Star strewn sky

This painting is starting to resemble the idea in my mind now:

Would you pay £290 for this painting of a dog?

How about for the photograph of it I Instagrammed?

How much is that worth?

Around 3.5 trillion photos have been taken since 1826, and Facebook is the largest repository of them on Earth, with about 140 billion of them, and rising.

We live in an age of content. What we need is filters.

And not necessarily the filters you apply via Instagram to make your photo of your stapler look moody or hip.

Today I saw this project – a collection of fascinating Google Street View scenes, some poignant, some funny, some beautiful, some sad.

And it reminded me that I am immortalised in Google’s remorseless digital memory, like a modern day Big Foot, slinking blurrily off into the wilds

This is a photo of me, my grandmother and my friend Manu.

You have to love the child you were, and recognise them in the person you are: Because underneath the constructs of age and experience, that vulnerable, playful, beautiful soul is with you for all your life and will always need love.

It’s a madhouse on the elderly ward, the person I am visiting is cogent so it’s bad for her. Last night an old sparrow of a woman – posh, obviously once beautiful and well to do – wandered over and tried to organise an escape with us. It was fascinating and heartbreaking as she flitted between the here and now and the places and situations of her memory. She offered me a job as her gardener.

I think it’s healthier, curiously, to be confronted by madness and death. There’s a tendency to ignore them, we pretend they don’t exist or touch us, so they lurk like bandits on the road ahead, to leap out and accost us. But they are there, and it is chance or fate that determines whether we are their victim or not.

On the elderly ward everyone sits facing nothing. Ill. Prepared.

London is full of Elephants, 250+ of them, in support of the charity www.elephantfamily.org

have taken to using the rickety dawdles from station to station as opportunities to doodle on my phone, an example here:

It is snowing.

A downy grey sky of feather fall.

Heavy in my viscera, memory:

She, rowing opposite me, across
the London skyline.

Upon soft water,  swans.

How happy, how loved. How
could it be
that I erased the slim lines of hope from the page?

Choosing instead
the blankness.

The blankness.

The snow erases the worn lines of the world.

A Kurdish Turk has been accused of murduring his daughter in a so called ‘honour killing’.

Honour killing is a misnomer.

It is better named a shame killing. Or just murder.

There is no honour in killing your daughter because she was raped, or because she loves someone not acceptable to your plans.

There is nothing but shame. Ugly, stupid, shame.

There are many examples of horrific honour killings, one more below:

On October 27, Turkish press reported that 15-year-old Naile Erdas from the southeastern city of Van was killed by her family when she gave birth to a child conceived during a rape. The girl, who hid her pregnancy, reportedly begged doctors at a state hospital where she gave birth not to return her to her family, fearing that she would be killed in accordance with the local tradition demanding her family’s honor be cleansed. Doctors informed state authorities, but the prosecutor nevertheless handed the young woman over to her family, which, as Naile feared, killed her. At year’s end, Naile’s uncles and father were under arrest for making the decision to kill her, while her brother, the suspected killer, remained at large. Source: US Department of state 2006 report

It seems to me that shame and religion go hand in hand, much like the Muslim men who wander the streets of (for instance) Tanzania or Saudi Arabia, holding each other’s hands, but to whom it is forbidden to even shake hands with a woman.

In the Qu’uran, a women is plainly stated as being only half the value of a man.  In law as well as in mental aptitude.

In Judaism and hence Christianity, shame is brought upon poor innocent Adam through his spare rib partner, Eve, and her beguilement by a bad, wise, snake.

Woman are basically bad and they bring shame about for men.

In Islam women are asked (in stricter regimes some would say forced) to don the Hijab and to cover themselves and their ‘ornaments’.  In Wahhabist Islam (the form of Islam most prevalent, possibly due to the fact that it is the harsh form Saudi Arabia practices, promotes and exports using her vast material resources) Women must cover up, essentially because if they don’t, men can’t be held accountable for the shameful things they will do.

This topsy-turvy logic is evinced in the abhorrent way Sharia law is sometimes enacted:

In Somalia, 1000 spectators filled a stadium to watch a 13 year old girl be stoned to death for the crime of adultery, she was accused of this crime after reporting that she had been raped by three men.

Some people defend their mediaeval beliefs by saying that the old texts give them a moral structure to adhere to, but I think to anyone who cares about what is ethical, or humane,  these texts are predominantly unsacred products of their barbaric times – often used to excuse terrible acts and ideas.

Honour killing is just one such terrible act.

A shameful and unacceptable practice, dishonourable in the extreme.

I was suprised upon viewing Newham Council’s website that they had chosen to promote ‘Black history month’ with an image of many notable black icons…and Gandhi.

Apparently:

‘Newham’s libraries are holding a series of free events throughout October to celebrate Black History Month.

Highlights include…an exhibition on the life of Gandhi which is touring Stratford Library, East Ham Library and The Gate, Forest Gate throughout October.’

Gandi is an interesting choice for Black History Month. Most obviously because he was not black.

But perhaps more pertinently because in his time in South Africa he appeared to be actively racist with regard to black people. He used the term ‘kaffir’ to refer to them and directed his efforts solely at the plight of the Indians there. He is quoted as saying, for instance:

“Ours is on continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life of indolence and nakedness.”

Source: Guardian

Of course, Gandhi was a great freedom fighter and an heroic practitioner of non-violent protest.

He also absolutely refuted any divinity attributed to him and refused to be called Mahatma. He acknowledged that he was just a man, and he was very honest about his flaws – in his autobiography he reflected that in his youth he was flawed, he beat his wife for instance.

It is other people who have attributed to him a saintliness and perfection that simply is unrealistic. He has become symbolic rather than real and as such the facts of history have been obscured.

The overtly racist caste system of the Hindu faith, where (to simplify) the blacker you are the more lowly you are (the untouchables) and the whiter you are the more divine (Brahmins) was bravely defied by Gandhi, who went on hunger strike to demand its abolition. But Gandhi’s contemporary B.R. Ambedkar points out that the truth is more complicated than this in his book ‘what congress and Ghandi have done to the untouchables’, here Gandhi is quoted as supporting the caste system in 1921, then proposing subtle changes to it, in 1925.

Others, such as Mark Linley show that Gandhi’s ideas developed over time and that he came to see the need to destroy the caste system through intermarriage.

My opinion is that Gandhi was a noble and brave man who did much good. That in his youth and life he was imperfect is no suprise and should not detract from his inspiring actions. But I think there is more value in knowing about him in his entirety rather than reducing him to a saintly charicature. He was a human being, human beings are complex, it is foolish and trite to blind yourself for the sake of simplicity or facility. History is more than just black and white.

Gandhi was a great man, who unified Muslim and Hindu India through his non-violent efforts. I think he was more great for his own acknowledgement of his flaws, which was part of his practising of Ahimsa (do no harm).  That level of honesty is more brave than the clumsy beatification of well meaning ignorance.