History

Rubber and a Rhyme Royal

humanist55

The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…

By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Rubber 2022 – $18.4B – 239th most traded product representing 0.078% of total world trade.

Gentle Reader – this post should probably carry a warning – for it contains true tales of Theft, Violence and Depravity on an Imperial scale – it will visit a city 900 miles up a river, surrounded by jungle that nevertheless afford to build an opera house with imported marble and talent, it will visit both the geographical and metaphorical setting of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and reflect, not for the first time in this A-Z Challenge, on the evils done in the name of Imperialism. You have been warned…

The story of rubber begins innocently enough with a ballgame – archaeological evidence shows that the Olmec people of Mesoamerica played a game with a rubber ball made from the sap of the  Hevea tree which grew extensively in the Amazon rainforest and which could be tapped to allow its white sap to be collected – this is called latex rubber.

Vintage illustrated collectible tobacco card from the Products of the World series published in 1909 by John Player and Sons Cigarettes, depicting agricultural exports and natural resources of world cultures and countries, here with two Indian workers tapping sap from a rubber tree, the first step in the mass production of rubber (Photo by Nextrecord Archives/Getty Images).

The English polymath Joseph Priestly received a small sample of latex and noted that it was very good at rubbing out (erasing) pencil marks and thus coined the name “Rubber”. In the nineteenth century, the development of first the bicycle and later the motor car, created a demand for rubber that far outstripped the sources of natural rubber and drove the discovery of synthetic elastomers – the technical name for rubberlike substances. The initial problem with developing rubber as a commodity, was that the Brasilian rainforest was the only source of  Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) and Brasil had a stranglehold on the market and one thing that commodity markets don’t like is a monopoly. There was no specific law banning the export of rubber plants or seeds from Brasil but nevertheless it was a closely policed prohibition – and no wonder – the wealth generated by the monopoly of the supply of rubber paid for that lavishly marbled opera house in Manaus, far up the Amazon, and for a stream of European opera divas to grace its stage. It took until 1870 for the seeds to be smuggled out and the monopoly broken…

“Henry Wickham, who in 1876 directed an operation smuggling 70,000 rubber tree seeds”

In 1876, Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 Amazonian rubber tree seeds from Brazil and delivered them to Kew Gardens, England. Only 2,400 of these germinated. Seedlings were then sent to India, British Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Singapore, and British Malaya. Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) was later to become the biggest producer of rubber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rubber

I well remember this story of derring-do smuggling from my geography class at school in the 1960’s but looking back, there was no hint of a question as to the ethics of this act of theft and the geopolitical shift that it meant for the British empire – it seemed that was just the way of things. An even more heinous crime was happening across the Atlantic in a similar river whose basin held a hard-to-penetrate tropical rainforest – the Congo. From 1885 to 1908, while the development of British rubber plantations in the Far-East were still being developed, the Belgian Congo, operated as a private estate – the Congo Free State (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) under the absolute rule of King Leopold II of Belgium – was another source of latex rubber. Congo rubber comes from vines and the wives and children of a village were held hostage whilst their menfolk were sent off to fulfil their quota of vine rubber. The depravity did not end there, with a bureaucracy that would have been the envy of the Nazis, every bullet used by Belgian soldiers had to be accounted for and justified, so if soldiers went hunting for meat or even sport – they would go into a village and chop off as many hands as required to justify their bullet allocation – claiming a police action as justification. No wonder Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece “Heart of Darkness” is set far up the Congo River where a European trader has gone rogue… So many people died under these imperial rules that though the exact figures are indeterminable, estimates range from 1.5 million to 13 million and the story of this genocide can be read here.

This is not to say that there were not many deaths of native Amazonian Indians as a result of rubber tapping in the Amazon but they have been overshadowed by the obscenity of Leopold’s genocide. It may be considered a boon then, that the theft of rubber tree seeds from Brazil and the subsequent establishment of rubber plantations in the Far Eastern countries of the British Empire, brought to an end the depradations in Brazil and the Congo… However, life on the remote plantations of the Far-East was at the very least a lonely station for the young men and women of the “Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets” as the globe encircling British Empire was sometimes called. Somerset Maugham (whom my mother “specialled”, or nursed one-to-one as a young nurse and who she described as a bitter old man) chronicled life on the plantations which we later watched dramatised on TV and if I can distil a typical story of his into one sentence it would be “Young planter comes back to England to wed from amongst the surfeit of girls following the First World War and returns to Malaya with his bride who later discovers he has a second family living at the bottom of the garden with a native wife – bitterness ensues…”

Somerset Maugham and some short stories of his…

Let us leave the sordid world of the early sourcing of rubber and move back to the uses of Rubber as a commodity. We have already seen one source of the name rubber, but another product that became synonymous was the “Rubber” or Rubber Johnny – prophylactic to who knows how many unborn babies… there are car tyres, cushioning and shock-absorbing devices, and still there are Rubber Balls and many more uses besides. Eventually, as demand for rubber exceeded production of natural rubber, Synthetic Rubber was invented and American dominance in the market was advanced by the Second World War, when the Allies, with their access to Far-Eastern natural rubber, stifled Axis efforts by bombing synthetic rubber factories in Germany, Italy and Poland.

Natural Rubber is still an important commodity despite synthetic products which have burgeoned over the years –  styrene-butadiene rubbers , polyisoprene, neoprene, nitrile rubber and last but by no means least  Silicone rubber. Even without being a chemist, that list may have conjured for you, wetsuits, surgical rubber gloves not to mention heatproof cookwear…
More than 28 million tons of rubber were produced in 2017, of which approximately 47% was natural. Natural rubber still goes into tyres and to dothat, the process of Vulcanisation had to be invented – a method of hardening the Latex or “India Rubber” (yes – the “stolen” rubber plantations of India gave their name to the raw material too) and this was eventually perfected by Charles Goodyear as a process involving heat and the addition of Sulphur.

Worker placing a tyre in a mould prior to Vulcanisation
Vulcanization. (2024, March 18). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcanization

Many other plants other than the Hevea Tree produce latex but have never been successfully been exploited and the price of rubber is volatile – for example, during the Covid crisis, the price of rubber spiked because of the demand for rubber gloves yet many small family-run plantations had rubbed up their crop to grow more profitable lines at the time such as palm-oil. Now plant diseases (which especially affect monocultures) and climate change are threatening the supply of natural rubber further…

Before proceeding to my own poetic offering, I cannot leave rubber without referencing A.A. Milne’s wonderful poem “King John’s Christmas” which takes us back to the very first discovered use of rubber and if you were unlucky enough not to have been brought up with his poems or only know of Winneie the Pooh – let this extract introduce you to a Wold of joy…

King John was not a good man,
He lived his live aloof;
Alone he thought a message out
While climbing up the roof.
He wrote it down and propped it
Against the chimney stack:
“TO ALL AND SUNDRY – NEAR AND FAR –
F. Christmas in particular.”
And signed it not “Johannes R.”
But very humbly, “Jack.”
“I want some crackers,
And I want some candy;
I think a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I don’t mind oranges,
I do like nuts!
And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife
That really cuts.
And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”

An extract from King John’s Christmas by A.A. Milne
One of E.H. Shephard‘s incomparable illustrations for A.A. Milne’s poetry books

Which brings us to today’s poem for which I have chosen the poetry form Rhyme Royal:

The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. In practice, the stanza can be constructed either as a tercet and two couplets (a-b-a, b-b, c-c) or a quatrain and a tercet (a-b-a-b, b-c-c). This allows for a good deal of variety, especially when the form is used for longer narrative poems. (source Language is a Virus – Poetry Guide)

Rubber

Has ever extraction so cruel
been visited on poor people
our industrial needs to fuel
our market trade coffers kept full
wealth from the Third World, First World pulls
stolen plants new plantations
bring relief to tropical sons

The smooth ride of the motor car
or even humble bicycle
wrote a trail of blood from afar
ignorance of the genocide
no excuse for the denial
when now we know how goods are wrought
with blood, sweat and tears they’re still bought

Blood diamonds the savage crop
from where bloodied rubber once grew
blood from Congo’s gold and coltan drop
tin and tungsten to name but a few
not just the Congo to give it’s due
children of seventy-eight lands
make goods never mind adult hands…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

You can find a report into all 457 goods made or mined using children – let alone adults, from 78 countries in this report…

Palladium and a Pylon Pylon Poem

humanist55

The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…

By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Palladium in 2022 – $29.4 Billion

A nugget of native Palladium

To be a Commodity, a substance has to be both important and tradeable on a sufficiently large scale and so most of the commodities are easily recognisable items such as iron, cocoa and orange juice – but in Palladium, we come to an element, for such it is, that most people will, if they even know the name, have no idea as to what it is or why it is sufficiently important as to be a tradeable commodity. Yet if you drive a car with a catalytic converter, are fond of white gold or are diabetic and use testing strips, you are (like rats) closer than you know to a small amount of Palladium.

You may not have heard of Palladium, but its sibling is Platinum and grouped together in the Periodic Table, the members of the Platinum Family (platinoids, platinides, platidises, platinum group, platinum metals, platinum family or platinum-group elements) consist of ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum. As is often the case with elements found close together in the Periodic Table, they have similar properties – their main characteristic has determined their greatest utility – they have many catalytic properties and so the major driver of Palladium as a commodity is the demand for Catalytic Converters in car exhaust systems. Incidentally, palladium recycles well and so there is a trade in used catalytic converters which sadly also drives the theft of them too…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum_group

As early as 1700, miners in Brazil were aware of a metal they called ouro podre, ‘worthless gold,’ this demonstrates that alloys can occur in nature – and ouro podre is a native alloy of palladium and gold and today, Palladium is one of the metals alloyed with gold to make “white” gold for those who don’t want the gold colour but want jewellery that is stronger and less tarnishing than silver. However, these native metal sources are not where Palladium is commercially extracted from – the ores are limited to four main sites in the world and 37% of the Palladium sold comes from Russia. So once again, Putin’s unwarranted war on Ukraine and the sanctions that followed it, have been a major lever in the trading prices of Palladium just as we have noted they were in oil and gas prices. Incidentally, every commodity has a Trading Identity Number and for Palladium it is HS Code 71102900.

A comparison of “gold” colours including Palladium/Gold alloy

Lastly, Palladium was named by its discoverer (as an element) William Hyde Wollaston in 1802 after the asteroid 2 Pallas, which had been discovered two months earlier. The nymph Pallas was killed by her childhood friend – Athena – daughter of Zeus who – seeing Athena and Pallas sparring, wanted Athena to win and distracted Pallas who was then accidentally impaled by Athena’s spear and Athena was thenceforth known as Athena Pallas. As recompense for killing her friend, she created a STATUE that looked like Pallas and she named it the Palladium which was later housed in the city of Troy. Pallas Athena had many responsibilities as Goddess of War, Wisdom and Health which is a rather mixed job description…

Athena and Pallas sparring whilst Zeus watches from the sidelines – in the style of Titian generated by Midjourney

And so to the “P” poem for today. I had a choice of a Pantoum – a form with a lot of repeating lines giving an incantatory feel which didn’t feel right and so I am going to go with another poetry movement, this one before the Second World War. The Pylon Poets made reference to, if not celebrating, modern technology – taking their name from a poem by Stephen Spender called The Pylons. Other Pylon Poets included  W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice. Most famously was perhaps W.H. Auden’s Night Mail which was also made into the soundtrack to a short film. I have chosen the Duplex form which is one of my favourites for the way each couplet passes a theme on to the next one creating a great sense of progress.

Palladium

Palladium which celebrates poor Pallas
Was first a statue made by her killer

The wooden statue was protector of Troy
A job not done so well so history tells

Her story languished for many decades
Later her name graced a minor planet

When telescopes revealed the heavens
Then science paid yet another tribute

When Wollaston found another element
With minor use named for a minor body

But now we crave the miner’s hard-won produce
for catalysis, jewellery and more

At last we found purposes for “useless gold”
Palladium which celebrates poor Pallas


© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Gasoline and Gold and a Glosa Poem

humanist55

The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…

By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Gasoline 2022 $16.86 Billion
Worldwide Trade in Gold 2022 $14.568 Trillion

When I first researched a list of “Commodities”, Gold and Gasoline were the only two which came up for “G” on the best list I could find, but what a pair! Gold has been sought for centuries – valued for its incorruptible nature though it has arguably been one of the greatest sources of corruption of the human heart. Similarly, crude oil – the source of Gasoline, has shaped the political map ever since its component “gifts” were discovered and exploited with disastrous consequences for many peoples and for the world and its environment as a whole. So I decided to deal with both these commodities together – one constant and immutable, the other volatile, expendable and dangerous…

Gasoline is used for transportation and energy production worldwide and is severely implicated in global warming as a result of CO² emissions. The spread of the motorcar through the 20th century reshaped our lives and living arrangements and wars have been fought to secure, steal or destroy other’s oil sources. Arguably. The US, as the largest consumer has fought an undeclared war against the Arab nations since the Second World War to assure the flow of oil although it began with an alliance with Saudi Arabia that promised guaranteed oil supplies in return for non-interference with the Wahabist-based sect of Islam which was espoused there. The consequences of that are another story, but Iraq and Libya (a country that shared its oil wealth amongst its people in an unprecedented way) are but some of the victims of US-led wars designed to keep the best oil flowing in the “right” direction. The oil lobby is the greatest source of “climate deniers” although the car lobby and many car drivers are equally denying that Climate Change is happening and man-made.

One of many vehicles owned by members of the Osage Nation. COURTESY RAYMOND RED CORN

A salutary tale of the corruption that surrounds commodities such as oil (and gold), is the recent movie Killers of the Flower Moon, in which members of the Osage tribe of Native American Indians are at first surfeited in wealth (see above) derived from the rights to oil found on their land but how an unscrupulous local politician then seeks to murder them and acquire their lands into his family.

Gold Bullion

Gold has also been a source of conflict and a regulator of success in wars as this article outlines. Paper money used to be backed by reserves of the actual gold which it symbolised and this was known as the “Gold Standard” and although this system has been replaced everywhere by the Fiat system the prevalence of inflation as a result of the severing of the link, has risen worldwide. Having gold bullion reserves finances wars – for example, it is estimated that Californian gold was responsible for 10% of the cost of the American Civil War. The UK had access to gold produced by mines in its colonies such as South Africa which the mines were obliged to sell to the treasury whilst over the course of the two World wars, Germany had no such access and so the UK was able to pay for some of the food and armaments that came from the US (and borrowed the rest which it only paid off in 2006).

Gold Fields South Deep Mine The Twin Shaft Complex comprises a Main and Ventilation Shaft. The Main Shaft extends in a single drop to 2,998m below
surface, while the ventilation shaft extends to a depth of 2,947m below the surface. That’s almost 3 kilometres…

Oil and thence Gasoline prices are also levers of power in war e.g. the embargo on Russian oil in response to the war in Ukraine although to pull those levers means adversely affecting the price of oil commodities and the US has to try to persuade its Arab producer allies to release more product to stabilise the market. The price of gold and oil or gasoline (their markets show some different behaviours) are some of the most important commodity trading standards in the market and the first thing that many in the know will look at each morning.

A gold Mycenaean brooch in the form of an octopus, Mycenae, mid 2nd millenium BCE. (Archaeological Museum, Mycenae)

Of course, gold has decorative and cultural uses as well as bullion – jewellery, crowns, ceremonial cups and it is because it doesn’t tarnish or corrode that it has had this value since ancient times and so is one of the earliest commodities to be traded.

And so to the poem and having recently written a Ghazal, I decided to try a Glosa…

Glosa, or glose, is a form originally from Spain, featuring a quatrain epigraph, and four ten-line stanzas with the last line of each stanza being the corresponding line of the epigraph. The key to the form is that it incorporates the words of another. The glosser, or glosador, advertises a connection to a prior text.

Gold and Gasoline

Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold […]
Hoarded, bartered, bought and sold, […]
Price of many a crime untold …

                  Thomas Hood, ‘Gold’

Gold has commanded lust of kings
and beggars both who wish for things
or for gold’s sake alone
a useless dragon’s hoard
coins, bullion bars and rings
miners gave their lives for it
soldiers died protecting it
across the globe merchants trade
the metal that will never fade
Price of many a crime untold …

Shallow mines are damp and cold
deep in the Earth’s heat lies the gold
where miners in the new South Africa
still sweat to feed the dragon’s hoard
a ring with which to have and hold
a brooch to sparkle and attract the eye
a sovereign, symbol of King and country
pays for the soldiers’ dice with death
to die or win and maybe loot a little wealth
Price of many a crime untold …

And gasoline’s story is much the same
black gold fought over in the Great Game
of nations tampering with other nations
to keep their cars moving, lights burning
the destruction of Libya a tale of infamy
the treasures of Iraq to the winds scattered
because compared to oil, culture didn’t matter
and wars are won and lost by oil’s logistics
and the market’s fluctuating statistics
Price of many a crime untold …

Whilst gold has spawned so many crimes
it doesn’t threaten climate-changing times
it will not end our human hubris
and rarely even give us bliss
as when we ring the wedding chimes
both have brought us good and bad
and if we perish, though very sad
we only have ourselves to blame
for seeking gold and gas – the same
Price of many a crime untold …

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

My Alice Blue Gown

humanist55

Sometimes knowledge comes in the strangest, most roundabout way…

This morning I started my day with my usual routine – that means flicking through my social media and emails before settling down to read “Letter from an American” from the incomparable political historian Heather Cox Richardson who writes daily on current political affairs in America seen through the lens of the history of that country. Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and Ms Richardson chose to take the day off and spend it with her husband Buddy who is a fisherman and instead of – as she sometimes does on such a holiday – posting a photograph, she re-posted what she tells us is her favourite ever post – a very sad Valentine’s Day tale about Theodore Roosevelt. You can find Richardson’s posts either on Facebook or on Substack where she has 1.4 million subscribers and if you join them, then you can, like me, get her posts delivered to your inbox every morning. At present, she is experimenting with podcasting so that you can hear her reading this particular piece here.

The tale she tells is of how on Valentine’s Day 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his mother, to typhoid and his wife to what was probably a strep infection within hours of each other. His beloved wife Alice, had delivered a daughter, their first child, just two days before. Theodore was so bereft that he never spoke or allowed anyone to speak of Alice again, and though his daughter bore her mother’s name was known as Baby Lee rather than Alice. Theodore was already a reformer by nature, but the death of his mother and wife to diseases of the poor – rife in the overcrowded conditions of the time and at odds with the riches of The Gilded Age which was then in full swing – confirmed Theodore’s determination to bring about change – but not before escaping to Dakota Territory to try ranching as a way of burying his grief over Alice. Following a disastrously cold winter in 1886-7, Theodore returned to politics with new determination, and the rest, as they say, is history.

What Ms Richardson did not mention, however, was what became of Alice aka Baby Lee. So curiosity piqued, I turned to Wikipedia who had a satisfyingly comprehensive article on Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Roosevelt eventually married for a second time and gave Alice five half-brothers and sisters and whilst her initial reaction to her stepmother was not the easiest as is so often the case with Step-relations, Alice eventually came to hold her in great respect.

Alice Roosevelt in 1903

Alice grew up to be a socialite, renowned wit and a bit of a clothes horse, which as the daughter of the now President, she could afford to indulge. So much so that the song “My Alice Blue Gown” was written about her. Now I confess to being a sucker for what we Brits call Victorian and Edwardian Parlour Songs but which for Americans would be Parlour songs from The Gilded Age and “My Alice Blue Gown” is a favourite as rendered by The McGarrigle Sisters.

So there you go, a connection that I never expected to find…

And if you are American or indeed anyone worried about the prospect of a second term of Trump, you can find some very qualified hope in Letter from American. I imagine that in choosing this title for her blog, Heather Cox Richardson might have been paying homage to Alastair Cooke’s Letter from America and if she was, then I for one name her a worthy successor…

Between the Bullets and the Bombs…

humanist55

A detective contemplates a corpse
stabbed so many times that
he concludes – this was personal
so I am called an evil terrorist
as if the zombies in a
first person shoot-’em up
were suddenly weighted to win
I don’t want to witness my crime
by seeing the enemy as people
so I remember my X-box
shooting down Nazis
whose Holocaust
ironically
helped justify
our Palestinian “displacement”
between the bullets and the bombs

I press the button
which drops the bomb
but I don’t see the blast blossom
the seven stories pancake down
all in my rearview mirror
I don’t even see the confirmation
back at base – nothing to learn
about smart bombs
and our TV does not show
the dead children
or traumatised living
amongst the rubble
an angel of death
my hands are clean
only the world seeing
the blood dripping from them
between the bullets and the bombs

I am an old woman
whose heart has just given out
on the refugee road to elsewhere
surrounded, shelled
we took the only road they left open
my children will go to Kuwait
via camps in Lebanon
where they will be displaced
again by Saddam Hussain
and die in England
they will call this The Disaster
but my great-grandchildren
will have a good life
far from the bullets and the bombs

I am an old woman from Poland
I escaped the Holocaust
of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals
and the less-than-perfect of mind or body
only to find myself taken
to another prison camp
where the Jews are outside the wire
my husband and I helped the inmates
driving them to hospital
and I learned their language
so they have scheduled me for early release
and I will not die
between the bullets and the bombs

I am a baby who died
as the grossest provocation
the loudest shout-out
to a world that has long since
stopped listening and covered its eyes
whilst I am a baby crushed
into my mother’s breast
my grave a concrete sandwich
but we two babies
separated by bullets and bombs
whose ancestors lived here
side by side in peace
for millennia
if tested genetically
cannot be told apart
brothers and sisters under the skin…

Written for Poetics: Why war? over at dVerse Poets Pub Posted by paeansunplugged 

To Australia’s Indigenous People – Sorry…

humanist55

This post by Di on Pandamoniumcat’s Blog, is in response to the No vote in the recent Australian Referendum on the issue of Constitutional recognition of Australia’s indigenous people. Failure to recognise the existence of people who already lived in the land you took can never end well and hopefully, this is not the end of the road for this cause…
It was posted in response to For Dverse Poets Meeting the Bar: A Collective Point of View

Sorry

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 9

humanist55

The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon…
Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…

Dear Rachel

Passing the end of this street
I saw these sun-painted shadows
depicting the neighbouring houses
chiaroscuro – light and shade.
Morning sun swinging round
is what we notice both
creating and destroying shadows
but at eventide
it is the shadows winning
steadily reclaiming surfaces
for the night. I started
seeing shadowplay everywhere
best of all – shadows invaded
by reflected sparkles
from third-party windows
Chiaroscuro…

Andrew
© Andrew Wilson, 2023

Rachel fulfilled the PoPo brief perfectly, an epistolary postcard poem that referenced the picture on her card (below), and since she had presumably received my card, also referenced my theme of light and shade – perfect! I only wish I was allowed to show you…

Hold onto your hats! Myrtle and High Street Bellingham WA


America (I Would Like to Visit You)

humanist55

America I would like to visit you but
I have a fear of repeatedly feeling
déjà vu having seen
your treasures and tragedies
over and over
on big screens and small
I have come to absorb
through books and films
and blogs – those love-children
of Letter From America
some understanding of your ways.

It is only my personal view
others see you quite differently
from The Land of Opportunity
to The Great Satan.
I also, of course,
know real Americans
both in the flesh
and in the virtual world
and even have relatives
a whole branch of the family.
Since my grandfather’s brother
emigrated before the First World War
he and his descendants
have demonstrated the positives
the opportunity to make good
– it might have been less opportune
if he had not been white.

Now I understand the wealth
of America could not have been so great
without the dispossession
of the previous occupants
or the relocation of millions
of slaves who
even after emancipation
worked a different kind of bondage
in the factories of Chicago.

I cannot preach
we British have no right…
just this week I read a supplement
of The [Manchester] Guardian
on how Manchester’s cotton wealth
was the fruit of slavery
just at one remove
and the Guardian
famously liberal
did little to recognise
even its own failure to comment
until now.

America
so much is squeezed into your great cities
each pressure-cooking a distinct language
which is so much more than mere accent
but in between, the vast wildernesses
still exist free of graffiti
the poor of the cities not banned
but excluded from access nevertheless
by lacking the means to get there

And so
America
you are a land of opposites
of natural beauty and urban ugliness
of obscene wealth and unforgivable poverty
of liberal tolerance and extreme hatred.
Maybe this is true of all countries
but America – You proclaimed yourself
to be the Great and the Good
to be the World’s Policeman
but all your policemen
carry guns
and so therefore do the bad guys
and the poor
and the rich
by inalienable right.

America
Dorothy has
pulled back the curtain
and the little man revealed
does not match up to the rhetoric
or the dream.

But still I would like to visit you
America…

Written in response to “America [superstorm]”
by Kathleen Graber from her collection – The River Twice
© Andrew Wilson, 2023

Roadtrip Review No. 3

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Carrie-Anne, in her incomparable Welcome to My Magick Theatre, gave us, not forvthe first time, a tour de force – on the history of both Iranian cities and also pioneering Iranian women – the latter in homage to the current persecution of women in that country. Iran, arguably the cradle of civilisation, has cities that have risen and fallen so many times through history it makes one giddy! And the women Carrie-Anne describes are all fascinating, not least because of the way their stories are told…

As if this Abercadarium was not enough on it’s own – Carrie-Anne did one in her second blog – Onomastics Outside the Box which was on Persian names – a possible goldmine to any expectant parents to be who want to go with something different, more ancient, perhaps, name-wise… any way, Carrie-Anne drove herself to exhaustion as she explains in her TWO Reflections posts here and here! Carrie-Anne’s posts are not to be read from A to Z and certainly not in one sitting – no they are to be savoured, like a fine wine from the cellar, when the occasion demands…

It is late, and I have work in the morning and besides I cannot bring myself to add another review to stand in the shadow of Carrie-Anne and so to bed…

Xmas Tree, Extras, EXpelliarmus – Made up languages…

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The A to X Challenge is a form of Abercadarium and it is a testament to the imagination of the many bloggers who participate, that they manage to find twenty-six words each year, with which to furnish their blogs. Yet every year, depending on the theme, each blogger will struggle to fulfil certain letters but if there is one letter of the alphabet which almost always challenges – it is X… So I shall not be surprised to see a bit of cheating nor feel guilty to use the silent E in EX to resolve this dilemma for myself – after all, I am not just searching for a word, but for a whole phrase – and one that we know the meaning of but have forgotten the origin of!

But first, with no cheating, The Xmas Tree, whilst not quite a phrase, is something whose origins have certainly been forgotten – perhaps for good reason… Christmas, Xmas, and Yule-tide is the second most important festival in the Christian calendar – the birth of Christ coming second after the Easter festival which “celebrates” his death. The death of Christ and the symbolic meaning of it, is arguably the reason why the spread of Christianity has been so successful – God first gave, then sacrificed His only son for the sake of sinful mankind – it’s a powerful story but equally important in the acceptance of Christianity, has been its strategy of incorporating local, existing festivals wherever it has gone, and one of the first examples of this is Rome and the Romans who adopted Christianity under Emperor Constantine in an “if you can’t beat them join them” way. One of the Roman festivals which came near enough he date (somewhat arbitrarily fixed) on which Christians celebrated the birth of Christ, was the carrying of a Pine log through the streets to the Temple of Magna Mater ( Big Momma?) in memory of the goddess’ consort Attis. In the same way that Christianity subsumed other religious traditions, the worship of Magna Mater came to Rome from Greece and in turn, probably, from Phrygia.

Relief of an Archigallus making sacrifices to Cybele and Attis, Museo Archeologico Ostiense, Ostia Antica

The Goddess Cybele, is said to have found the infant Attis, in a basket in a reed bed (similar to the discovery of Moses) and raised him like a mother, to be her consort and priest for which he made a vow of chastity, to look at no other female than Cybele. He broke this vow with a nymph making Cybele so angry that she cast Attis out and mortified, he committed suicide by castration, bleeding out under a pine tree and being transformed into one himself. Cybele now relented her anger and brought Attis back to life and, having learned his lesson, Attis remained in faithful service to her (and who wouldn’t!).

A cult of Galli, meaning half-men, grew up around Attis in which priests ritually, and ecstatically castrated themselves and there is some suggestion that this was a trans-gender cult. This did not go down well with the Romans for whom castration, rather sensibly, was illegal. The logs carried through the streets by the Romans were adorned with an image of Attis dressed in women’s clothes – could this be the origin of the “fairy” atop the later Christmas tree? The Arbor Festival of which the Pine Log carrying was part, took place in March and is part of the coming of spring since Cybele was seen as the goddess of fertility and rebirth (and Attis’s resurrection) but may have been subsumed by Christianity as part of the turn of the year timing of Christmas.

Almost from the beginning of Christianity, the celebration of Christmas was criticised for its materialism and the more austere the variant of Christianity, the more it was criticised although it is said that Martin Luther, the reforming founder of Protestantism, was the first to bring a Christmas tree indoors and adorn it with candles after walking at night under a starry studded sky – certainly the tradition of the Xmas tree grew until its Victorian apogee with candles, baubles, tinsel and presents stashed beneath it…

The tradition of lighting a Christmas tree has been widespread in Britain since the Victorian era

Extras – here are a couple of phrases that I thought of too late for the date of posting their letter! Booting up (your computer) goes back to the 19th-century book “The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” by Rudolf Erich Raspe based loosely on a real explorer renowned for his telling of tall tales (hence Munchausen Syndrome). In one story he claimed to have climbed to the moon by pulling first on one boot bootstrap, raising his foot, and then on the other. Computers use a tiny operating system called the BIOS to start the underlying machine code operating system DOS, which finally starts your main operating system, say Windows or Linux – hence bootstrapping – now abbreviated to booting up!

Theatrical release poster by Lucinda Cowell for Terry Gilliams film…

Giving free rein to something – obvious when you think about it but most people are so far removed from the age of horses as a means of transport, that we may have forgotten that the reins are the steering wheel of a horse and so when you give a horse free reign, you are allowing it to find and pick it’s own way – perhaps because the ground is difficult and the horse knows best where to place its feet…

EXpelliarmus is the “Disarming Spell” from Harry Potter and whilst it is necessary to invent some Latin-sounding names for spells in such a book, some authors go as far as to invent whole languages for their books – I am thinking of J R Tolkien in particular where such languages reside in Appendices to his books. Of course, Tolkien was a Professor of Middle English at Oxford so he certainly had the skill to make such inventions but did they add anything to the books? Well, there are phrases spoken by say the Elves followed, mercifully, by the translation, but was it necessary to invent the whole language? I think not and I always skipped over those appendices. And what about those authors who put foreign language phrases and don’t follow them with the translation – how elitist is that!!! Of course, there are a few nerds who have fleshed out and talk Klingon (StarTrek) to each other at nerd fests and who knows – maybe there are would-be Elves whispering sibilantly to each other in Tolkien’s elvish tongue. But I think of the dwarves, elves, hobbits and orcs as archetypes of human nature rather than literal races who require a language inventing for them. Lots of science fiction and other fiction manage to put contemporary language into the mouths of their characters to perfectly good effect for the reason that the books are addressing a modern audience. Anyway, that’s my little rant over…

The Cant languages we have been showcasing from the Wikipedia article on that subject, are, on the other hand, perfectly justified because they are to defend one group from the eavesdropping of another and today we have just one:

Xíriga, from Asturias, Spain