POEM: Flitter, Follow, I am Your Friend...

Apropos for stationary insanity, 

willing participant: 

listen, 

you hear that comes in a way of triwling.

Flitter, follow, 

I am your friend.

Brighten goose gabble streamlined imperium, 

tackling a fastidious and notable chair, 

crash down the chair foes, 

crash, 

splinter of wood in groundskin, 

ground taper flying splinters are shards, 

toothpicks, willing outburst in the detritus of mother nature. 

Like a protest.

Like a protest they fly through, 

like a Google sweepstake panorama, 

across deserts and mountains and oceans, 

those havens of generality and all-forgiving mothers to creation, 

and the plywood makeshift batton explodes on impact with the transparent riot shield, 

the meeting of nature and nurture, 

a gruelling endeavor to drive each other into and beyond the precipice.

Seeing the abuses, 

leveled up in arrogant impiety to the cruel wielders of power, 

taking batton in hand, 

refusing to heed the words of his comrades 

who cowered together 

in an outflanked huddle, 

his objective was simple: 

to crack the helmet of military police officer 69041.

Poustinia: Belize's Land Art Park

I am in Benque Viejo, a backwater rural settlement on the outskirts of the Guatemalan jungle. We are technically in Belize, but so close to the border that I can see the lights of a Guatemalan village over the trees and hills.

It is night now, and the insects are crawling all over my screen. Sometimes I have to flick one off just to read a particular word again as I type. There are all kinds of sounds and strange things whizzing around. When I return to my cabin to sleep in the hammock I have to chase out the bats which chase eachother around the ceiling, and I hear them all night, because they live in my roof and come out to suck the blood of the cows, which I can hear now have begun to move around.

They all wear huge bells and all day and night you can hear the clanging. It is something amazing that I should record. You would not believe the sound. It is like an orchestra of retarded children if you gave them all wooden spoons and saucepans and told them to beat the tune of Waltzing Matilda.

Tomorrow we go into the Poustinia land art park which blew my mind. You are just walking through the jungle and will see the most strange things. A statue of a woman standing with an enormous chain wrapped around her entire body, all kinds of broken down cars and crazy monuments and trees made out of car-tires. Afterwards we may get out the shotgun and shoot down these eagles which have been eating the chickens.

Tomorrow I will try to find the image of the last one the old man shot out of the sky. He took a picture of it, killed it (probably ate it) and then published the picture as the final image in the final book of the exhibition series. An epic photo as well, as the eagles stare is piercing and the blood is all over its wings.

Soon we return back over the border to the city, but there is still much to do. I have to submit a thesis draft by tomorrow, but Im not even nearly finished. It will be difficult to stay awake. very difficult.

All our power is solar and in short supply. I get a lot of time to sit quietly and smell the cow shit. The food here is much better than in the city. We get three meals a day, tamales tortillas rice noodles and fresh eggs, courtesy of the surviving hens, then espresso made of the finest coffee,  which thanks to free trade, is so cheap that it is now worthless as a cash crop.


In the wilderness my memory takes a turn for the worse. I look at the caretaker and his Guatemalan boys and can understand how easy it is to lose track of time and motion. They rarely bathe and dont seem to do anything all day except take the cows to pasture and chop the shit out of things with machetes.

When I am an old man and retreat from the world there will be no need to remember all the things I have held onto. But until then, I will avoid the jungle.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie: A Short-Short Story

Thursday, 28 July, 2011

Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize

I was sitting in my cabin, on the outskirts of the jungles of Belize, on the border of Guatemala, where the anti-aircraft missiles used to point at. 

I was just sitting there and behind me the rotweiler pup splayed out sideways, like a sleeping black virgin, begins to whine and whistle in secret distress. His eyes were closed and he was so young and his barks were more like rubber toy squeeks: like he was a bath toy and there was some invisible ghost sitting on his chest. 

It didn't go on long, and then he was asleep again. 

The whole affair must have taken only a couple of seconds, and any other time it would have just passed me by, just like any other dream. I rarely remember my own dreams, let alone a dog's. And I couldn't wake him up and ask what was the matter. But I wanted to. And it seemed he was crying out for someone, a plea for help, to be lifted away from some malicious pursuer.

Here the lands are filled with barking dogs. They bark for no reason at all, simply to communicate, saying hello to the other invisible barks coming from a hundred yards away. And the dogs are all chained up to trees, never let off to go and meet or even see where the other barks are coming from. They are like a correspondence community transmitting in nocturnal barks. 

They are not vicious – well, not most of them – the highest fences have the worst dogs, and strays are the most languid and carefree of the lot. It doesn't matter how well they are kept, they all share the same meager hardships; the fleas, the heat, the rain and their masters. It doesn't matter who the master is, the culture of master is always the same. JD says that their job is simply to sit there and bark when someone comes. These two have spent years tied to the same spot.

They have their job, and they get fed, and if we let them off the leash they won't know what to do with themselves. They'll eat all the chickens and curdle the cows' milk. So we leave them there in the brush, tied up with their heavy chains, and the beauty of it is their dancing. 

Sometimes I'm on my way up the hill to the barbed-wire fence to take a leak and let the heat out, and I see them: They've pricked their ears up, raising their necks attentive to my every move, and the one up the hill under the cedar tree will start to dance. He's learned the chain will bite into him if he jumps forward, so he's started to jump backward with his hind legs. He'll keep on like that, dancing in circles around his chain and I am struck with the enthusiasm he pays his leaking visitor.

This visit to the farm I wake up late most days, usually 6:00 a.m., for my icy cold bath of rainwater, and when I stand there naked in the dawn grey, pickled from head to toe in white goosebumps, I look at the cringing mut on the other side of the barbed-wire fence and wonder why is he frightened? There must be something I cannot see which has warned him, some guiding hand to take the noise of the dance from his bark and his spring. 

Whenever I approach to bring him scraps of chicken skin or bones, he'll watch me while hiding behind his kennel. Last time was just the opposite, and he was barking and straining at the chain, drooling from his chops all over the sharp stones under his feet. Is this the same dog that I remember? Julio the caretaker says most dogs don't live longer than a few years here, as there is no shortage of dogs on the farms.

I turned around and that pup lying on the concrete floor behind me is watching me. Like he is sniffing my spirit to see if I will chase him. I pretend to ignore him and just turn around, so he stays lying there. But I'm hungry and so get up to have some breakfast. There was an eagle that came before I was here. She butchered twenty hens and JD brought it down with his shotgun. He took a picture of the wounded bird and put it in a book. He is a wounded man, and is losing too much money. 

People keep stealing things from under his nose. And when I went to the caretaker's house to ask about the eggs, Umberto the caretaker's assistant said there were no eggs. He's a young boy and doesn't yet know how to lie properly. I shrugged and went back to tell JD, who hit the roof. Too many setbacks and he is behind schedule.

The eggs are there, but I don't want to beat it out of Umberto, because I just arrived for the second time, and it's not me who pays him. JD should have the honour of beating him: You should get what you pay for. Instead, he sent me back to speak with Umberto, to offer him a dollar to go buy eggs from the neighbouring caretaker, who probably hates him. Umberto suddenly remembers that there are actually eggs and goes inside his house to retrieve them, but I send him for more anyway, as he has already eaten too many and there are only two left.

How do you treat a worker who lies to you like that? JD's inclination was to pummel him, but he thought better of it because that will only make him resent and steal from you. Eggs are one thing, but they might sell a cow and say it died, or break into the cabin while we are away. The whole irony, JD says, is that we treat them better than they treat their own. It's one thing for the foreigner boss man to have it over you, but it's another thing entirely if it's someone you consider one of your own people.

Julio the caretaker is always sending Umberto off to do the dirtiest jobs, anything JD sends Julio to do, he will simply heap it on little Umberto. But JD says that the farm is a tricky place. The animals are tied to your own life, and we all live and share in the same space. 

They eat us and, all in good time, we will eat them. 

The more time you spend on the farm the more you treat yourself like the animals. 

Julio is a prime case. 

The man's got leukemia and could die at any minute, but JD's got him doing chores, keeping him moving, and he treats it like normal. He just came back from his homeland in Guatemala, across the border. There is some Swiss pharmeceutical company giving him free treatment, which would otherwise cost over US$4000 a month. 

JD said this is a bad sign, because they would never have given him such expensive treatment free if they didn't think he was going to kark it at any moment. I don't know what JD will do if Julio gets taken down by that leukemia.

But Julio doesn't seem to notice, he gets his transfusions where they pump a new body of blood into him every few months, and like clockwork, every month the black-faced mut just keeps on coming back for more. JD says that compared to all the crap Julio's been through in his life, having leukemia is as much of a nuisance as a mosquito bite. 

Before he ran away to Belize he was drafted into the army, and before that he was fighting the army in the resistance. He joined the resistance because his entire village was slaughtered by the army and he had to survive on rainwater in the hurricanes and the jungles for weeks... The dogs are barking again. It's probably nothing. You can never get into these things' heads, and who'se to say if they are lonely, or just afraid of the quiet.

Geographical Optimist

Call me a Geographical Optimist: I like to remind myself that I am not the centre of the Earth.
If I was, then that would be just too boring. So recently I decided to pay a little more attention to maps and the undiscovered countries of our planet.

But it wasn't always like this. Until recently I had felt confused and bombarded with the world's population. All those hundreds of countries, each with borders defined to the milimeter, appearing on the world map as a congealed mass of chaos vomited over the natural landscape of our planet. I thought it a waste of everyone's important time and energy to get mixed up in this whole debate over what one group is vs everyone else and vice versa. Countries, in this light, seemed to me far too self-interested to make for a harmonious planet. In many ways I still believe much of our antisocial behaviour is generated by this insecure need to assert our own identity.

But countries don't create these problems any more than anything else. More than anything, countries have become a reflection of power relationships with other countries. This is true to the extent where borders, countries and definitions of sovereignty no longer reflect the reality of a place. We have countries whose people associate themselves with outside influences, above and beyond their own nationality.

After all, what is a country anyway? Notwithstanding its people, resources and other distinctive features, the all-encompassing idea of a "nation state" is a cold and meaningless word when we are trying to define the essence of what makes a particular place a home to a distinct group of people. I certainly haven't come across any unpopulated countries, anyhow.

Belize’s national blowout: Government clashes with private investors in sweeping utility expropriation bid

17:00, 28 June, 2011 (GMT)
By James Donald, Belize City

The Belizean government’s bid to curb privatization of national utilities escalated yesterday into a full-blown power struggle between government and private business. 


The Court of Appeal ruled unanimously on Monday against the government's acquisition of Belize Telemedia Limited (BTL) from the British Caribbean Bank, declaring the expropriation "unlawful" and "unconstitutional."

The ruling was a strong blow to the Barrow administration in light of Belize’s approaching national elections, further compounded by the local media who described the August 2009 takeover of BTL as "the singular defining moment of the PM's legacy."

Prime Minister Dean Barrow initially conceded defeat, vowing not to use the police to take BTL back by force, but later made a back flip, telling government-appointed board chair Net Vasquez that he would reassert control over the company.

Godfrey Smith, attorney of the temporarily deposed BTL Chairman Dean Boyce related his exasperation that, despite the court’s ruling, the two were refused entry to the premises.

"We are attempting to go in -- we've said to them that the court has ruled -- we are entitled to be there. We understand that former members of the management team of the board are inside probably shredding documents, destroying company property. I made an attempt to enter and the police officer actually assaulted me."

Prime Minister Barrow was adamant in the government’s resolve to hold onto BTL, saying “there is no possibility the way I see it that this can have any quick termination, and in the meantime the status quo -- which is that government remains in control of the company -- will prevail."

"So the police and the Prime Minister are bigger than the court of appeal? This is the order of the court,” Smith protested.

Prime Minister Barrow chastised the most vocal of his critics, Belize Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI), for being “a prisoner of their ideology,” and violating its responsibility as a “social partner.”

Popular opinion sided with Prime Minister Dean Barrow's move, which he promised would relieve inflating power and telephone bills. But the takeovers have been strongly contested by the companies' private stakeholders.

Prime Minister Barrow chastised the most vocal of his critics, the Belize Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI), for being “a prisoner of their ideology,” and violating its responsibility as a “social partner.” Private investors see the takeover as one of a series of government attempts to curb foreign interest in national assets.

On the other hand, Belize Electricity Ltd's (BEL) former primary stakeholder, international electricity giant Fortis Inc., does not intend to contest last week’s expropriation of its 67% share of Belize Electricity Limited (BEL). Instead they plan on claiming compensation of US$125 million.

Fortis’ Chief Financial Officer Barry Perry criticized the expropriation as a “draconian measure,” but insisted that BEL is not material to its business, accounting for less than two per cent of the company’s US$12.9 billion in total assets. Outgoing BEL managers were also deliberately fired just before the takeover in order to receive up to BZE$2.7 million (US$1.38 million) in severance packages.

BEL has 296 employees and purchases its electricity from Belize Electric Company Ltd. (BECOL) and serves a customer base of around 77,000 accounts. As of December 31, 2010, the company's total assets were valued at US$476.9 million, with operating revenues of US$190.526 million.

Jesus was gay

Today I convinced myself that Christ was homosexual. The Bible alludes to several things, but to really comprehend its deeper meaning, we need to look at the deep cultural context of its origins. For the various points for and against this viewpoint, you can check out this interesting article on the question at hand: "Was Jesus gay?"

 

This is no longer such an outlandish position to take. We could cite a whole host of theories: that Jesus was black (well he wasn't Caucasian that's for sure), that he was a woman or that he lived fast in the years of his youth uncovered by the Bible before his early death. But in the case of his sexuality, there seems to be a bunch of evidence that the guy had certain... tendencies toward men.

The Bible avoids going into explicit details about the numerous raunchy encounters of both testaments, and the common euphemism for getting down and dirty was to "wash the feet" of the man (feet meaning genitals). Now, Jesus being equipped with the knowledge of his imminent death as he was, decided of all the things he would like to do that night was invite all his disciples to engage in a symbolic celebration of his body. Before telling his disciples to think about him whenever they break bread together, he washes all their feet...

We consider Jesus -- correctly written "Yesuth" for phonological accuracy -- and the New Testament to be a break with the old and beginning of a new covenant. But this new collections of texts is a long shot from rejecting the fundamental pillars that define the Judeo-Christian identity. In fact, Jesus should be seen as a reinforcer of canon law by redelivering a god of the old world under the domination of the Roman Empire.  

 

In fact, he spent most of his time in the company of nothing but men. Jesus was a special kid, but a boy of low social status growing up single was not even acceptable for openly homosexual men, who would do their duty and take wives for procreational purposes then have their male paramour on the side.

 

Likewise, the New Testament draws on many of the narrative traditions of the Old Testament.  This might even explain why we have so much sexual confusion in the Church.

The Canterbury Tales: Pilgrimage Toward Calling Things By Their Right Names

English history is the most important history when it comes to the study of Empire and language. I stop and wonder often if it is as simple as I make it out to be: Surely the rise of the world's most powerful naval mercantile industrial complex was not propelled to its revered position through the rampant desire for sex, drugs and violence, all in the name of holy pilgrimage. To me though, that is English history in a nutshell, or at least from the time of Chaucer.

Why begin with Chaucer? Because he gave England a language it could call its own; one that would stand up on the world stage, even if it was just to recount the medieval equivalent of fart jokes and Simpsons-social commentary.

English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) was the first to stand up in a respectable forum where his every action and word was weighed and measured and takes the piss out of all the facile superficiality of his age, pointing out all the shortcomings and contradictions invested in the professional neuroses of the lofty houses of Church, Merchants, men of office and the Feudal Aristocracy.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400)

Chaucer is relevant to me at this time for precicely for the same reason that he is held up by the English-speaking world: Chaucer, more than even Shakespeare, was the legitimator of English, not because of the language's nuance and flavor, or its ability to adapt foreign words, or whatever reasons people use to prop it up as the world's new equivalent of high-culture "court language." Chaucer could have existed in any country, with any language, the important thing is not what language, or even what he said (which was not profound or interesting as many other writers), it is that he was the only one to speak out at the reality of England, the real England, when everyone else was pretending they were still in France or Rome.

The Canterbury Tales is a piece created for court entertainment. But in Chaucer's time, the seeds of the formidable British Empire had not yet been sewn, and England was nothing more than a backwater fraction of an island -- similar to Japan at the same time (1300s CE) -- that imported its high culture from the dominant traditions of France and Rome. Looking back its appears a straightforward matter of sweeping cultural and industrial  reform for England to break with its inferiority complex with the continent and transform its image from the tag-along island into the world's outstanding pillar of global dominion. 

It might seem simple, but really this was only possible through the original thinking and iron balls of men like Chaucer who took the language and stories that everyone knew and present it in a style and grace fit for the royal court. Check out Overthinking It for a review of each chapter according to sexual references and fart jokes.Chaucer's poem was so unprecedented and full on that he was seen as a pioneer, in an age filled with writers and artists who were bent more toward self-aggrandisement by following well-accepted formulas of manufacturing art. They were more interested in being successful in a system and following its rules to climb to the top of the ladder than expressing what they truly thought or felt was the reality as they saw it.

Chaucer, on the other hand, was a man of wit, and his poems are literally bursting with allusions and a natural rhythm and vibe that overflows the traditional (ancient Greek-derived) meter of iambic pentameter. Tradition just can't box the cheeky rascal in. When he's not making "wink-wink nudge-nudge" allusions, he's all up in your face with commentaries on the rampant moral degradation of the church, the cold and lecherous rising merchant class, and the complacent ostentations of an aristocracy which lorded over Europe's macro-equivalent of the pig sty. 

Like any man or woman forced by the economy of circumstance to sing for their supper, Chaucer had to be both entertaining to his crowd, but his character finds it impossible to leave the truth out of his poems. Chaucer is a social commentator. He doesn't preach any liturgy about fallen ideals. When he holds up the mirror, it is just so that we, no matter which stereotype we ascribe ourselves to, can cast it aside for a moment and share a seat at the table with all others and recognise our humanity.

The Roots of Chaucer's Genius

The Canterbury Tales invites us on a pilgrimage to the resting place of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Beckett (1118-1170), England's most notorious martyr, who was dispatched by Henry II's knights after a conflict over the rights and privelages of the church. It is a pilgrimage that has over the years become a well-trod tradition, and though many take it out of religious course, its significant was built on the back of Chaucer's poem. This is not a religious pilgrimage. It is a return to the site of a fall from grace. The abuse of power to crush those who continue speak out for what they believe in. Thomas Beckett was made a saint because he signified to the English people someone that could not be bought, intimidated or humiliated into denying the world as he saw it. And this man was cut down in cold blood by a group of sword-wielding thugs dressed up in the uniform of royal soldiers and enforcers of the law. 

The Canterbury Tales does not waste much -- if any -- time on giving us a history lesson. The story was common knowledge, and Chaucer's interest lies firmly in the present: He is interested in the journey that men and women take, and how in taking the same road, those who are not equals by sex or birth may become so by paying respect to the art of calling things by their rightful names and not swooning in the face of intimidation or seduction.

This is a reality not only for countries but also regions and humanity in general. The forces that attempt to conserve their hold over power inherently undermine our will to express the real feelings and revelations we have within ourselves and the society around us. The way out of this is not through fear or retreat, but courage and investing our bodies and minds to this reality as we see it; not the one I or anyone else tell you about, but the one you see and feel with your very senses.