Parable

by QMS, August 2015

The thought before the word
Is the one that leads the herd,
But the bird before the flock
Is the word before the thought.

Palesraeli Poetry

or 

Profane Poems in the Promised Land;

Sacred Verse in the Cursed Center

July-August 2015
by Quincy Saul

* * * * *

The serenity of apartheid
The obscenity of the sunrise
The holiness of land
The conscience of sand.

The sun is rising over Gaza
Pouring life and death like lava
From destiny's molten core,
A volcano to implore:
The heavens to redeem the earth,
To promise love to every birth.
The soil to redeem the sky
To promise peace to all who die.

In dreamless sleep the world is one
Oh sunrise let thy will be done.

* * * * *

You only know what you can see:
Thus the sunlight teases thee.
You can only see what you already know:
Thus the moonlight comes and goes.

But your secret is awakening
As water makes the desert sing:
So you can see more than you know
Even as the blossom grows,
So you can know more than you see,
Even as you can know me.

* * * * *

Apartheid is as apartheid does:
Burning children; beachside love.
Apartheid does as apartheid is:
Takes away all that it gives.

* * * * *

Will deep dry heat burn up the lies
Or bake them into hardened pies
Which generations will consume
And in digestion meet their doom?

Death and destroyers they become
Of the present, past and still to come.

Will the searing sun redeem
The silky silence of their victims' screams?
Will the blazing sky reveal
The soil's wound, that it may heal?

Or will every day conceal
The blooming desert of the real?

Will there ever come a time
When Israel loves Palestine?
What God or Devil, Heaven or Hell
Could love or hold thee, Israel?

* * * * *

Write a poem on a leaf,
Put your sword back in its sheath
And write a song to raise the dead;
As above, so beneath.

Though peace and justice call for rage,
Take a leaf from nature's page,
And write a rhyme for the growing green.
If you must burn then burn like sage:

Write a poem on the sky
So all the land can read your cry
As beneath, so above:
Raise the living, ask them why!

* * * * *

Everything under the sun has been named
But meaning is wild and can't be tamed:

Gaza like a bomb between the lips
Jenin like a fuse between fingertips
Ramallah like a patient moon
Nablus like a mountain of fire, soon.

Tel Aviv like a petulant child,
Jerusalem like faith gone wild,
Haifa like a dream gone wrong,
Jaffa like a broken song.

Israel like the wages of crime
Only redeemable in Palestine.

* * * * *

Is this the midwest or the middle east?
Fields of wheat, but without yeast,
Combine harvesters, power lines,
Stolen land and hidden crimes.

* * * * *

The emptiness of thought
Where everything is bought
The emptiness of soul
Where everything is sold
The emptiness of faith
The spiritual disgrace
When the land of milk and honey
Is ransomed for money.

(Arriving at the Jerusalem Bus Station)

* * * * *

(Jerusalem 1)

Does greatness rub off
The stones worn soft?
Do prayers rub in
Streets steeped in sin?
How much blood spilled?
How many spirits filled?
How much truth
And how much proof?
How much deceit
And how much belief?

How much pain and how much love?
Enough to fill the skies above,
How much grace and how much grief?
Enough to fill the ground beneath.
Enough still to come and enough left behind
To stagger any heart or mind.

* * * * *

(Jerusalem 2)

Here is the church and here is the steeple
And its single God for every people.
Here is the mosque and its call to prayer
To one God and one Prophet in the believers' care.
Here was the temple and here is the wall,
And the chosen people whose one God rules all.

Here is the stone and here is the sky,
Here is the present flying by.
Here is the dream and here is the faith,
Here is the prophecy, here is the grace.

Here is the hatred and here is the hurt,
Here is the pestilence, here is the dirt.

Here the convergence of ancient glories
Here the crossroads of modern stories.
Here the calling of what's to come,
Here the befalling of what's to be done.

And here is just another place
Another dream of the human race,
Here is a city cursed to be first
In the hearts of the best and the hopes of the worst.

Here is a city whose time will pass,
Here is the topsoil for the next world's grass.

* * * * *

(Jerusalem 3)

A city that feels like a final breath
Suspended, sustained in dynamic depth,
A city devoted to death, which lives,
A city that like any other gives us
Shelter and purpose and memory,
Prey to conquest and tyranny,
Fertile in chance and destiny.

A city devoted to death, which lives
Like water passing through a sieve:
Is the city the sieve or the water?
Which is hatred, which is honor?
What remains after all this time?
Law or crime? Beauty or grime? Poison or wine?

A city devoted to life, which dies
In the clash of profit and power and pride.
A city of dreams which wakes up and dies in
Apartheid walls upon the horizon.
A city that shines like a beacon of prayer
Trapped in a snare! Beware of its bite! Prepare for a fight!
A city devoted to life, which dies
In the occupation of Palestine.

A city, murdered symbol of unity,
Calling for mass and momentous mutiny
Against the world which has wrought it this way,
And for the world of peace for which it prays.

A city immortal in spiritual depth
Yet a city that feels like a final breath.

(If it doesn't succumb to its demons of slaughter
The sun will dry up all the water.)

* * * * *

(Jerusalem 4: Al-Haram Ash-Sharif)

  
The center of this world,
Where it started, where it ends,
The magnetic north of truth,
Where it hardens, where it bends.

Where souls shall be weighed,
Where prophets ascend,
Where sacrifice is measured,
Where judgement descends.

The throne of God
The primordial clay
Rapture night
Resurrection day.

Where kings are remembered,
Where the covenant's kept,
Where God is dismembered,
Where the son of God leapt.

Where Jesus committed his one act of violence
For which he was crucified:
Where the son of God fought the rule of money,
The living cause for which he died.

Where David and Solomon ruled and judged,
Where Abraham's son escaped sacrifice,
Where Mohamad alighted from a winged horse
And where he ascended to paradise.

Where empires pray,
Where crusaders slay,
Where pilgrims converge,
Live and die for the Word.

Where the Temple of the Chain
Failed to separate wrong from right,
Where all believers stake a claim
And sing, and shout, and kneel, and fight.

Where Mercy's Gate is closed,
Where soldiers guard its doors,
Where the poors await the Messiah
And the Messiah awaits the poors.

Where apocalypse will dawn
On cypress and olive trees.
Where revelation beckons,
Where birds come and go as they please.

Where Mercy's Gate is locked
Where the Messiah cannot enter
Where the path to peace is blocked:
The cursed and blessed center.

* * * * *

(Mount of Temptation)

To seek refuge in a desert cave
From a world of empire, sin and slaves,
To search for what's beyond the grave,
To burn for truth in the sun's sharp rays...

To meet the devil face to face,
To conquer hunger and pride and power
With grace at the hardest and darkest hour,

To fight Word with Word in delirious silence,
And to convert God to love from violence!
To distill from the simmering end of a world
The wisdom of newborn boys and girls.

To forge a legend of temptation
In the boiling sun's ablation
To inspire a thousand nations!

From the universal refuge of desert caves –
Carved by destiny's standing waves –
As beacons to a world of slaves
To meet your fears – be not afraid!
Of Self or State or God or Grave!
Fix your eyes on the horizon's blade:
This is the lesson that Jericho gave
A slave who defied himself and his tribe
And met the devil on its mountainside
To free himself from doubt and fear
Until he could speak to those who could hear
Of a destiny drawing near:

Of people from money and empire saved,
And of paradise gained because we forgave.
If this is what you love and crave,
Seek the refuge of desert caves!

Because love has not yet conquered hate
Because the holy city has imperial gates
Because money and empire rule the race
Go meet the devil face to face
And conquer him with love and grace.

* * * * * 

Jaffa Poems

(by Kanya D'Almeida and Quincy Saul)

* * * * *

Chessmen are limited but their choices are infinite

A lifetime in a game

Win or lose.

Existence in a box, movement on a square,

What's there?

In the ranks of the opposing color?

Some other

“Do or die” extremists

In the mists?

People are infinite but their choices are limited

A game for a lifetime

Win or lose.

Existence in a state, movement within borders,

Who gives the orders?

Where fate is decided beyond the horizon

Who dies and who lives

In the mists?

* * * * *

We are reptilian

Slithering forth into life

Calculating, pulsating

Wanting water, needing land

Laying our eggs in the sand

Striking at night, thoughtful and slow

Never letting go

Until our prey is limp

Drained and dead

And our mouths are red.

We are spirits

Shining through into life

Soaring

Roaring

Wanting work, needing love

Hoping for help from above

Dreaming at night, thoughtful and slow

Always letting go

Until we become food

For worms and roses

And the eye closes

And the sky opens.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Selections for 21st Century Conditions, from

SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM: A TRIUMPH by T.E. LAWRENCE [of Arabia]

DE LUXE EDITION, 1938, GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO.

selections and italics by QMS

“Rebellion was the gravest step which political men could take, and the success or failure of the Arab revolt was a gamble too hazardous for prophecy. Yet, for once, fortune favoured the bold player, and the Arab epic tossed up its stormy road from birth through weakness, pain and doubt, to red victory. It was the just end to an adventure which had dared so much, but after the victory there came a slow time of disillusion, and then a night in which the fighting men found that their hopes had failed them. Now, at last, may there have come to them the white peace of the end, in the knowledge that they achieved a deathless thing, a lucent inspiration to the children of their race.” 54

“The Sherif's rebellion had been unsatisfactory for the last few months: (standing still, which , with an irregular war, was the the prelude to disaster): and my suspicion was that its lack was leadership: not intellect, nor judgment, nor political wisdom, but the flame of enthusiasm, that would set the desert on fire.” 67

“Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or claim to it, against aggression. Even the wells and trees had their masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink of the other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who would instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account and to exploit it or its product among others for private benefit. The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.” 84

“Neither Sykes nor Picot had believed the thing really possible; but I knew that it was, and believed that after it the vigour of the Arab Movement would prevent the creation – by us or others – in Western Asia of unduly 'colonial' schemes of exploitation.” 132

“It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the votaries found their neighbors' beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers. Again and again they had arisen, had taken possession, soul and body, of the tribes, and had dashed themselves to pieces on the urban Semites, merchants and concupiscent men of the world. About their comfortable possessions the new creeds ebbed and flowed liked the tides or the changing seasons, each movement with the seeds of early death in its excess of rightness. Doubtless they must recur so long as the causes – sun, moon, wind, acting in the emptiness of open spaces, weigh without check on the unhurried and uncumbered minds of the desert-dwellers.” 148

“The first confusion was the false antithesis between strategy, the aim in war, the synoptic regard seeing each part relative to the whole, and tactics, the means towards a strategic end, the particular steps of its staircase. They seemed only points of view from which to ponder the elements of war.

The Algebraical element of things, a Biological element of lives, and the Psychological element of ideas. The algebraical element looked to me a pure science, subject to mathematical law, inhuman. It dealt with known variables, fixed conditions, space and time, inorganic things like hills and climates and railways, with mankind in type-masses too great for individual variety, with all artificial aids and the extensions given our faculties by mathematical invention. It was essentially formulable.

… calculate how many square miles? … And how would the Turks defend all that? No doubt by a trench line across the bottom, if we came like an army with banners; but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, in vulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind; and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so might we offer nothing material to the killing.” 192

[about the Turks and Germans] “They would believe that rebellion was absolute like war, and deal with it on the analogy of war. Analogy in human things was fudge, anyhow; and war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.” 193

[on the art of war, defined by “war philosophers”, based on “the biological factor”; reserves, #s, “effusion of blood”:] “A line of variability, Man, persisted like leaven through its estimates, making them irregular.” 193

“Nine-tenths of tactics were certain enough to be teachable in schools; but the irrational tenth was like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and in it lay the test of generals. It could be ensued only by instinct (sharpened by thought practising the stroke) until at the crisis it came naturally, a reflex.” 193

“The decision of what was critical would always be ours. Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves until we attacked... We might turn our average into a rule (not a law, since war was antinomian) and develop a habit of never engaging the enemy.” 194

[on propaganda and preaching] “It was more subtle than tactics, and better worth doing, because it dealt with uncontrollables, with subjects incapable of direct command. It considered the capacity for mood of our men, their complexities and mutability, and the cultivation of whatever in them promised to profit our intention. We had to arrange their minds in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. And not only our own men's minds, though naturally they came first. We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation waiting the verdict; and of neutral; circle beyond circle... There were many humiliating material limits, but no moral impossibilities; so that the scope of our diathetical activities was unbounded.” 195

“We had nothing material to lose, so our best line was to defend nothing and shoot nothing. Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power. The invention of bully beef had profited us more than the invention of gunpowder, but gave us strategical rather than tactical strength, since in Arabia range was more than force, space greater than the power of armies.” 196

“'What will now happen with this knowledge?' asked Mohammed. 'We shall set to, and many learned and some clever men together will make glasses as more powerful than ours, as ours than Galileo's; and yet more hundreds of astronomers will distinguish and reckon yet more thousands of now unseen stars, mapping them, and giving each one its name. When we see them all, there will be no night in heaven.'

'Why are the Westerners always wanting all?' provokingly asked Auda. 'Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your millions.' 'We want the world's end, Auda.' 'But that is God's,' complained Zaal, half angry. 'And has each the Prophet and heaven and hell?' Auda broke in on him. 'Lads, we know our districts, our camels, our women. The excess and the glory are to God. If the end of wisdom is to add star to star our foolishness is pleasing.” 282

“Jerusalem, was a squalid town, which every Semitic religion had made holy. Christians and Mohamedans came there on pilgrimage to the shrines of its past, and some Jews looked to it for the political future of their race. These united forces of past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present. Its people, with rare exceptions, were characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through. Ideals of Arab nationality were far from them...” 333

[on Syria and Syrians] “They were discontented always with what government they had; such being their intellectual pride; but few of them honestly thought out a working alternative, and fewer still agreed upon one... Some cried aloud for an Arab kingdom. These were usually Moslems; and the Catholic Christians would counter them by demanding European protection of a thelemic order, conferring privileges without obligation. Both proposals were, of course, far from the hearts of the national groups, who cried for autonomy for Syria, having a knowledge of what autonomy was, but not knowing Syria, for in Arabic there was no such name, nor any name for all the country any of them meant. The verbal poverty of their Rome-borrowed name indicated political disintegration. Between town and town, village and village, family and family, creed and creed, existed intimate jealousies sedulously fostered by the Turks. Time seemed to have proclaimed the impossibility of autonomous union for such a land. In history, Syria had been a corridor between sea and desert, joining Africa to Asia, Arabia to Europe. It had been a prize-ring, a vassal, of Anatolia, of Greece, of Rome, of Egypt, of Arabia, of Persia, of Mesopotamia. When given momentary independence by the weakness of neighbors it had fiercely resolved into discordant northern, southern, eastern and western 'kingdoms'... for if Syria was by nature a vassal country it was also by habit a country of tireless agitation and incessant revolt... The master-key of opinion lay in the common language: where also, lay the key of imagination... Patriotism, ordinarily of soil or race, was warped to a language... A second buttress of a polity of Arab motive was the dim glory of the early Khalifate, whose memory endured among the people... Yet we knew that these were dreams. Arab Government in Syria, thought buttressed on Arab prejudices, would be as much 'imposed' as the Turkish Government, or a foreign protectorate, or the historic Caliphate. Syria remained a vividly coloured racial and religious mosaic. Any wide attempt after unity would make a patched and parcelled thing, ungrateful to a people whose instincts ever returned toward parochial home rule.” 335-6

“Then would come reaction; but only after victory; and for victory everything material and moral might be pawned.” 337

“We should never try to improve an advantage. We should use the smallest force in the quickest time at the farthest place.” 337

“In a real sense maximum disorder was our equilibrium.” 338

“Any of our Arabs could go home without penalty whenever the conviction failed him: the only contract was honour.” 339

“The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance. By this substitution of a sure job for a possible masterpiece, military science made a deliberate sacrifice of capacity in order to reduce the uncertain element, the bionomic factor, in enlisted humanity. Discipline's necessary accompaniment was compound or social war – that form in which the fighting man was the product of the multiplied exertions of a long hierarchy, from workshop to supply unit, which kept him active on the field.

The Arab war should react against this, and be simple and individual. Every enrolled man should serve in the line of battle and be self-contained there. The efficiency of our forces was the personal efficiency of the single man. It seemed to me that, in our articulated war, the sum yielded by single men would at least equal the product of a compound system of the same strength.” 339

“Guerillas must be allowed liberal work room: in irregular war, of two men together, one was being wasted. Our ideal should be to make our battle a series of single combats, our ranks a happy alliance of agile commanders-in-chief.” 340

“We went about in parties, not in stiff formation, and their aeroplanes failed to estimate us. No spies could count us, either, since even ourselves had not the smallest idea of our strength at any given moment. On the other hand, we knew them exactly; each single unit, and every man they moved. They treated us as regulars, and before venturing a move against us calculated the total force could meet them with. We, less orthodox, knew exactly what they would meet us with. “This was our balance. For these years the Arab Movement lived on the exhilarating but slippery tableland between 'could' and 'would'. We allowed no margin for accident: indeed 'no margins' was the Akaba motto, continuously in the mouths of all.” 381

“the civil population of the enemy area was wholly ours without pay or persuasion. In consequence our intelligence service was the widest, fullest and most certain imaginable.” 385

“We underestimated the crippling effect of Allenby's too plentiful artillery, and the cumbrous intricacy of his infantry and cavalry, which moved only with rheumatic slowness.” 385

“Yet I could not explain to Allenby the whole Arab situation, nor disclose the full British plan to Feisal.” 386

[on the revolt of the Arab peasantry] “They could only rise once, and their effort on that occasion must be decisive.” 386

“I weighed the English army in my mind, and could not honestly assure myself of them. The men were often gallant fighters, but their generals as often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.” 386

“The abstraction of the desert landscape cleansed me, and rendered my mind vacant with its superfluous greatness: a greatness achieved not by the addition of thought to its emptiness, but by its subtraction. In the weakness of earth's life was mirrored the strength of heaven, so vast, so beautiful, so strong.” 512

“I explained that we should live on the country. Young thought it a poor country to live on. I called it very good.” 541

“I had been told the theory, could repeat some of it: but it was in my head, and rules of action were only snares of action till they had run out of the empty head into the hands, by use.” 618

“My head was working full speed in these minutes, on our joint behalf, to prevent the fatal first steps by which the unimaginative British, with the best will in the world, usually deprived the acquiescent native of the discipline of responsibility, and created a situation which called for years of agitation and successive reforms and riotings to mend.” 636

“I had studied Barrow and was ready for him. Years before, he had published his confession of faith in Fear as the common people's main incentive to action in war and peace. Now I found fear a mean, overrated motive; no deterrent, and, thought a stimulant, a poisonous stimulant, whose every injection served to consume more of the system to which it was applied. I could have no alliance with his pedant belief of scaring men into heaven... My instinct with the inevitable was to provoke it.” 636

“Our aim was an Arab Government, with foundations large and native enough to employ the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the rebellion, translated into terms of peace. We had to save some of the old prophetic personality upon a substructure to carry that ninety per cent of the population who had been too solid to rebel, and on whose solidity the new State must rest.

Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors. Feisal's sorry duty would be to rid himself of his war-friends, and replace them by those elements which had been most useful to the Turkish Government...

Quickly they collected the nucleus of a staff, and plunged ahead as a team. History told us the steps were humdrum: appointments, offices and departmental routine. First the police. A commandant and assistants were chosen: districts allotted: provisional wages, indents, uniform, responsibilities. The machine began to function.” 649

“anyone who pushed through to success a rebellion of the weak against their masters must come out of it so strained in estimation that afterward nothing in the world would make him feel clean.” 659

“We took Damascus, and I feared. More than three arbitrary days would have quickened in me a root of authority. There remained historical ambition, insubstantial as a motive by itself. I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us. Mecca was to lead to Damascus; Damascus to Anatolia, and afterwards to Bagdad; and then there was Yemen. Fantasies, these will seem, to such as are able to call my beginning an ordinary effort.” 661

Lost and Found:

The universal mind
That thinking left behind
When self became an ego
And inner eyes went blind.

The universal soul
That spirit can't control
When being became having
The part could not be whole.

by QMS, June 2015

Tomorrow is Still the Question!

Viva Ornette!  

March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015

(Ornette Coleman on alto and soprano saxophone, Don Cherry on trumpet, Percy Heath and Red Mitchell on bass, and Shelly Manne, Recorded between January 16th and March 10th, 1959)

It is so immediately obvious that this music and these musicians lost nothing and gained so much by abandoning certain conventions and standards. You can hear the exuberance in everyone’s playing: the exuberance known only to those who collectively go where no collective has gone before. Here is a living, ongoing fusion of cutting-edge and tradition, common sense and avant garde, both essences at once, in sound and the silences in between.

 














We can reenact their almost subversive rhythm, melody and harmony, we can feel its promise of another music (and another world) in our heads and hearts. But if we try to copy them we can never have the same exuberance in our playing as in this album. For us the question is yesterday, while for them it was tomorrow. Until our life questions and musical questions together are of tomorrow (as theirs were), we will never be able to sound like this. Tomorrow is still the question. Ornette Coleman, Presente!

 

Before the Time is Over

Before the time is over

Clasp the chaos in the order;

Stretch the moment to its limit!

Become immortal within it!

Hear the birdsong go on forever!

Hear how the melody perishes never!

Build a kingdom, topple a kingdom!

Lose, regain, and practice freedom!

The time is almost over

But the moment has no border:

Now and then and forever,

Here and there and wherever,

You and me and whoever,

No one and everyone together.

by QMS, June 9, 2015 

Notes towards an Anarchist International

by Jax Cafark

Left Boredom, May 30, 2015, New York City.

What do we awaken to? 
100,000 people are gone from New Orleans.
We're losing land. There will be no 400th anniversary.
What is the real?
The real is the shock of something we didn't pay attention to,
when it takes away our families.

Protest is so masculine.
We need an ecofeminist movement within anarchism,
So we can actually give birth to something;
Regeneration of the human and natural community.

   
Learn something from people who have communal lives.
Can we learn?
Can we join together?
Can we begin to really practice solidarity?
The First International was a metaphysical breakthrough.

Uniting institutions, ideologies, imaginaries and ethos:
Positive envy for a charismatic movement:
It has to be so good that people feel bad to be left out.
Not short-term gratification, but the real joy of the long haul.
Like the Zapatistas, movements of the imagination:
Grassroots poetry and stories!

Our main focus: what are we creating?
It's simple.
People are born, they live, they need to eat and drink, they die,
They need to be taken care of.
Our system is callous and cruel to people.
If they like what you're doing, something's wrong.
We can do better. People will flock to it.

P.S. I continue to be amazed when you show me what “I” have said.  “I” is such a strange equivocation. This is another useful example of how “I” can “have” no ideas.  The parallax of perspective brings out much that “I” could never have imagined!

COPLA CIMARRÓN

por Quincy Saúl

24 Mayo, 2015

Cantan las montañas

Silvestre en canción

Leyendas ancianas

Por un futuro cimarrón.

Cantan rios y vientos

Silvestre en corazón

Futuros hambrientos

Por el pasado cimarrón.

Canta el mundo entero

Esférico en oración

El pasado y el futuro

Por un presente cimarrón.

Cantan los ancestros

¡Pensamiento y acción,

Amor y rebeldía,

Poesia cimarrón!

Cantan los pueblos del mundo

Por la séptima generación,

Por el pueblo que no ha nacido

Silvestre y cimarrón.

Canta maestro pueblo,

Un nuevo modo de producción,

Comunas en éxodo,

Economía cimarrón.

Canta el encanto
De la prefiguración
De la agroecología:
¡Vivir despierto y cimarrón! 

Cantan las semillas

En contra de la traición

De la muerte transgénica

Y por la vida cimarrón.

Cantan conuqueros

Con semillero cimarrón

¡Profecías y destinos

De la revolución!

Canta el Pachakuti

Una nueva iluminación,

¡Y guerreros del arco iris

En horizonte cimarrón!

Canta toda la clima

Por la organización

De paz ecosocialista

Y un cumbre cimarrón.

Dedicado humildemente a los Guardianes de Semillas, y a los conuqueros y conuqueras de Monte Carmelo, con altas esperanzas cimarrónes y cronopios, por el lanzamiento del Primer Internacional Ecosocialista.

Viento y Pueblo

by QMS, May 16, 2015

¿De donde viene el viento?

¿De donde viene la lluvia?

El viento viene del sol

Del cielo negro y rubia,

La lluvia viene de tierra

De suelo arena y mármol.

¿De donde viene el pueblo?

¿Y hacia donde va?

El pueblo es como el viento

Tiene origen y mamá:

Va por el horizonte

Alrededor y adentro.

El mundo es tan sencillo

Como una semilla:

Pequeña y ardiente

Con vida infinita,

Compleja enormamente

Libre y candente.

A Surregionalist Schema of Revolutionary Experiences

What do the most inspiring revolutionary experiences have in common?

By QMS, as inspired by Max Cafard, 2015/Year 2 Pachakuti

 (For example...)

What do the Zapatistas have in common with the Sarvodaya movement?

The Havana malecon with the anarchist side-streets of Thessaloniki?

The NYC revolutionary arts scene with the Vermont Bread and Puppet Theater?

The Venezuelan ecosocialists with the South African shack-dweller movement?

Intentional communities/ecovillages with the radical labor movement?

International solidarity organizations with the prison abolition movement?

Radical environmentalists with the alternative/complementary currency movements?

Squatter movements with hacker collectives?

(An aspiringly surregionalistic schema of revolutionary qualities observed/derived in/from a little over a decade of searching for revolutionary movements on five continents... Sometimes these qualities appear only “in vanishing moments”... To the degree that they are magnified, extended, and elaborated, we are all better off... These can be manifest among “the masses” or among small collectives of individuals...)

• Revolution of everyday life – where the meaning of politics is constantly reborn and reinvigorated and reinvented in every-day life, not just in planned or spontaneous events.
• Challenging modernity – where people are challenging/reinventing/transforming not only the status quo/the powers that be, but on a more profound level are developing new practices and imaginations beyond the whole matrix of modernity, beyond its conditions of production and its forms of knowledge (including its foundational concepts like jobs, “progress” etc).
• Like water (this is Oscar Olivera's criteria): social movements should be like water; in motion, transparent and happy.
• Resistance and prefiguration – where politics encompasses both a rejection and an embrace; where practice is negative and positive, obstructive and constructive; where negation and affirmation complement each other and spur each other on, especially when the dialectics between these aspects are so tight that you can't say where one begins and the other ends. Where sacrifice and celebration share common cause and creed.
• Evolution – where the possibilities of humanity are unlocked, for individuals and for collectives, where people are doing qualitatively new things which would not otherwise be possible, and there is the genuine sense that humanity is evolving; where human nature is freed from the captivity of capital/patriarchy, to be and to become beyond what we already know...
• Revolutionary ontology – where there is attention and focus on Being, deeper than struggling for concessions, or resisting something, but where the struggle is for a new human being, and people are conscious of themselves as a site of that struggle and celebration.
• Revolutionary epistemology – where there is attention and focus on Knowing, deeper than reciting a political line or an ideology, but where the struggle is for a new way of understanding, and people are conscious of their own minds as a site of that struggle and celebration.
• Ancient and futuristic – where people have a reference or a rootedness in the ancient and the ancestral, both in terms of their daily practices and in their philosophies, but for whom tradition is not a shackle but a launch pad, which carries them toward bold, innovative, daring, even outlandish and otherworldly futures.
• Spirit – Movements/collectives which are “more than meets the eye” – which acknowledge and focus a dimension of politics beyond the strictly economic... With individuals who think and behave beyond the ego form of the self.
• International/Intergalactic – In two senses; both in terms of having concrete reference/relation to others who are far away, and also in the shared sense of both humility and responsibility of knowing that we all are connected and interrelated and interdependent; an openness, an anti-provincialism, which is not abstract but rooted in self awareness/self-consciousness.
• Matriarchy – where women are leading the way, and self-consciously taking control of affairs in concrete ways (control of resources, development of new theory, making decisions, recruiting and taking responsibility for training/development of new members, etc).
• Holistic – No distinction between means and ends. A simplicity of theory and practice that is comprehensive even as it tackles and engages in all the complexities of the world.
• Back to the basics – Human labor. Seeds. Land. Water. Shelter. Food. Movements that cut through the complexity and obfuscation of the information age... who remind us what it means to be human, and give us an angle to join in that struggle and celebration.
• The wild – A sense of surprise, the unexpected, a break from routine and routinization... not to be confused with randomness, but the way a garden surprises even a veteran gardener, social movements should surprise their practitioners.... a readiness for the unknown and unexpected and uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

Can you deduce it all to program? Probably a terrible idea... Never seems to work... But just in case:

RED BLACK AND GREEN:

A PROGRAM FOR (R)EVOLUTION

RED: For the sovereignty of the First Nations: For the original peoples of the world, the indigenous and aboriginal and tribal peoples on every continent. For the original communists, who lived in egalitarian and harmonious balance with all nature. For all struggles to reclaim the commons, past present and future. For the heroic revolutionary anti-capitalist traditions all over the world. Free the land.

BLACK: For the liberation of oppressed nations everywhere. For Black Power and Black Consciousness: For self-determination and for decolonization. For the emancipation of internal colonies and occupied territories. For Panafrican and Afrocentric ubuntu and ujamaa. Free the people.

GREEN: For Mother Earth, the Pachamama. For all our relations and ancestors and the next seven generations. For wind, water, fire and soil. For seeds and their guardians. For Earth Democracy. For agroecology and the production of integral ecosystems. For the preservation of biodiversity, and the struggle against desertification. For healing people and the planet. For the young and the new. Free life.

JAFFNA POEMS

by Kanya D'Almeida and Quincy Saul, January 2015 

Yalpanam, land of music on the lyre
Like ficus vines that find a bark and cling,
Jaffna, burning on the nation's pyre,
A desperate, wise and determined thing.

To color the soil this crimson-red clay –
Where deep red earth is deep as deep blue sea –
Just how many lives did they have to slay
Where crickets sing beneath the banyan tree?

Where recent history has disappeared,
Buried, flattened, scattered, whispered, feared,
The present has passed, the future is now,
Answered in the eyes of a branded cow.

When a jute rope connects your neck to your hoofs
Even the act of escape is a noose.
Where ruins old and new with flowers bloom,
Where causes false and true in shadows loom.

Where every scene was witness to a death,
Where heat and breeze and beauty catch your breath, 
In a bottomless well, echoing sobs,
In a single temple, a hundred gods.

Silences heavy, expectant and still,
Where gods have danced for aeons in the skies,
Lush grapevines bend to a bent farmer's will
Where trees have stood for centuries and grown wise.

Not curiosity shining in the eyes
Where bulletholes and beauty strangely swirl,
More a quick sizing up of deceit and lies,
Where freedom's hands around a kathi curl.

Seas and trees they preserved, but dreams they stole
Where cultures grow from land in fields of grain,
Holy and haunted, sacred and profane,
Ravaged yet untouched, destroyed yet whole.

Echoes of Jaffna

by Quincy Saul, January 2015

1.

A distant drum, and a rooster, in the night,

The deep raindrop of a tabla, and a buzzing beetle,

Sing together a vision of Jaffna.

The wide skies over elephant pass

Resonate with thousands of years

Of bondage and bravery,

Migration and invasion,

War and counter-war,

Peace and counter-peace.

Villages of survival,

Full of crows and pockmarked empty buildings

Dance together a vision of Jaffna

Which the wide world will never see.

Empty lands – flat, vacant, crying their erasure to the empty skies,

They too resonate, they echo, they resound

With stories the wide world will never hear.

Yet their emptiness outweighs all the concrete:

Vacuum becomes plenum

And emptiness outweighs extinction.

2.

The music in a passing car,

Passing on a road that is also just passing through

Sings of modernity and progress and development,

While packs of dogs howl to the stars

With the echoes of forsaken dreams,

With the echoes of betrayed causes,

With the echoes of unfulfilled faith.

There is a silence in the Jaffna night

Which is full of ghosts.

The distant drum whispers, or it echoes,

A foreboding promise:

That the ghosts are more alive than the concrete,

That unseen visions

And unheard stories

Will always,

In merciless anonymity,

Prevail.

Neduntuvu

by Quincy Saul, January 2015

Temple of the growing rock!

Kingdom of dead coral!

As beautiful as its breeze,

As the mane over the eyes of its wild ponies.

Where on a small dirt lane

I met the eyes of an old man, with a cloth around his waist and a wooden stick in his hands.

Flabby in my hat and clothes and trishaw, I felt like a disgrace and a fraud.

On that same dirt lane, later on,

We saw a living corpse,

Beaten, broken, scarred, but standing, looking at us:

This pony seared a symbol in my mind forever:

The horror and the reality of war.

Hundreds of haunted houses.

Coral walls that are taken down for parties

And rebuilt again after.

Beaches that flare the flames of dead coral into the bottomless blue.

Here is a beauty which humans made bleak,

Yet bleakness and beauty become each other:

Almost everything is in ruins, but

The remains are showered with flowers --

Bright pink blossoms are scattered like so much sand,

Splashed with abandon

On beds of green, draped over

The coral and concrete skeletons,

Which stand like garlanded sentinels to the unknown.

A lone baobob stares out to sea,

Older than everything else except the rock,

Bearing with massive magnanimity the scars of human contact,

Home to thousands of generations of creatures.

And the growing rock –

What if it were the most sacred site on all six continents?

Its anonymity suggests to me that this is the case.

Is it a cocoon, or a chrysalis?

Does its nature reveal ours?

The growing rock and its temple, called Delft,

As flat as its great plains of thin green grass

As gnarled as the roots of its ficus forests,

As beautiful as all the blues of its many-striped sea,

As pitiful as the branded cow which wanders,

Neck tied to its foreleg,

As tragic as the dead cormorant on the side of the road

Outside the airy, empty hospital,

In front of the ruins of a Dutch fort, and somewhere

In the mix of incredible coal and indelible colonialism,

Between flowers and war,

There is something to be rediscovered:

In the superior eyes of an old man,

In the mystery of a wild pony,

In slow strangling swarms of ficus,

In the wary innocence of children born after the war,

In the new words for tree and for spider

Which we were taught by one such child,

On the remains of an ancient temple,

In the shade of a giant tree,

In the wind of a saphire ocean,

Among the dance and play of butterflies,

Whose flight seems clumsy

Because our eyes are too slow to see such elegance,

Beneath the solitary soaring

Of Brahminy kites,

And in the bright and constant singing

Of a small bird flying at great height,

In the exuberance, the full bodied expression

Of its song and dance

It is there!

Find it for yourself in the growing rock,

In the blossoming ruins.