Poetry

“Americans, who are you?”

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I left the following comment at zenpundit :

Kabir says,

“I don’t touch ink or paper
This hand never grasped a pen
The greatness of four ages
Kabir tells with his mouth alone”

Tom Tom Club (Wordy Rappinghood) says,

“Words in paper, words in books
Words on TV, words for crooks
Words of comfort, words of peace
Words to make the fighting cease”

And Asia Times writes,

The channel broadcasts in Pashto language from 12 pm to 3 pm in the afternoon and 6 pm to 8 pm in the evening. The programs include jihadi taranay (jihadi motivational songs….

And drones the size of bees, some day

And mobiles crossing the Kush; they play

Tribal songs for jihadi alms, a call-to-arms

On 11/11 our cell phones say:

And Americans can talk endlessly about the importance of democracy, but they never thought to explain to the chiefs why they came back to Afghanistan. They arrived with suitcases full of cash to buy help but they never told the chiefs that they were there because the way al Qaeda attacked the US on 9/11 meant that many Americans couldn’t find so much as a fingernail of their massacred relatives to bury because the bodies were ground to dust.
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Not to be able to bury one’s dead or even a piece of one’s dead — knowing THAT would have meant a great deal to the chiefs and those in their tribes. But the Americans never explained, never even cried, never showed emotion. THEY NEVER ACTED HUMAN; they never interacted with the Afghans in ways that are the same for all — not only all humans but all mammalian creatures. In other words, they displayed not a whit of common sense.
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What do you talk about when you first sit down with a man whose life has been circumscribed by war and who knows nothing about you and your tribe? The answer is you tell me of your battles, I’ll tell you of mine and in this way we establish a commonality of experience.
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You transform the rug or patch of sand you’re sitting on into the terrain of the battle, and you use sticks and stones or teacups as place markers for the troops to show how the battle was fought. In this way, you demonstrate that the battle is truly in your heart, that it means enough to you that you can bring it alive for another.
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If you don’t show what’s in your heart, then you haven’t established a basis for developing a mutual understanding, so then there is no way to move off the dime. Only when you’ve demonstrated by your stories of war that your tribe also shed much blood for independence, can you move on to explaining stuff about government. You can explain that you were losing too many of your sons in battle so you devised a type of government that would help defend your freedoms and with less bloodshed. And so on.

– Pundita, “Americans, who are you?

Contra Pundita, I bet this has been done sporadically between some who are working together as NATO attempts to build an Afghan Army – one able to protect its borders and serve as an irritant to transnational groups in the region. Many stories have yet to be told….

With Greco: two views of Toledo

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — perception, painting, pre-modern, modern, post-modern, heaven, sky, simulation, John Donne, El Greco ]

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It is Sunday.

I find it powerfully interesting that the sky as perceived by painters (our “seers” par excellence) used to be filled with supernatural beings and is currently filled with natural ones — a clear sign that our culture has effectively  moved from what one might call a theological vision of the world to a meteorological one (with astronomical trimmings under a clear sky)…

And I see that transition captured very precisely in four words, when John Donne writes:

At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe…

The “round earth” is that of modern science, the “imagin’d corners” those of pre-modern maps and angelology.

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I have to admit, therefore, that I was surprised yesterday evening to come across an El Greco painting of Toledo that featured the blessed Virgin Mary over the city.

I have long been familiar with his better known View of Toledo, which is entirely naturalistic unless you want to consider storm-clouds as portents of a divine presence —

quo-sky-over-toledo.jpg

but the second of these images, from the View and Plan of Toledo, came as quite a surprise…

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Memorial Day

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God bless our veterans, living and dead. God bless America.

Recessional, by Rudyard Kipling (1897)

God of our fathers, known of old—
Lord of our far-flung battle line—
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies—
The Captains and the Kings depart—
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard—
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Amen.

Here is a version of Recessional being sung by Leonard Warren.

(“Far-called, our navies melt away…” I have always found something very stirring about that phrase. I always imagine the shock of some final military disaster striking, and the news spreading, and weeping and numbed silence, the end of hope, the knowledge that the tide has turned against you at last and forever. May we never see such days. And this: “All valiant dust that builds on dust, and guarding calls not Thee to guard.” I think of that one all the time.)

The DARPA arts

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

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Zenpundit blog-friend Cameron Schaefer has a piece up at Small Wars Journal today in which he quotes Boyd (writing that his approach “incorporated science, but more closely approximated the often chaotic, creative impulses of art”) and Mahan (“art, out of materials which it finds about, creates new forms in endless variety”), and concludes:

Approaching strategy in an indirect fashion, as more of an art than science may make some uneasy, specifically those who find safe haven in the concreteness of checklists and formulas. Yet, the nature of strategy reflects the nature of the world. It is infinitely complex, it is always changing and it is filled with humans that often do irrational things. Literature (see Charles Hill) and psychology have as much of a place at the strategy table as military history… as do mathematics, physics, political science and technology. So, when asking, “what must one study to be a great strategist?” the answer seems to be, “everything else.”

Okay, so that (and Hill‘s work, which Zen reviewed recently) gives us the significance of the arts in strategic thinking which, one hopes, is practiced before going in to battle, and may indeed give one second thoughts about it…

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Literature and the arts are also important after battle, though and the US Military and DARPA have clearly been thinking about that side of things:

quodarpa-arts1.gif

Sources: Comics – Plays

Poetry? meh… Sophocles? Chlanna nan con thigibh a so’s gheibh sibh feoil!

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Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox in The Imperial Animal characterize modern health care as the “bureaucratization of mercy” and propose that for comparison, we set it beside:

the Greek ideal of the hospital as the place with the best food, the finest furnishings and paintings, and the most skilled musicians and comedians.

The greatest healing center in ancient Greece was the Asclepion at Epidavros / Epidaurus, which housed an amphitheater that could seat more than ten thousand people for dramatic and musical performances without amplification.

At Epidavros, patients would be healed by watching those same dramas of Sophocles to which the US Army is now turning for therapeutic relief in Guantanamo — for as Tiger and Fox (what a pair of names) go on to argue:

It is not the healthy, but the sick who most vitally needed such agreeable and re-creative stimuli; and the resources the community had were most beneficially and sanely used in helping them ease their personal disarray and feel encouraged by this display of their community’s careful concern.

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It’s also interesting to note that the graphic novel Silver Shields mentioned in Axe‘s piece as a precursor to DARPA’s “Online Graphic Novel/Sequential Art Authoring Tools for Therapeutic Storytelling” project is “set during the ancient Greek invasion of Afghanistan more than two millenniums ago” as a metaphor for America’s current situation…

A HipBone approach to analysis VII: world wide spiders & the web

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[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

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I thought I’d back-track a little, and drag in two blog posts that I made elsewhere back in March of 2008, which may help to explain my basic outlook on the sorts of issues that analysts face.

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I. The version of the idea as poetry:

I am Charles

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My concern is the human mind in service
to an open heart, and my problem
is that the heart picks issues rich in ambiguity
and multiplicity of voices, tensions
and torsions tugging not one way but
in many directions, even dimensions, as does
a spider’s web weighed down with dew
to clarify which a mind’s abacus is required
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equal in subtlety to subtlety itself, while
in all our thinking and talking, one
effect follows one cause from question
to conclusion down one sentence or white
paper — whereas in counterpoint,
Bach’s fugal voices contain their dissonance.

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II. The same idea presented in prose — as I say, a few years back — with graphical illustration:

Spiders and dewdrops

Spiders and dewdrops do a pretty convincing job of portraying a certain level of complexity in this node-and-edge diagram of the global situation.

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spider_web.jpg
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When, say, Castro hands over power to his brother, or Musharraf has to give up control of the Pakistani army, it’s like snipping a couple of threads in that spiders web — and the droplets fall this way and that, carom into one another, the fine threads they’re on swing down and around until a new equilibrium is reached…
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But try thinking that through in terms of Cuba and Pakistan before breakfast one morning if you’re Secretary of State, with a linear Cold War mind, Russia going through its own changes, and al-Qaida and associates training and recruiting in the background…

Well, those two instances have been and gone, and the new configurations are now the tired old same old configurations we believe we’ve figured out — until another dewdrop slips, and a thread breaks, and all things are once again new…

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Funnily enough, I think this spider’s web of mine ties in with the Hokusai quote I posted in response to Zen‘s quote from Steven Pressfield yesterday, and with a piece I read today about intelligence analysts — Martin Petersen, What I Learned in 40 Years of Doing Intelligence.

It’s the web of tensions that constitutes the “complexity” that must somehow be grasped by the analyst, the writer, the historian…

And Hokusai, watching across the years how grasses bend in the winds, reach for sunlight, bow under the weight of dew — and spring back when released — may finally have a mind that’s attuned to that kind of complexity — to a degree that linear thinking will never reach…