and I ever sat in quiet; never had we been so close.

My mother wept with joy; my grandfather cried too, saying later that he felt the presence of my then recently departed grandmother. The power that tea can have -- the life-changing presence and connection that it may offer when prepared in the right environment -- became clearer to me than ever before. I share this experience, so personal, to show that one need not be a saint, a meditator, or even a tea lover to experience the profundity of what a tea ceremony steeped in the Tao can offer.

In this day and age, loud and cluttered, a drop or two of quiet emptiness is forceful enough to make the average person weeo. Nothing is needed more. When we study the history of tea, we find such sweeping statements as "for thousands of years tea was medicine to Chinese people," as if this somehow approximated a description of the largest part of man's relationship with this majestic plant. Authors often begin where the brush first touches paper, feeling more comfortable standing on historically verifiable ground. It takes a greater affinity with the Leaf to approach the much larger substrata of prehistory. Sure, it's true that tea was "medicine" for thousands of years before it was ever a commodity, social pleasure, or hobby. But that word, at least in English, is a bit misleading. It was "medicine" in the way that Native Americans used that word: "healing" or "with spiritual presence/power." 

In the beginning, tea was eaten and steeped by aboriginal shamans who used it to heal, to inspire meditation and to commune with divinities. Some of the earliest references to tea are as offerings to spirits as part of rituals to communicate with them. Slowly, over time, the steeped leaf became an essential brew in the life of Taoist mendicants. These hermits sought out wild bushes, claiming that tea was an ingredient in the "Morning Dew", which was the elixir of life and key to immortality. They drank tea for health, to clarify the mind, and to promote meditation as well as transmission from master to student. 

From martial arts to mathematics, the tradition of student and teacher sharing tea continues even today. If the student brews the tea and the master accepts, it is also an acceptance of the student into the lineage. More poignantly, when the master brews tea and presents it to the student there is a direct transmission of what Eastern mystics believe to be an ineffable wisdom, only available to experience. What could be more symbolic than the master brewing his mind into a bowl, which the student then consumes, taking that wisdom into himself? 

When Buddhism first came to China, it was heavily influenced by indigenous shamanism and Taoism. Anthropologists call such blending of beliefs "syncretism", suggesting that newfound systems never completely replace the old ways, but rather blend, forming new traditions. No doubt, the first Buddhists arriving from India and Tibet were served tea by the local Taoist masters, and found much concordance in their mutual appreciation for quiet, meditation, and completion through Nature. Very soon after, tea was incorporated into the lives of the burgeoning monasteries. In fact, every single tea mountain in China is also home to a famous monastery. Sometimes the monks brought the trees, for they were indeed the first farmers; but more often, they built their monasteries on mountains where wild tea bushes grew. Tea drinking, offerings, and ceremonies were recorded as part of their monastic code, and such an essential part of the Buddhist life that when Japanese monks first came to the mainland to study and carry Buddhism back to their homeland, they couldn't do so without also bringing knowledge of tea -- production, preparation, and even seeds and saplings to plant. They said, "The taste of tea is the taste of Zen, and there is no understanding of one without the other." 

Primarily, it was in the Tang dynasty that the royalty and literati were first introduced to tea during their visits to monasteries. They wished to take tea home and perhaps recapture the quietude that had transformed them on the mountain. Slowly, tea was commoditised, heralding new farming techniques, trades and eventually tea houses, private brewing for pleasure and all the other well-documented migrations of tea throughout Asia and beyond to the West. No matter what reason you've found a love for tea, it is important to remember tea's heritage, which is ultimately Nature itself; passing beyond the Buddhist to the Taoist and their steaming bowls, past the early shamans, we come at last to eons of simple trees in the forests of southern China, silent and undisturbed by man. 

To many it may seem almost like a fairy tale that those Taoist mystics cloudwalking around ancient China were able to find a sense of oneness, transcendence and connection to the universal energy when today people all over the world drink tea all the time and never get close to those sensations. My experience with my family that day proved to me that it doesn't take much for us to find a sense of tranquility and completion through tea: just provide a quiet space with a bit of respect for tea and people can change. I'd say it was strange if I hadn't seen it happen so many times. In an age of flurrying activity, some ancient stillness is needed more than ever. Rather than sweeping your tea into the hustle and bustle of your normal workday, why not try taking time to slow down and have a cup of quiet? Aren't you a part of the same world those sages dwelt in? When asked to share a tea memory, I found myself passing through the experience I had with my family to the realisation that I was connected to the same world all those who have ever practised Cha Dao were connected to. Sharing in an ancient tradition of Cha Dao, I share all my elders' tea memories as my own. As you drink your tea, are you too feeling as they felt? Do the forests not soothe your soul in the same way? Perhaps we need not ask. A sip is enough. Our breath warmed, we return to the mountain hermitage of the heart. 

Zen and the art of cleaning kitty litter

If there's one thing I hate about my morning chores, it's cleaning the kitty litter. The smell, the pure ickyness of the task, the... (I could go on for ages so let me stop here). Which is why Tuesdays and Saturdays are stellar days for me because I don't need to be cleaning no kitty litter.

Rose does it then.

But now that I've started meditating, I've stopped actively resisting the task (the resistance is what makes it all that much harder) and started to embrace it.

Yes, sweep up all the sand on the floor in a Zen way.

Yes, scoop out the poop.

If it stinks hold breath.

But in a peaceful and not a disgusted way.

Then scoop out clumps of sand held together by cat pee. (This part is stinkier).

Hold breath.

Peacefully.

I can honestly say that the last two days of cleaning kitty litter have gone a lot better.

Progress?

Maybe.

The year so far

I purchased an Audible book written by a doctor who sat for a year and listened to his busy thoughts and journalled about them. It gave me pause. I had initially intended to fill this blog with excerpts from other books but I thought, why not plot my own progress through the year? I mean, obviously, not all posts will relate to that and I will still be sharing cool stuff I read.

Note: It's the middle of the first month and I have already finished three books this year:

1. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
2. Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
3. Miss Buncle's Book by D. E. Stevenson

The last, which was the December offering of my Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights subscription, was by far my favourite. Set in an English village in the 1930s, it's a tale about a spinster who writes a book about her village under an assumed name. Because she has no imagination, she writes what she knows. The book provokes outrage and recriminations - and becomes a bestseller. You can't get more fairytale-like than that.

Anyway, yesterday I walked into the office and ran up against someone I don't like and don't talk to, in fact, haven't spoken to since I joined this company. Usually, walking behind this person, my feelings of hostility would simmer and boil over.

But what's the use of meditating if I allow my knee jerk reactions to always take control?

So instead, I concentrated on feeling neutral.

That's it.

No hostility.

At the end of last year, I signed up with Calm, my favourite meditation app, again. I had let my subscription lapse and I did feel the lack of Calm in my life. In all senses of the word. Getting onto YouTube for a meditation video - well, I missed Tamara Levitt.

I haven't got to the place where I can wish my enemies or people I don't like loving kindness. But I'll take baby steps and maybe, just refrain from wishing them ill.

I also made a resolution to go to the little gym downstairs every day and work up a sweat. After starting out promisingly, I slipped into indolence and indifference. So I started it up again. It's one of those bandwagon things. I keep falling off...but the trick is in getting up again and to keep on keeping on. One of the books I read last year warned me against measuring results because a lack of these at the beginning tends to throw cold water over every scheme and have me wondering...why bother? It's not going to make any difference anyway.

So yeah, those are the things I've got lined up so far.

I'll check in here from time to time.

The Inconveniences of Life

This is a delightful book, a thought experiment, if you will, about an aristocrat who remained in Moscow, after the revolution, neither executed nor fleeing, and looking at the influence he exerted over his surroundings, being a gentleman, the sensibility he brought to everyday things and happenings, and looking at the changes taking place in Russia through his eyes. 

Towles has a light touch; tragedy is but gently touched upon, you get the pathos without the gore.

But one my favourite passages in this book has to do with his change in philosophy over the years...as an aristocrat he went out of his way to spare himself trouble in little things. As an adult, he saw that the things that gave him trouble were what made his life worth living.

"I'll tell you what is convenient," he said after a moment. "To sleep until noon and have someone bring you breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment's notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka - - and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the Inconveniences that have mattered to me the most."

Psalm 42

My friend, Esther, sent me the following testimonial over WhatsApp. Over the past two years, there have been incidents where you linger over a deathbed, willing the person not to die, and believing there is nobody there to hear you. 

No miracle.

So you can imagine that I read this message with somewhat close attention. It lifted my spirit (the way tales of miracles always do, especially miracles happening to someone you know or you have met...because so far, all the miracles I read are about other people, people I don't know or haven't met).

So here goes. This is the story of Jude Antoine's (google him on YouTube if you don't know who he is) heart attack this Christmas and what happened after. Told by his daughter Alicia Antoine.

When my dad Jude Antoine got home from Indonesia on December 15th, 2019, he had a really bad cough. He was weak and was always wanting to sleep. Because of his previous experience with "broncho-pneumonia", we assumed that these symptoms of tiredness and cough were related to his weak lungs.

Despite feeling this way, on December 22nd (Sunday), he decided to go on to give a talk at a family Christmas gathering in Kajang. We all travelled to Kajang as a family. As he was preaching, we noticed that he was sweating profusely. When we asked if he was okay, he said that he was tired and that he just needs to rest.

After the session around 4pm, we drove home. During the drive he complained of uneasiness in the chest but attributed it to exertion during the preaching. Upon reaching home, he took a short nap, but woke up still sweaty and still with the discomfort in his chest area. Not knowing what else to do, we sat and prayed, trusting that he would feel better. Two hours went by and he still was the same. Hoping that a meal would make him feel better all four of us took the car and drove to a McDonald's drive-thru to get him some porridge.

As we were waiting in the drive-thru, my sister (Lavinia) noticed that Papa kept massaging his left arm. She asked him why and he said that it was because his t-shirt was uncomfortable. When we got home after getting the food, Lavinia was convinced hat these were all symptoms of a heart attack. Immediately we three insisted that we go to the hospital to check it out. Hearing this, Papa started to freak out (he hates hospitals) and tried to convince us to go the day after. Ignoring him we got into the car and dragged him with us. This was around 10pm on Sunday night.

We managed to get to General Hospital Kuala Lumpur emergency department in 5 minutes (GOD IS SO GOOD!). The male nurse in the Emergency checked him and decided to do an ECG to check the activity of his heart. Looking at the results, the nurse ran out of the room without saying anything. Papa got dressed and was slowly walking out of the room. As he walked out, the same nurse came back running with a hospital stretcher. He told Papa that he is having a heart attack as we speak and that he needed to lay down.

As they pushed him to the emergency, a doctor passed by and asked what was going on. The nurse gave him the ECG results. The doctor looking at the ECG strip responded by saying "oh wow...oh wow...oh wow...oh wow" four times. I was so confused, so I asked the doctor what was happening. He looked at me and said that Papa is having a heart attack and that the doctor in Emergency would tell us more about the situation.

And so, we got to the Emergency. Papa had three doctors around him discussing what was the best way to treat him. Finally, the doctors decided to send him to Institute Jantung Negara (IJN) (a cardiology specialist centre about 10 minutes away) because they did not have a cardiologist at that time of the night. Knowing this, my sister and I decided to go to IJN first, while Mummy waited with Papa for the ambulance to get ready.

As we were reaching our car in the hospital carpark, I received a frantic call from Mummy. She was crying hysterically and said: "Alicia! Come back now! Papa needs both of you now!" Filled with fear, both of us ran back to the Emergency -- praying out loud. When we got there, we saw Mummy on the floor crying. I asked her what happened and she said that Papa's heart stopped beating.

I couldn't believe it. So I rushed into the room where we left Papa. As I opened the door of the room, I saw many doctors and nurses surrounding Papa and on top of him on the bed -- trying to resuscitate Papa. One nurse shouted at me, saying, "Please go out NOW, your father needs us right now," and pushed me out of the room.

I was so scared I didn't now what to do. I started crying. That's when I saw this Malay lady dressed in a cleaner's uniform, sweeping the floor outside the room Papa was in. She looked at me and said, "DOA", which is "pray" in Malay. At that moment, it felt like I saw Jesus. It felt like I heard Him say, "Lean on Me, Alicia."

Knowing how stressed I was, Lavinia pushed the Bible into my hand to distract me from what was happening. Whilst still crying and trembling, I opened the Bible. The first thing I saw was Psalm 42:11: "Why are you cast down, O my soul...Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my help and my God."

This verse pierced my heart. It was an assurance from God that I will again praise God as long as I put my hope in Him. I prayed out loud, commanding Papa's heart to beat again, declaring the name of Jesus LOUDLY in that entire emergency ward. It felt like I was praying for hours.

And then, the same cleaner lady (who seemed to be sweeping the same spot on the floor for 30 minutes) comes back to me and says that Papa is okay. I was wondering how she would know. She never went inside the room. I was so confused because it didn't make sense.

At this point, the doctors came out of Papa's room and said that Papa's heart is beating again. I walked into the room to look at Papa and he was wide awake, looked completely normal but confused. He said hi to me, held my hand and asked me why I was crying. It was as if nothing had happened to him. He had no clue what had just happened -- his heart had stopped for 2-3 minutes. The doctors had done CPR but it failed and ultimately they used a defibrillator to kickstart his heart. (Interesting note: we never saw the cleaner lady again, after Papa became conscious).

After a few minutes (around 1am on December 23rd), the IJN ambulance was ready to take him to the other hospital where they were ready to proceed with an angioplasty procedure immediately. The nurse at the IJN reception said the procedure should take about 30 minutes; anything longer would mean there were complications.

At the IJN waiting lounge, we were surrounded with so much love and support. We had family with us there physically and family all over the world praying and declaring healing over Papa's life. We knelt, cried and prayed aloud in the lounge. The presence of God was so strong in that room, even the security guard was watching. It took 1 1/2 hours and the doctors managed to put in a stent. There was one major block. Doctors say it was a miracle he survived that massive heart attack in the Emergency considering the block. If Papa had been anywhere else when the massive heart attack hit, he would not have made it. The hand of God was all over us that entire day.

Even when death was in front of us and every part of me told me to give up, God told me to put all my hope in Him. I saw His mighty Hand as I trusted Him and put all my hope in Him. He is Yahweh Yireh, our Provider. If God is for us, not even a heart that stopped beating can be against us.

All glory to God!

Alicia Anne Antoine

Date: 6th January 2020.

Want The Change

I read this book many years ago; it was my introduction to Roger Housden. After that I went back and bought as many of his "10 poems" books as possible because I really loved the essays that went along with them. They were each a meditation on the poem itself, on life...not in a lit crit way, but more, in a way that made it come alive and become personal for me. The way it was for him.

I couldn't get this particular poem out of my mind...and I want to finally share it with you today. All the times I was not doing this blog, I would find wonderful things to share, and then, forget about them.

So maybe that's why I've restarted it.

So I have a placeholder for all the good thoughts, the bits of wisdom, the beauty that I stumble upon day by day.

The miracles.

Over to you, Roger.

SONNETS TO ORPHEUS Part Two, XII

By Rainer Maria Rilke

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears,
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed,
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne,
becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

This is a beautiful translation of one of the poem's in Rilke's last, and many say his greatest, work, Sonnets to Orpheus. Certainly, the Sonnets have found their rightful place in the canon of great twentieth-century European literature; and this sonnet in particular has found its way into my own heart as a resounding call to new life after the eventual demise of my marriage with Maria, the same Maria I first met in a retreat centre in the middle of hay fields. That encounter was described in the original volume of Ten Poems to Change Your Life. This sonnet signals for me the other end of the story.

The Sonnets to Orpheus came about in a mysterious way. Before the First World War, Rilke had begun work on what he felt would be his most inspired work, the Duino Elegies, but during the war he found it increasingly impossible to write, and only in 1921 did he find the peace of mind and also the place where the muse could speak to him again. In that year, funded by wealthy friends, Rilke moved to the thirteenth-century Chateau de Muzot, in Switzerland. In a seminal moment of serendipity, his lover at the time, Baladine Klossowska, left a postcard pinned above his desk, and then withdrew. It showed Orpheus under a tree with his lyre, singing to the animals.

For months Rilke wrote nothing but correspondence, and a lot of it, until suddenly, early in 1922, a great wave of poetry surged up within him and poured onto the pages in the form of a series of sonnets to Orpheus. In just over two weeks, fifty-five poems arrived complete, in the standard sonnet form of fourteen lines with end rhymes. They arrived with an astonishing speed and fluidity that seemed to suggest they had been dictated to him rather than having germinated in his mind. In between, the sonnets, he also wrote the seventh, the eight, the ninth, and the tenth Duino Elegies, completing that series as well.

Now Orpheus was a god and a poet, and the sweetness of his voice would cause trees to walk and animals to draw near. When his beloved Eurydice died from a snake bite, he went down into the Underworld and enchanted its ruler, Hades, with his music, persuading him to allow him to return to Earth with Eurydice. Hades agreed on condition that Orpheus not turn to look at his beloved on the journey, though he did, of course, just before reaching the light; otherwise, there would have been no story. His punishment was to be torn to shreds by the Maenads, the female worshippers of Dionysus. They threw his head into the river Hebrus, and it floated, still singing, down to the sea. In this last detail, we have the perfect image for Rilke's insistence throughout his work that the poet be a praising person; that whatever his fate, his song is all, and will not perish.

Dismemberment is a theme in every religion -- from the ancient Egyptian god Osiris, through the Tibetan meditation practice called chod (in which you visualise your own dismemberment), down to the Christian celebration of the Eucharist, "This is my body, broken for you."

In the sacrifice of the idea of the bodily self -- the identification of self with form -- lies the possibility of transcendence and of a new life. And if there was ever a poet who urged his readers to transform their lives in this way, it was Rilke. One of his best-known poems, the "Archaic Torso of Apollo," even ends with the lines

for there is no place at all
that isn't looking at yo. You must change your life.

In the sonnet before us here, he urges the change upon us in the very first line. For change happens in every moment. Not just the events of our lives, but the cells in our bodies, our memories, even our sense of who we are, all shift in a moment, often imperceptibly. We, on the other hand, tend to nurture a fixed idea of who we are and where we are going. We harbour notions of what is good for us and what is not, and try to organise and strategise accordingly.

Yet life, does what it does with scant concern for our preferences, so the poet is urging us to look beyond the parade of circumstances and events to the fundamental fact of change itself. In wanting the change, we are aligning ourselves with truth, with what is already happening anyway. We flow, rather than self-consciously make our own way. And in that flow the sense of who we are and where we are going becomes more malleable and fluid, more responsive to conditions around us instead of bound by fixed beliefs and agendas. In the flow of change, self-forgetting happens, and a deeper remembrance can emerge, the remembrance of being always and ever joined to a greater life -- not as another idea or elegant concept, but as a lived experience in the moment.

In another translation of this first line, Herter Norton renders it as Will the transformation. Not just change from one appearance, one set of contingencies, to another, then, but transformation: a metamorphosis involving a different order, a different quality of being and seeing altogether. Not a horizontal shift from one room in the mind to another, but a vertical ascent into a quality beyond the original mindset altogether. (Is it merely by chance that Rilke spent many hours with Baladine -- his lover who pinned the postcard of Orpheus by his desk -- reading Ovid's Metamorphoses?)

So Rilke is urging us to want the change that is happening, to embrace it, whatever it is. If we are in the middle of a divorce, let it be that; if we have lost our job, let it be that, and if we are dying, may it be so. Of course, it's not easy. Nobody willingly allows themselves to be dismembered, torn apart, crushed like a grape between fingers. The ego, our idea of who we think we are, will never assent to self-sacrifice. The impulse must come from something else in us, another organ of awareness, you might say, that knows somehow that, however much it hurts, however much we may be on the rack -- a sacrificial lamb, it may seem to us -- that what is happening is true, necessary, inevitable, and ultimately, therefore, good.

Easy enough to say, but it didn't quite feel like that for me when, at the beginning of 2006, eight years after first meeting her, I finally parted from my wife, Maria -- the same Maria I had met in near-mythic circumstances in what felt like a visitation from destiny. She was a muse for me, and her beauty and thoughtful calm inspired me till the end. Yet there were also deep incompatibilities, which for a while we both let the charisma, the magic of our togetherness, gloss over. But increasingly, over the space of a few years, it became evident that our lives had very different trajectories and priorities.

With hindsight, I can see that the end had been whispered in my ear from the very beginning. A week or two after we parted ways at the retreat house (Maria to return to her family in New Jersey, and I to a writer's cabin to continue working on a book, with no plans to make contact again), I was awoken early one morning with a start. I would not call this a dream, more of a visitation; three owls were sitting on a branch, all eyes on me. As I stared back at them, they flew one by one in front of me: their hooting filling, it seemed, the entire room. My mind was filled with two words: Attention! Attention! Warning! Warning! That same afternoon, Maria e-mailed me for the first time. I didn't even know she had my address, since we had not exchanged any details when leaving the retreat centre. I knew this was the what the owls were telling me to pay attention to -- it was my choice to respond or not, and either way, it would be fateful. I went ahead and responded. Two years later, we were married.

Many things contribute to the end of a marriage, and there is no need for me to explore them here. Suffice it to say that when the time finally came for our parting, we were both more than ready for it due to our different reasons. But that doesn't mean it was easy, at least for me. It's one thing to know you need to part and start a new life; it's another to say good-bye and close the door on a crucial chapter in your life -- to want the change, to will the transformation.

For the first time in my life, I was without a significant other to relate to. My three relationships had spanned thirty years,  with almost no gap between them. To begin with, being alone was, and still is at times, a strange and sometimes disorienting sensation. Of necessity, my attention was returned to my own life, distinct from anyone else's. I saw how much energy and time I had given to concerning myself with the life of someone else. You might call it codependency, or simply an engagement in the joys and struggles of someone you love. It was probably a mixture of both.

In any event, over time. I have come to value myself as an individual, rather than as part of a couple, in a new way. I had always assumed myself to be well grounded in my own individuality, and in many ways I was. But it is only in the experience of having no external referent, either physical or imaginary, that I have come to feel both a deeper substance and also a deeper tenderness in my own life, which was allowed me to be more porous and open to the mystery of how everything unfolds, than I had before.

Intermittent loneliness, along with the grief of our parting, and the relief of knowing, despite everything, the rightness of it all, would often vie for my attention, as did the knowledge that a new life was beckoning me in California. I had made my first home there after arriving in the United States from England, and I had always felt more at home in that state than on the East Coast (where we had moved to be near Maria's children), with its more sombre weather and temperament. The day after I arrived in California, I wept for a long time in the arms of a dear friend, who held me like her child. It was all very humbling, a necessary dismembering, as I see it now to have been.

But the shift, the full surrender to the change that Rilke speaks to in this poem, actually occurred for me some time later, when I read another poem, called "The God Abandons Antony," by C.P. Cavafy. Or perhaps I should say it was articulated then, and was already present, unspoken, within me, waiting for the right words to give it birth. Astonishing poem! Antony and Cleopatra have lost their cherished city of Alexandria. Antony has also lost the protection of his personal god, Dionysus, god of wine and music. The poet commands him to go to the window and listen to the beautiful music of a procession as it passes in the street -- to listen, knowing that this is what he is losing. To listen

to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria that you 
are losing.

Reading those lines was like undoing the last button on a tight shirt. A few days later I visited Maria, sat down on the sofa with her, and read her this poem. I wanted her to know that I could feel the richness of what I was losing, that I would not wish to diminish our life together by suggesting she didn't matter to me, that I would always recognise and praise the gifts she had brought into my life. How could I not? And yet we were already gone from each other.

The sadness, and yes, sometimes the anger, would surface every now and then for a while after that, but essentially I was released from my own morbid preoccupations into a new life with new possibilities that were far more congruent with my natural inclinations than the life I had known with Maria could ever have allowed. And I know she would say the same.

A year or so later, I returned to New York for a friend's book party. There she was, and we fell into each other's arms, though only for two minutes -- that was enough for us both to know the love hadn't gone anywhere, even though our lives were now on very different tracks and in different time zones with no regrets.

This is exactly what it felt like when I first read this image in Rilke's poem:

... Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears.

This awakens in me the same clarify and sense of joy that I felt on reading Cavafy's lines. The love and the life I knew with Maria were never so bright as when I could fully acknowledge their leaving. It's like death in a way, the proximity of which can sharpen our vision and deepen our gratitude. A friend just told me that he has known for the last two weeks that he has prostate cancer. These two weeks, he said, have been the most alive in his life. Far from feeling fear or grief (perhaps these are still to come), every moment has had a clarity and sharpness he has hardly ever known. It's as if some deeper vision has been switched on, which enables him to see with great intensity the fullness of each moment.

I find the next image, owing as much to the translation as to Rilke, one of the most beautiful of all.

The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

The image has made me appreciate with completely fresh eyes those nude figures turning away from the viewer that you can see in the work of so many artists throughout history, from Roman times to Picasso. It's not just a matter of perspective, but of the interplay of absence and presence, of an eye that can flow into the future even as it is happening in the present.

The next stanza warns us that the more we cling to a form, whether it be the form of a relationship, a career, or a belief system, the more prone we are to earthquakes and lightning bolts. The more hard and rigid something is, the more susceptible it is to the forces of change, both within and without. And since change is life, change will keep coming right up until the final big change. Which is why it is better, rather than protecting ourselves with some false sense of detachment, to allow what is happening, to flow with it like water, another life image.

Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and with ending, begins.

Life and time are a spiral, then, rather than merely a circle with its endless repetitions. T.S. Eliot, too, reminds us of this in "Little Gidding":

And the end of all exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

When Maria and I parted, she was once again living in New Jersey near her children, where she had been when I first met her; and I returned to the same town of Larkspur, California. We are both back where we started, and yet not, for everything is different, starting with ourselves. In the eight years we were together, we inspired each other in our work of writing and speaking. Maria helped me feel more at home in the world of the humdrum every day, less identified with some idea of my own specialness, and yes, more open to the invisible workings of grace in a life. Love always changes us, whatever the eventual outcome of the relationship is. And overall, the love and the life I have shared with Maria have allowed me to feel more at home in my own skin, more at peace with the way things are and with who I am.

There were times soon after our parting when I thought I would never love again; when I felt that if this love, which had started so auspiciously, and had so much of the flavour of grace about it, could end, then nothing could be believed in anymore. There were moments when I felt cheated by life, fooled by my own fate. I was wrong, of course. Like Daphne, the nymph who transformed herself into a laurel tree to outwit the designs of Apollo, we too, against all odds, can miraculously enter another life. We have only to bow to the inevitable and become the wind. Eventually, and not always without a struggle, the wind is what I became.