Just entered a short story competition!

I've just entered a short-story competition - the first in a while. I've been short-listed or mentioned in the top five in the last few I've entered, so it's about time I got going again!
Good Night and Good Morning!

Haiku Sun 2 Dec

Haven't done haiku
got a lot done though woo-hoo
Council tomorrow?

Simone Veil est morte : Written 2017; posted 18 November 2018

Simone Veil has died: I'm so sorry I didn't realise she was still alive.
     She is one of my clearest memories of French studies with the amazing Danie Jamieson (may she live forever). (I so hope she's still alive). From a lifetime of working tirelessly and intelligently for liberty and justice, holding high office in French politics, after surviving Auschwitz as a 17-year-old, Simone Veil is most famous for her law legalising abortion in France. And my clearest memory of her from my French studies? As she left the Assemblée Nationale (Parliament) after her law was voted in (9 women in an Assembly of 490 in 1975), someone congratulated her on her win, saying how happy she must be. She replied "No-one is ever happy about any abortion."
     You can tell from my wording that I misremember the quote - one of my clearest memories, clearly not verbatim. I had never heard of her, and didn't realise how recent it was, as a young thing in the early 80s. I've just watched part of her speech to the Assemblée Nationale, made available on the excellent news site for children "1jour1actu" (literally "1 day 1 news item" - daily video & article, available on the web or as an app). She is everything I would like to be: serious, intelligent, full of humanity, making good use of her language skills, persuading others by her cogent prose, well presented.
     What I remember from the article we no doubt discussed and translated an extract of, is that she replied to this colleague or journalist congratulating her on her win in the House, that an abortion is always a tragedy to the woman involved, and that no-one ever chooses it lightly. And I forget her words for what came next, but the impact of them is forever carved in me: something to the effect that any one single abortion is a tragedy, but that women must have access to abortion when necessary. No doubt worded well and forcibly, with great warmth and empathy.
    This blog is not about abortion: more about the strength of character and effectiveness of this wonderful woman, and the effect she has had on the world for the good. And when I say woman, I mean person. I admire that she worked hard and intelligently to make happen what she believed needed to happen. Even when it was morally complex.
     This blog is also not about the Shoah: although a big driver in her life was "le devoir de mémoire" - the duty of memory. Veil bore witness to what she had lived through in a concentration camp and did not want people to forget what had happened during the Second World War.  She also worked for peace between different nationalities, different peoples.
     There are not so many left who actually lived through these horrors - my beloved Peter Dane died last year - the duty of memory falls to younger generations.  And that duty includes not only the facts of that period - I think most people by now have got that Hitler did evil, and trying to eliminate the Jews in order to purify his civilisation was a wrong thing - but to transfer this understanding to current events, and to all sides of any multi-national or multi-religious or multi-group question. Anywhere there's a potential Them-and-Us.
     I hope that in her death, in the widespread reporting of her death, her voice will reach some who had not heard it during her life (google her!), and a seed of reflection will be planted that might just be the tipping point in a crucial decision - one person decides to treat someone Other as human, their whole family decides to treat some Other as human, that Other therefore decides that they are human and not as Other as he/she might otherwise have thought, and so votes in their group for clemency rather than violence, in whichever direction it might potentially be aimed. So a church, a mosque and an atheist discussion group meet for lunch instead of slinging insults at each other, neighbours invite each other over and feed each other's pets instead of haggling over fences, one group decides for peace rather than bombs, one taped-up bomber decides to bail, two countries decide they can keep their national identities while trading and without aiming missiles at each other.
    There will always be a new Other; there will always be a new excuse to be prejudiced, there will always be a choice between accepting the Other as different but still human, or different and thus dangerous. Oedipus attracted his bad fate by trying to avoid it, by separation from the people who were to cause his downfall, where if he had only got to know them in the normal natural way he could never have walked into the trap. Then, with Oedipus as King, the people of Thebes tried to rid themselves of plague after plague by eliminating strangers, potential contaminants, when all the while the disease was within them.
     We don't have to become the other, and we should be wary of people trying to persuade or force us against our better judgement or against our will to become like them, but nor do we have to avoid the Other, or try to make them be like us. I will delight in the music and colour of Diwali, but I neither want to become a Hindi, nor make them drop their multi-faceted, multi-path culture to be like me, or failing that, leave "my" country and go be Hindi somewhere else.
     I suspect the "Them-and-Us" problems now might be even more complicated than in the 1930s and 40s - but then they probably were then, too. And I bet the world now is a little better than it would have been if that strong young woman hadn't stood up, got the necessary education, and spent her life force working for liberty and justice. "Grande conscience française du XXe siècle" (Great French conscience of the 20th Century) according to Le Monde on-line this week. Good on her for possessing the strength to make her gifted life also a long life, and not succumbing to the self-elimination of the other Simone Weil - with a W - also French, Jewish, and young during World War II, also blessed with high intelligence and sensitivity (beat Simone de Beauvoir to first place in an important competitive exam). She (Weil with a W) poured her overflowing life-force into mysticism (leaving a body of highly poetic mystic philosophy), but, ultimately, embraced suffering as a form of virtue, embracing an absent God's love, and starved herself to death. Essentially did Hitler's job for him. Was she more sensitive that Simone Veil (with a V)? I doubt it. Just took a different turning at a crucial point in her development and decided that self-abnegation was virtuous.
    Both fascinating women, both worthy of study, both (well, let's bring in the third contemporary Simone, de Beauvoir this time) - all marked their time, all added their unique individual thread to the tapestry of our time, all did harm and good, all burned bright, all have had enormous influence, have changed many lives through their efforts.
     Vale Simone Veil, thanks for your inspirational life well-lived.
   
   

Haiku 16 Nov 18

Feeding neighbours' cat
She is so affectionate
What could be nicer?

Oedipus, Trump and Hitler, The Wall, Pink Floyd

This will be a stump of a future post (oh, how often does one start that way and never come back to finish!!??) about Oedipus and the urge to improve oneself or one's nation by removing the Other.
     In the Oedipus myth they did it: they thought the way to ensure the safety of their city was to kill the monster that was causing all the death and destruction. They awaited a saviour to make everything all right again. Oddly, Oedipus was both the one who understood the riddle - ie that evil is within us - the 4-legs-in-the-morning, 2-legs-in-the-noontime, 3-legs-in-the-evening one - and the one who played the saviour and made Thebes feel safe and rescued for a bit.
     Things went horribly wrong, due to the whole killing-the-father-marrying-the-mother thing, and of course they had to kill someone to cut that evil right out of Thebes. But the seed of the whole situation was way back - it was already in the ruling family before they had their beloved baby son brought up far away so that he couldn't possibly fulfil the awful prophecy.
     Which of course was the mechanism for his not recognising his father or mother and the means by which the prophecy was able to be fulfilled - fulfillment by attempted avoidance.
     The evil was within them right from the start - actually from before the start.
     The saviour that was supposed to purify them by removing the evil monster - he killed the Sphinx, didn't he? actually brought the original evil right back into the heart of their civilisation.

     Hence Trump doesn't have any more hope of making a better world by building a wall and only keeping pure Americans - however he defines them - and sending everyone else away or refusing them entry - than Hitler did.
     In my youth I thought we'd learnt those lessons and any countries still caught up in internecine wars would eventually see sense. How one-sided do you have to be to be blind to the feelings and point of view of the people that a quirk of time and geography has deemed to be your enemies?
     Now I think we're in a downward arc of the circular nature of things.
     And I think all those who ask "how could all those supposedly nice people in the 1930s support Hitler?" are about to see how.
     My hope? That rather than strictly circular, we're in more of a "two steps forward, one step back," sort of a system, and that enough people have progressed morally sufficiently to recognise the beginnings of a recurring pattern and to keep speaking out and doing something about it until the pattern can be reversed.
     And may we have more and bigger steps forward, and fewer, smaller, slower steps backward.

Toujours Charlie?

C'est une grande partie de ce que j'aime de la culture française - la tendance à tout analyser - comme moi aussi je fais à tout moment. Les animateurs à la radio ce soir se demandent pourquoi on dit "Je suisCharlie", ou pour certains, "Je ne suis pas Charlie parce que ..." - avec de bons arguments sur les deux côtés. Certains, par exemple, disent "Je ne suis pas Charlie" car ils ont honte de ne rien avoir fait - Charlie Hebdo a eu le courage de se manifester contre la censure et de continuer dans leur esprit de 68ards. Puis il y en a d'autres qui disent "Je ne suis pas Charlie" parce qu'ils n'aiment pas du tout pas mal du contenu de CharlieHebdo. Moi j'ai vu cette revue, mais un peu seulement, je suis sûre qu'il y aurait des choses dedans que je trouverais de trop, mais j'en apprécierais la plupart. J'ai bcp aimé le Canard enchaîné - je ne sais pas si ça continue ou non. Mais peu importe, moi je dis "Je suis Charlie" car on est tous en danger de perdre la liberté d'expression, et non uniquement par la parole. Je ne suis pas très courageuse, mais je trouve que cette question est tellement importante, et je suis énormément encouragée par la flotte de "Je suis Charlie" partout dans le monde, et par les 15 minutes d'infos consacrées à cet événement, et à la veillée à Aotea Square, vendredi soir - les infos de TVone qui normalement passent une minute ou deux sur chaque question plus ou moins importante avant de passer aussi vite que possible au sport.

Dame Felicity Lott (and Elizabeth Mandeno) at Rannoch

I'm just home from a stunning evening of beauty and wit.
Dame Felicity Lott and husband Gabriel Woolf regaled us with a selection of love songs: childish, lyrical, comic, witty and cynical, with a smattering of poems and witticisms in between. For the last song, the trio from the end of  Der Rosenkavalier, Dame Felicity was joined by Sarah Court, beautiful mezzo soprano, and Elizabeth Mandeno, soprano, ravishingly beautiful in white and gold, with voice to more than match, all three singing on the mezzanine above us.

Dame Felicity was as gracious and warm and alive as she was in the film of La Belle Hélène which so captivated me, at Mum's "Greek Odyssey" end of year treat film a year ago - she played the most beautiful woman in the world when pushing 60 and surrounded by deliciously beautiful young parisienne actors, and utterly pulled it off. I was struck then by how thoroughly sexy and beautiful she was, and how she seemed utterly at ease with herself - "bien dans sa peau", as we say in French. Yet throughout the evening (there was a Q&A after the singing) she several times referred to her "complexes" and lack of confidence, and how being chosen by the great conductor Karlos Kleiber (spelt phonetically, sorry, hope it's close to right) to sing an opera gave her confidence - "if I'm good enough for him ..." she thought. Not a trace of a hint of any lack of confidence (or indeed ability - her very-high pianissimos were amazing) in her performance tonight - yet she told me afterwards that she was sick with nerves before going on tonight. It never goes away, huh?

Left me topped up with delight and Art and Song and the sense of a wider world.