Tuesday, 4 June 2013

gu-ru.

... all the dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy ...                              Up, Down.       Tiananmen 1989 
Bill McKibben & Rob Hopkins.A link to 'a provocative blog post' came to me by email from JustEarth. I know a few of them in the Toronto chapter: ex-MPs, ex-Judges and the like; none remember my name when I meet them again, all good. I get their newsletter and read it. The provocative post turns out to be second-hand. The original seems to be: Why I’m marking passing 400 ppm by getting back on an aeroplane; which is worth a careful read including the comments. Rob Hopkins (in case you don't know, I didn't though his book is on my shelf) is an instigator of the Transition Town movement in Totnes, Devon, UK, and the author of The Transition Handbook (which seems to be out-of-print) - there are pdf copies here & there ...

... but getting back to the 'provocative post', the key phrase both to me and to himself is "Give it another 18 months, 2 years at most, and then the funding and political effort will shift from mitigation and into adaptation and defence."

Which comes on like a punch in the heart.
 
Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds,

Red Right Hand, 1994.

take a little walk to the edge of town  
and go across the track
where the viaduct looms
like a bird of doom
as it shifts and cracks
where secrets lie in the border fires
in the humming wires
hey man you know
you're never coming back
past the square past the bridge
past the mills past the stacks
on a gathering storm comes
a tall handsome man
in a dusty black coat with
a red right hand

he'll wrap you in his arms
tell you that you've been a good boy
he'll rekindle all the dreams
it took you a lifetime to destroy
he'll reach deep into the hole
heal your shrinking soul
but there won't be a single
thing that you can do
he's a god he's a man
he's a ghost he's a gu-ru
they're whispering his name
through this disappearing land
but hidden in his coat
is a red right hand

you don't have money?
he'll get you some
you don't have no car?
he'll get you one
you don't have no self-respect
you feel like an insect
well don't you worry buddy
cause here he comes
through the ghettos and the barrio
and the bowery and the slum
a shadow is cast wherever he stands
stacks of green paper in his
red right hand

you'll see him in your nightmares
you'll see him in your dreams
he'll appear out of nowhere but
he ain't what he seems
you'll see him in your head
on the TV screen
hey buddy I'm warning
you to turn it off
he's a ghost he's a god
he's a man he's a gu-ru
you're one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan
designed and directed by
his red right hand
Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.
 


Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.
Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.Nick Cave & The bad Seeds.
Nick Cave.
Red Right Hand is a hit not long after Leonard Cohen's The Future (1992) & Dylan's Man In The Long Black Coat (1989) - please imagine that all of the obvious literary exercises have been ... accomplished, incorporated.
 
But this guy is bringin' in the zeitgeist sensibility on a Sid Vicious wave length (!) or maybe I am easily impressed by heroin addiction, bourgeois twit, whatever. Nonetheless, seems like the right way to me, appropriate, apt, symmetrical - to mourn the final bourgeois victory.

I am late coming here ... not as close to my children as I was; they used to keep me abreast. But having a beer with my son the other day the topic came up and I sensed interest.

This is despair gone on to nihilism (articulate nihilism mind you), and apparently beyond that again to unself-concern & outright self-destruction. Be that as it may be, a day spent listening has been at least as 'provocative' as Rob Hopkins' (fundamentally silly) hand-wringing.
Nick Cave.Nick Cave.Nick Cave.
 
I have mentioned before what I call Leonard Cohen's 'untrustworthiness' - Nick Cave is not trustworthy in any degree, not at all, simply does not pretend to it. And then there is a book, The Death of Bunny Munro, which is awful embarrassing dreck ... so ...

[Apologies for the over-done and (likely very) brittle HTML. I hope you can see about what I put, if not ... Firefox 9.0.1 under Windows7 with the display set to 1600 x 900 landscape (if that helps, otherwise, sorry).]
Esteja bem. 

And just in case you think I embrace this (or any other) brand of nihilism, fatalism, any'a that ...
   
"Nevermind, we're already fucked."
 
Is that what you're sayin'?

How lame is that? To accept such a thing quietly?
Mitigation?! Adaptation!? Resilience!? Civil Defence!?
Are you kiddin' me?
 
Anyway we're not fucked, not quite, not quite yet. We have until 2015 to stop CO2 emissions. It will take thousands upon thousands of actions like that of Tim DeChristopher: imaginative, thoughtful, courageous, weighing the consequences and accepting them, but it can be done.

This is Lucky '13 - the year we turned it around.
 
so ... let's get our thumbs out ...
   
Trustworthy or not he sure writes some wonderful lines:
               "I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay,
                 I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet."


Down.

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