Phoenix Ark's Blog

ARE WE ALL PIIGS NOW?

I picked up the term from an article by an academic called Gregory Jourdanis, referring to Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain, and others labelling them, especially Greece, as somehow unworthy to be part of the Northern European club of Civilized, progressive Nations. Because the implication is there that there is something endemic to Greece, deep in the Greek character perhaps, that encourages corruption, laziness, or whatever it is that had lead to the default and the risings in Sintagma Square. Then knocking down this kind of prejudiced ‘orientalism’, especially in comparison to the tabloid and phone hacking scandals in Britain, but finishing on an upbeat note by talking of a democratic fight back, like the Arab Spring, and us all being PIIGS now! Very good point.

Yet horrifying as the scandals of British Journalism are, just watch a film like Gomorrah, about the Comorra ‘mafia’ gangs in Southern Italy, and especially Naples, before you go over the top on the simple benefits of a United Europe and the Euro Zone, or where the money actually goes in the face of corruption. Apparently money has been laundered to even support projects like the Twin Towers replacement. How they have controlled rubbish collection in Naples, and the whole sale toxic polluting of the countryside, is just a terrible story, human and environmental. It may be be that where the State fails, they provide ready forms of ‘Justice’ the ordinary man understands and respects, but Berlusconi’s links, his character and the way he both runs and controls the Press in Italy is glaringly awful and it seems no one can do anything about it. The way he made a macho joke about a paper cup on TV, relayed on a recent documentary, and putting it in the bin, just showed the scornful stamp of the man, or he has long felt he is untouchable. The problem is with today’s cultural values, the average Italian male seems to wants to be him and have all that money.

Perhaps we all expect that corruption can always develop, but then must be cleaned away again, but my experience of a Greek friend on the island of Lesbos showed me how she was falling foul of corruption, over property she had inherited from her father, and had little chance against ‘the system’. Perhaps the stamp of our times is the complete loss of value, that could allow Rupert Murdoch to admit ‘we have no ethics’ on the Sun, and the Comorra to get so far in Italy. Who wants to stand up to it and who can? But there is a different and just as insidious kind of corruption, inherent in the banking bonanzas we have ‘enjoyed’. Was it the arrival of ghastly ‘super casinos’ on late night British TV that announced Tony Blair or Labour’s ‘monstrous breaking of the Bank’ in Britain, as the poet had it? But in America and the US, banking methods, onselling of toxic debt, absurdly comoplex futures and financial ‘instruments’, then the tax funded propping up of the system, has surely led us to believe everyone is both implicated and corrupted by it all. The problem is it is the vulnerable and those at the bottom that go on paying the real price, as banks then take some so-called moral highground and refuse lending. Also, perhaps there is a needed call for tolerance and understanding too, rather than an easy search for scapegoats, though big rotten apples have to be weeded out. Perhaps it was ever thus, we should take a leaf out of the Ancient Roman’s book and start again with some new laws of Solon, or perhaps any life cynicism is just a natural disillusionment at the human condition, and we all need more poets…

Louis MacNeice – Bagpipe Music

It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.

I’m rather annoyed by a recent comment about losing self-respect, just in blogging, not to mention what I’ve said about myself. I lost not only a great deal of self-respect, three years ago, but almost all meaning too. It wasn’t some ordinary thing, but truly extraordinary, like Silas Marner in the novel, some kind of spiritual blinding that was reflected in the themes of a book I was writing, and eventually a personal story of almost complete disconnection and internalisation too. But it involved bizarre differences in what respect means, especially between the UK and the States, and among of a group of ‘friends’ too. By the time an so ex indignantly cried out ‘now you’re not respecting me’ it was true, because the disrespects they showed to really meaningful things, to me, compared to those surface ‘rights’ and politically correct proprieties was huge. I say again that people need to honour one another, in staying together but also in separating.

It’s harm is also the harm of bad faith and the nasty voice of rumour too, that writers always have to take on board. That’s also why I’ve spoken openly about myself and although both real respect and self-respect are vital, casual opinions can go jump in a pond. As a once best-selling novelist I don’t always respect blogs, and not everyone should write either books or stories, but I respect quality writing, and the right to share interesting ideas. I had enough self-respect to fight a publisher for a year on fundamental creative principles, ‘win’ but to walk away too, although it has cost a career and a deal of grief. I had enough self-respect to demand eRights from three major publishers. That’s the only thing that makes it all worth talking about, because most people are very good at judging ‘the world’, but terrified of revealing or exposing themselves, or standing up either. Then there is the significance of ‘real life’ and a novel, that few understand or believe. It doesn’t matter, it matters what Phoenix Ark might have to say about the current climate of publishing, the threat of the media, of fear and hypocrisy too, especially in places of power, and a huge failure of connection and awareness between people, in our supposedly hyper connected, blogging Cyberverse. No one can know, unless they went through what I did, the importance of that connection, and sometimes how to fight to find it again, but actually it was some real kind of love and understanding from rather unexpected quarters that made the real difference. DCD

FOR PEOPLE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED THEM WE ARE REBLOGGING CULTURAL ESSAYS, ALTHOUGH YOU CAN CLICK ON THE LINK ABOVE FOR THE SERIES

Phoenix Ark are delighted to publish an essay/short story first scribed about 18 years ago, pre The Taliban days and after Russian occupation of Afghanistan, when the mujahedeen had begun to tear each other apart and refugees were flooding over the borders into Pakistan.

‘Bismillah’ by Henrietta Miers

Bismillah seemed an unlikely paramedic. I first suspected he was a hypochondriac too when I offered him a banana and he sternly replied, “No thankyou, Hanry, I’ve had experiences with bananas. They give constipation. And kebabs, they give diarrhea.” Bismillah was obsessed with his health. Whenever I asked him how he was, he’d reel off his illnesses like a waiter rattling off the specials on some exotic Eastern menu: hepatitis; colonostitis (I think he meant colitis); tonsillitis; a bad knee; high blood pressure, you name it, the list went on.

Bismillah had lived in Kabul. When the Russians left and the mujahedeen set about tearing each other part, the city became far too dangerous for his family. So he had escorted them to his village in the Panshir Valley, four years earlier, North East of Kabul, in the middle of the Hindu Kush. From there he crossed over the border into Chitral, in search of work. Bismillah often spoke of returning to Afghanistan to fight, although somehow he seemed as unlikely a fighter as a paramedic. Once I asked him if he really meant it and he curtly replied, “I have no information on that.” He could never give an outright ‘no’ to anything. If Bismillah didn’t know the answer to something, he’d just say he had no information on it. That day he added, “There’s too much blood. Our children they eat blood from our soil and grow strong to fight.”

Thoughts of Kabul were never far from Bismillah’s mind though. I remember once when we were driving along together and had to stop for a herd of goats wandering across the narrow, dusty road. Bismillah frowingly announced, “This goat come all the way from Afghanistan. He lucky to escape the rockets, but now he get eaten in Peshawar!” “You mean these goats,” I said, helpfully. Bismillah was always eager for me to correct his grammar. “Sorry for my error and thank you for the plural, Hanry,” he smartly replied. “I live in singular because I only have one wife. When fighting stops I return to Kabul and take second wife. Then I think in plurals and say – Hello wives, how are yous?” With that thought he stopped the jeep, grabbed a pen from his pocket, and scribbled down his address. It went on for about half a page, ending ‘just next to botle shop oposit barbar.’ “You must come and visit me, Hanry, when the fighting is over,” he insisted, thrusting the page into my hand. Bismillah often spoke of returning to Kabul. After that he lapsed into silence, just muttering “I talk too much. My larynx hurts and my left buttock has numbness.”

I first got to know Bismillah when I grew ill in Chitral, and was forced to visit the clinic for Afghan refugees, where he worked, carefully carrying my delicate stool sample with me for analysis. The clinic was run by a tall, languid Danish doctor and staffed by Afghan paramedics, who had received some sort of medical training in Afghanistan, before the war. When I returned for the results of my test, a triumphant Bismillah gleefully informed me, “Miss Hanry, you have many many amoebas, bacterias and worms, where do we start?” Then, as if to confirm this glorious news, added “I examine your stool extra carefully because I know it belong to English lady.”

Bismillah despaired of the number of times I fell ill. “Hanry, you not strong enough for this mountain life,” he declared one day. Maybe he was right, but my afflictions seemed so trivial compared to what I used to see while I waited for my regular stool results to be announced. Refugees would stream in from over the border in Afghanistan, many with limbs dangling off, after stepping on or bending over mines. One poor woman came in with a stomach ache which refused to go away. When the Danish doctor opened her up he found a surgical towel scrunched up inside her – the size of a bath towel.

On one of my visits to the clinic, Bismillah announced I would teach him and his fellow Afghan medics English. “We need English words for illnesses and medical matters. You teach us one time a week. We learn quickly,” he said and I could think of no reason to refuse. I grew to look forward to my once-a-week sessions at the clinic hugely. We would sit together on the floor of a large single room, lounging on fat cushions and colourful Afghan carpets, while I delivered up the basic building blocks of English grammar. As Bismillah predicted, my Afghan students were quick to learn. Bismillah was always the quickest of the lot though. He would say eagerly but respectfully, “OK, OK, Hanry, thankyou for the common noun, now learn us the pro-noun.” Then, “Thankyou for the pronoun, thankyou for the possessive pronoun. More nouns?” It was as though I always taught too slowly. But whenever the lesson slipped into laughter, as it often did, he’d shout seriously, “quiet now, Hanry teaches us”.

After the lesson we would feast on plates of Afghan pilau, then someone would start to sing an Afghan song or two. They always sang my favourite just for me, Man Yek Sarbazam, (I am a solider) which they told me was about the Mujahadeen struggle for freedom against the Russian occupation of their country. One day an English friend came to stay from Peshawar and we had a party. The paramedics turned up, all of them, led by Bismillah. “We are ten,” he announced sheepishly, as I opened the door and in they all trooped. They’d brought Abdul the cook, with his Zityr, and Aziz the chowkidar, with a bright red drum. They lined the spaces around the side of the room and immediately began to play and sing. Soon the dancing started. One by one, each Afghan would be tossed into the centre of the room, feigning resistance for a little while, before giving in. He wouldd move slowly at first, quickening with the drum beat, working to a crescendo of dervish-like whirling, before collapsing in a shattered heap back on the floor. “We disturb you? You give us permission to leave,” Bismillah said suddenly. According to Afghan culture, you can turn up at any time of the day or night at someone’s house, but you cannot leave until your host permits you to. “You may go,” said I, not wanting them to go at all.

One day Bismillah invited me to his home. He lived in one of the Afghan refugee camps along the river, in a tiny two-room house that he shared with his cousin, Javed. The camp was a shabby cluster of half-deserted mud-built houses, clinging to the river’s edge, tucked beneath the looming shadow of the mountain, where the narrowness of the valley hides the sun completely. During the rains, the houses would slide over the bank and straight into the river. “You fall in here you finish in Kabul,” Bismillah warned me, with a touch of longing in his voice, as we drove over a rickety bridge and into the camp.

As soon as they saw us, children raced out to greet us, with grubby little faces full of hope. Hope for a treat, a sweet or just a crumpled ruppee note, something new to brighten up the greyness of their days, even a chewed biro top would do. I spied a little boy wearing a once pure-white t-shirt, with ET barely visible through the grime. “Ask this little boy if he knows who ET is,” I said to Bismillah, remembering that famous ‘PHONE HOME’, and he bent down and spoke to the little boy in Farsi. Bewildered, the boy remained dum, so Bismillah turned to other children in the crowd and tried to coax them into speech instead. They stared at him just as blankly, mouths agape and perfectly silent. Bismillah stood up. “They don’t know ET. They don’t know any film, these children. They have no VCR, no papers, no country.”

In the end Bismillah was laid off from the clinic for selling medicines in the bazaar. He decided to return to Afghanistan to join his wife and children, fed up with being a refugee. “Chitral is jail,” he told me. “Even the water here is dirty.” I asked him what he’d do though, when he returned home, thinking of a fighting Paramedic. “I have no information on that!” he replied. “I do whatever I can for my family, to survive. We are desperate people, us Afghans, we are flotsam and jetsam of world“, and with that he bade me goodbye.

Copyright Henrietta Miers 2011. Henrietta Miers was an aid-worker in Chitral, in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Famous for fighting for difficult causes, and for telling the truth, she has worked in many countries, for the Agha Khan Foundation, and for Dyfed. She is a mum, and married to the War Correspondent Patrick Bishop, which just goes to show – ‘wisdom is a woman, and loves a warrior.’ She plans to write much more about all her travels and experiences, and we thoroughly recommend it. The picture is a public domain photo from Wikepedia of Chitral Bazaar.

Two quotes from fine correspondents today, one, who took the photo, ‘genius is mysterious’ and the other, my only American chum left, it seems, ‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn Pro!’ Hunter S Thompson, gonzo journalist and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. We’ve no desire to be so big and bad, or to be launched into the stratosphere by memorial space rockets, but just to remind ourselves that there are many wonderful artists out there, a discovery near Butler’s Wharf on the Thames, last night, of the most amazing fountain, a poem to the feminine muses of life and water. Keep looking, all, with restored eyes.

The photo is by Lee Crichlow.

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There, there’s a line drawn through ‘the past’, love, friendship, stories, feeling, publishing responsibilities, truth, fairness, imagination and talent. ‘Sail on Ulysses!’ DCD

We thought a blog about the newly named Cyberverse and Anders Breivik was a little inappropriate, although hits at Phoenix Ark certainly rocketed. However, the ‘debate’ has already begun, although the Norwegian Prime Minister was dignified and impressive about how Norwegians are coming together, both to grieve and support one another.

‘Gruesome but necessary!’ is the even more chilling way Breivik has described mass murder, with all the arrogance of the little though hugely inflated mind. What is worse, the attack on young people, the distorted logic or the blatant attempt to get media attention? No comparatives needed, it is simply horrifying. The ‘debate’ is whether his trial should be a closed session, precisely because it is the opposite of what he wants. Convicted criminals are denied certain normal ‘rights’ and even the most tolerant societies like Norway draw certain lines through tolerance. Of course, provide all the due processes of law, but do not give someone a platform that would exactly justify murder and extremist acts. No doubt he will get much attention, his ‘hearing’ over the years, it is what the media both rightly and wrongly does, and they have already found his 1500 page ‘manifesto’. As for any deep ‘soul searching’ Breivik clearly wants though, it is probably not needed in Norway at all. What is needed is a restricted door on patent lunacy and manipulation, then a great deal of healing. We are sure the Norwegian authorities will show him far more compassion than he showed so many people. Though perhaps Norway is mature enough to hear it loud and clear, with an open trial and just turn its back. It of course also depends what ‘open’ means, namely open to print journalists or tv. The ultimate Breivik lesson though is that ‘terror’ can come from any extreme quarter, so rather than confirming any anti muslim fear or hatred, or proving anything at all about an undertoe of Right Wing extremism in Northern Europe, perhaps it is the perfect object lesson on how we always need to defeat a climate of terror and fear itself, precisely by coming together to condemn and grieve.

There is another crucial reason that New York story should never have happened, especially in the supposed land of ‘free speech’, not just big business muscle. A reason the mystic river runs very deep indeed. A programme just now on the Space Station orbitting the Planet reminded me of that picture of Earth, and all that has happened in just sixty years, since such iconic images where sent back, and began to shift human consciousness and awareness to a new dimension. It talked of the devastation of the Aral Sea, of the explosion of populations, and of the essential interconnectedness of all life and nature. Scream of the White Bear, like my other books, was and is an attempt to say something valuable about the paradox of the wild and man, and to find a story that both entertains and inspires, suggesting some link between the human meanings we need, the ‘spiritual’ meanings we vitally need, so often contained in story, and the potential power of science to save us all, man and endangered animals like Polar Bears. But not once were those messages or attempts protected in New York either, on behalf of their own contracted author. All a CEO could say, despite having a hobby studying rivers, at the height of a personal crisis too, was ‘there is no energy here to do your book!‘, amid the most outrageous contempt for me and for storytelling too. All distorted in the frame of someone else’s personal greed to triumph, or be private. My contracted book that is, that I fought for two years and more to get right, in the most impossible and heartbreaking circumstances. It is a story that, even with little Phoenix Ark Press, half makes you half want to wave the white flag in total surrender and despair at people and publishing, but half fight on, however the truth was distorted by the supposed guardians of meaningful stories. So what to do? DCD

The only thing to do is try to finish that book properly and meaningfully for readers because an author triumphs through their books alone.

Second Epigraph to Scream of The White Bear:

According to a series of studies by the U.S. Geological Survey, future reduction of sea ice in the Arctic could result in a loss of two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population within fifty years.

Thanks to a gratefully received email from Tom, The Sight on e-book has been temporarily withdrawn due to issues of typos. We would like to apologise to any readers who were disappointed with this version, but it just goes to show that real authors should be protected by real publishers, not have to start their own. There are though, and always were, differences in the British and US editions of The Sight. When we get the US e-versions from Dutton, they will be published separately.

Luckily the spotted errors are not serious and will be corrected quickly.

Phoenix Ark are delighted to publish another poem from PollipigglePuggar, to be read to children by their parents.

ARE YOU SCARED OF THE DARK?

Are you scared of the dark?
When you shut your eyes, are the windows full of witches?
Does that book, that’s sitting by the bed, pop open, all on its own?
And does a monster jump out, straight into your head,
Or is that shadow on the wall suddenly a GIANT, mean and tall?

Don’t be scared. It’s only a dream.
And dreams are really fun, if you know HOW to dream.

So next time,
Rush to bed, snuggle up,
Then shut your eyes tight and say, very softly indeed,
“Hello dream. You’re mine and in MY dream I’m going to…..”

Dive with dolphins, climb a tree,
Eat a Jelly fish for tea,
Balance buckets on my knees,
Find my pillow’s made of cheese,
Build a snowman, fly a plane,
Leave my trainers in the rain,
Score the goal that wins the match,
Show my goldfish how to catch,
Be a film-star, kiss a frog,
Teach my teddy bear to jog,
Join the circus, rob a bank,
Make a pirate walk the plank,
Win the Grand Prix, sail a boat,
Own a castle with a moat,
Get to school by red balloon,
Ride a spaceship to the Moon…

And those are just some of the wonderful things you can dream
When you go to bed tonight.
Because dreams are all yours.
But if, now and then, your dream doesn’t turn out quite the way you wanted…
DON’T BE SCARED.
Dreams are just you, working things out.
And they can’t really hurt you. Ever.
But, if you ARE scared, you can always close your eyes and…

Take that monster to the park,
Leave him out there, in the dark,
Ride a broomstick ‘cross the night,
Paint those silly witches white,
Make that giant do a jig – be a giant, twice as big.

But if that book ever starts to open up again…
Just put it outside,
In the rain.
Then snuggle down again and dream…

Of eating snow-flakes, counting sheep.
Then drifting gently off to sleep.

Copyright David Clement-Davies 2011