Uk delegation to Diyarbakir

After a full night of travelling on what was possibly the hottest flight ive ever been on i spent the better part of the night trying to sleep in Istanbul airport with feet which had swelled up to the size of melons due to the extreme cabin temp from London. Not sure whether if it was hot to try to acclimatise cold Britons to turkey's heat or just to reinforce the fact that British weather in October is rubbish!

My boss and i decided that the only way forward was to consume some beers at 5 am, which as we boarded the red eye to Diyarbakir seemed to reinforce the slight weirdness of travelling through the night. The flight was full of Kurdish businessmen heading back to the city which is the focus of the current political struggle of the Kurdish people for recognition and freedom. We are flying out as part of the UK delegation to observe and monitor the mass trial of 152 Kurdish people by the Turkish state for charges of crimes against the state.

In order to have a little time to ourselves we have travelled out a day earlier, we are later travelling over the border into Kurdistan and researching business opportunities and offering our services to the KRG government, so being able to get a understanding of the Kurdish region this side of the border is a big help.

On arrival at Diyarbakir it is immediately obvious of the massive military presence in this city. The few commercial flights which land use a shared airstrip with the military and as i strode across the airstrip we are surrounded by high chain link fences with razor wire and an array of armed military personnel who are strolling giving the passengers the look over. We seek out a taxi driver to take us to our hotel which is in the newer part of Diyarbakir. Diyarbakir has seen massive economic growth in the last ten years with a massive splurge of high rise apartment blocks and suburban spread.

One of the things my nicotine lungs have been desiring is a cigarette and it is fine to smoke in the taxi, as my time in the east of turkey goes past i realise more and more that they operate a very lax approach to seat belts and road traffic rules and like my other trips east ... the horn is king. The roads' traffic is a mix of shiny new four by fours and family cars, older style taxi's and agricultural vehicles and man pushed handcarts laden with goods for sale on the roads side or in the tiny winding streets of the old town sur. Very occasionally we swerve to pass a donkey with an older Kurd in traditional dress astride seemingly oblivious to all the kafuffle behind him.

In order to avoid the main drag traffic our taxi driver runs a small detour round some back streets, small children play in the rubble strewn streets, women wash down their front steps, and beat out carpets and young Kurdish boys send footballs arcing through the spray. It is interesting to later learn that there was a project to give out a lot of footballs to young people to encourage sport playing instead of rock throwing at the Turkish military which had resulted in over 7000 youths being arrested and put in jail. Surprisingly the footballs did not really work, the young people are still angry at their lack of political freedom, a football is not going to replace a sense of justice and acknowledgement! The majority of Kurdish people live a long way below the poverty line, a lot of the residents of Diyarbakir are the children of those which were forced into the city by the government endorsed resettlement plans, and some are refugees come over the border in the the 90's fleeing Saddam's persecution. Others are simply the ethnic Kurdish population who have always resided in this area of Turkey and are yet to be given the recognition or a semblance of equal rights in their native country.

We are staying at what is one of the newer hotels in Diyarbakir, in a fairly newly built district bursting with Turkish brand shops and coffee bars and places to eat along with various bars catering to those who do drink in this district. It is incredibly hot as we disembark and rearrange ourselves in the room, but luckily we have air conditioning and i finally get feet which have returned to the actual size they should be! Our delegation is not arriving till late in the evening so we have the day to explore the city.

We head off on foot through this new district to the go within the city walls into the old town known as Sur. Walking along the streets can be a bit precarious as son much is still a building site and pavements finish and potholes arrive without any warning. Building is haphazard and seemingly occuring without much thought to planning or impact. We pass several rusty and decidedly bent scaffold system where young men shimmying up and down with no rope harness or safety systems in place. Young boys of around 7 or 8 push hand made sacks on wheels and collect rubbish from the streets, plastic bottles and such like, weaving in and out of the congested traffic and narrowly at times avoiding getting squashed by all manner of road traffic. We walk down one of the more formal boulavards and pass by a military encampment with sentries in pill boxes at each corner and rifles pointed out into the street. The military operate a very large base here, and they live the army lifestyle contained completely within base, with all their families housed in the compounds and all facilities within. They have very little to do with the city or with its residents as people other than in their military role.


We pass through one of the municipal parks, green and lush but with a slightly disused feeling, the fountains are not running and a big bronze of attaturk looks solemnly down on all within the park boundaries. Eventually we reach the walls of the old town and one of the four main gates into the city. The walls are built out of black and white stone and have been much restored over the last few years, but they still create an impressive physical barrier as well as a mental barrier.... the city inside remains little changed since medieval times with twisting tiny streets running between the houses and covered bazaars with all the traders selling their wares. They is a vast aaray of produce on display from dried fruit to nuts and the heady aroma of spices. We walk down the streets and as it is saturday people are in a playful mood, little children run and skip in the alleyways from doorway to doorway and occasionally a child will turn to say a shy hello or how are you in broken english. We pass the oldest mosque in Diyarbakir and its cylindrical stone carved muezzin tower. There are workshops for the metal working and black smithing, dark and black interiors that emit deep amber sparks and the loud crash of an industry little changed for millennia.

It has now been a tumultuous and busy few days since our arrival in the heat of Diyarbakir, The trial has attracted a lot of national press coverage but the international coverage has been muted at best and misinformed and prejudiced at best. Their are representatives from various European delegations including Sweden, Germany, France, Switzerland and representatives from the EU including several MEP's. As for the compilation of our delegation we are 2 MP's, three lawyers and human rights campaigners and one Kurdish PHD student resident in the Uk and of course little old PA me...

Our daily activities start early with the struggle to get into court each day, organisation is a chaotic, the struggle and crush around the court gate provides the perfect bottle neck so that the media can get its shots of differing people arriving each day. Family members have come down and large numbers of people gather to watch and mark their protest, their is a heavy police presence, with armed and riot geared police standing around, as well as air surveillance in the form of helicopters and snipers posted on every tall building in the vicinity.



The Italian delegation are loud in protest, colourfully demonstrating via the use of a brightly coloured banner proclaiming 'free everybody' in Turkish, Kurdish, English and Italian. They have been the most proficient at grabbing the media's attention each day. However this is to the dissent of the Turkish riot police, who eventually decide they have had enough of this flagrant media circus and show of free speech and decide to enclose and shift the protesting group away from the court entrance. They force the protest down the road to group together on the outside of the Diyarbakir town hall plaza. Eventually the protest manages to close off more then one street lane to except the growing amount of protesters.

Single child family plant

That drunken purchase,
in strip lit Tesco's at four in the morning
made me laugh as you returned with
spiky leaves and naff fake terracotta pot.
It moved houses with us
it's head stuck out of windows of vans
getting wind blasted on the motorway

Bashed and abused,
drunk students poured cider over it
and house mates ashed fag butts and spliffs
into its bare roots

It had three stalks
one taller than the other
and one wee stem
so that we named it the single child family plant

Our relationship sputtered and stuttered
and was finally stubbed out
i claimed the plant
If only cause i had somewhere
to call home
And could shift it!

It bobbed round other flats
saw lovers come and go,
and gradually sickened
leaves browning through neglect
i was terrible at watering it
and then drowned it
in over compensation

When that last hurried eviction came
and i headed west once more
Single child family plant
came with
but got relegated to parents shed
and overwintered with
garden furniture and rats for company

Life flowed onwards
Our summer festival reunion
broke down barriers
and opened new lines of communication
But our plant-
had definitely died and rotted in the shed

My mother ever the green gardener
come spring
pulled it out into the sun
and left it be
So on a recent soft rainy June day,
smoking and talking under the arbor
she pointed at its garish pot

No longer single child family plant
But a vigorous flowering bush
many stemmed
and heady with new growth
has arisen some wind carried stray seed

Out of your spontaneous alcohol fuelled
purchase
comes whole new growth
i wish you could see it bloom!

Fridge surprise!

On returning late one night,
to closeted cottage
i let the fridge light
reveal a surprise hidden tight
Chocolate from France with love
ohh it tastes just right!

(yummm yumm all gone in my tum!)

Pawn

She that lets herself be a pawn to men, will always sink and rise with the swell of fate-
We make our own lives out of the ends handed to us. Don't allow yourself to be buffeted by another's fear and inadequacy- Stand alone and strongly!

Rag doll

The room circles round
with snapshots which just don't quite fit,
biting down into shoulder
no teeth to grip to stillness.

But this rhythm is yours
you push to the limits
and find nothing at the bottom of myself
but rags and straw.
Smoke screens and mirrors
have failed to hide this mystery
so carelessly woven.

Vigorously
but with a knowledge
which can only be intuitive,
you unpick these seams.

Like a rag doll
to these pointed sharp fingers
i'll fall, bounce and crash
tremble, twist and quiver
At the final push
only i fell into the valley below.

My hard won climb to the heights
will only be met with disinterest.
This was only ever a human tale;
with cloth for skin
and lambs wool innards,
i can only be returned
to the dusty half shelf

One reaches maturity.
It is time to put away childish things.

Waterloo verse

Head in the clouds,
feet in the gutter,
arms around my waist
what does it matter?

OR AS HUGO THINKS IT SHOULD BE

Head in the clouds,
feet in the gutter,
arm's round your waist,
i must be a nutter!

On hearing an old friend describe his girlfriend as proper mental..... made me laugh so i ran with it!

3 am phone calls,
texts that just don't stop,
drunken conversations,
and head fucks the lot of us.

Crazy and mad,
a real pain in the arse,
The ones to avoid
Evil harpies,
wicked witches of sex
A furious group are we

psychotic, licentious
needy neurotic
all of us
fit to be garrotted

Whether we left you,
or your still running from us
We are the ones you
bemoan in beer
and drug fuelled excesses
Either too mad, bad, vixen or bitch
best friend shagger,
Or frigid virgin desperate to hitch

How quickly we shift
from the arms of love.
Fall down the cracks
This distance you crave
We wish to save
If we be woman
our souls are stone
We are 'proper mental'
in need of straitjackets
and restraining orders
battle lines drawn
we cannot cross your borders
so who are we?
Who are we?
That awful bunch
Of exes....

taxi thoughts

Black contained wealth
glides by, as taxi windows
reflect passing streetscapes
and pavement treaders.

Sun like syrup,
pours into the cracks between buildings.
A break in a passing cloud
illuminates like theatre spotlight,
a ramshackle man,
a hand to mouth drunkard.

He stops and lets sun warm his cheek,
this piercing heat
like the thousand cheek slaps
from women in bars
less drunk than he
and feels nothing but the sensation.

Yet trussed up suit,
stuck in traffic
in stuffy cab
see's only the sun
beating down
and is envious for a moment
of the freedom that comes
from having nothing left to lose.

Master of disguise

I am never sure of which side
will face me tonight.
We sit down in smoke filled rooms
under whiskey coloured half light
This cities loud yell
Still filling our brains-

Communication is stilted,
stifled,
overwrought and intensified
by the sheer enormity of everything to discuss.
A sidelong glance
across this heaving room,
can reveal
a parallel universe
of intricate and myriad meanings.

And yet it's this look which so deceives
for in the pit black of iris
still plays a light- a fire.
This flame can flare or flicker
and to look too hard
is to extinguish.

Your elusive personhood
twists and turns and like a prism
fractures light.
Your splitting self
becomes an untouchable
infinite reflection in the looking glass of life.

In a striptease of revelation,
i am allowed to glimpse
differing selves
that linger in the minds eye
occasionally i can touch your
chameleon skin.
But the hand may linger too long
or the mind will try to retain
this sensation,
this seductive communion.
So the skin will flush crimson red
and fingers will be burnt by poisonous secretions.

You play this game so magnificently,
i wonder at your sanity.
In having millions of facates,
do you still have anything at the core?

Or have you achieved this ultimate goal?
In the obliteration of one true self
is there delicious freedom
in being all things to all men?

Humanity does not desire intimacy.
Brute proximity to visceral reality alone,
Is almost to painful to bear.
So propinquity to another
can in it's desperate realness
become a stranglehold.

The shackles of stasis
are excruciating to you
time to shift and change
and break loose again
The master of disguise.

Birthday Verse

In my eyes you are aging
grown shabby, bumbling and benign.
Trousers held up by string,
on our dawn walk to the sea.
Talking about trees and plants
you so wanted to tend in younger years,
yet gifted you were.

Artisan's hands, and a mind
of quivering complexity
pushed and pummeled you forward
to create, to perform.

Even now as we drive
down silent midnight motorways
and you slip through tiredness
into the separate universe
of the sleep deprived,
you mind will whirr and click.

And then in moment of lucidity
grasp and illuminate
an idea.
Just like the blood orange moon
winks through dark car windowpane
and highlights the corners
of your slumped sleeping body.

I cannot help but love you-
in ways old and strange
Time will not erode this i know.

late night conversation

Talking till words have become cumbersome, the tongue furs and slurs round consonants and vowels which are are bitter in the mouth, like grit between teeth. Repetitious situations and conversation frustrate me yet when tiredness overwhelms me i fall prey to this malice also. If i have the pleasure of uncharted territory, unblemished by my cynical intuitive perception, then i can express, however contradictions and ties keep me in a form of stasis. These bonds with each and everyone are alive with the tenuous connection we have, this electricity of intimacy which strobes and crackles amongst us and yet it seems only my fingers are burnt by its lightening forks!

The creative urge

A child will create without any hesitance, the act of creative output as natural and uninhibited as breathing or laughing is. As we age the criticisms of the world will often encroach upon our creative urge. We develop a fear, the weight of experience which stays the hand before it places words to paper or paint to canvas. The fear of the blank page can become overwhelming, our natural impulse to simply create in a naive but true fashion is stifled. The critical implications of being assessed or of being our own critics will stop so many images being painted or written. We need to return to the child likeness, to be naive and open to our own creative urge.... to simply do and make, the criticisms of others will be valid but we should never allow these to stop us from creating in the first place !

Leviathon

It is like water,
in that it stagnates,
swirls and eddies.
Can cleanse
uproot and upsurge
A tidal wave of dessimation or destruction.

Or gently drip
steady erosion of even the strongest subjects
permeates,
seeps,
makes sodden even the most resolute.

Peculiar ability to transform and renew
coupled with enormous capacity
for absolute asphixiation
Tasteless
but instantly recognisable

Changing consistency and colour
from oil rainbow to the most transparent blue-

The upsurging, heaving waters,
converge and engulf
Either a boat riding the swell
or the shell of a wreck on the sea bed.....

Winter in the city

Winter in this city can be lonely and tough-
unyeilding concrete buildings instill a deep chill in your bones, a small unsettling feeling seeps in amongst the dark, dank river bridges and the jostle of drunken jarring night time streets. I knows this absence well, as it approaches through cracked windowpanes and rises up into the nose in piss reeking stairwells of decaying high rise flats.

On the streets people rush by at speed and i become illusory and imagine you walking these streets as well. You pull your coat closer to you to tighten that fragile circle of warmth around you and revel in minute security it affords you. I remember you always as without jumpers, and wearing your only pair of leaking plimsole shoes, striding like you were royalty always. Pride cloaked your shoulders better than any regal robes. But the reality of the precariousness of your existence remained- Standing scarecrow like on the side of the road, thumbs out, hanging on the moment. My one pair of heels and battered couture hat creating an illusion to hide the hunger which curled at the bottom of our bellies.

Our ride-rode on chance, on your all encompassing smile and quick wit and my quiet haughtiness and ability to pose! So here we are again, in another car sitting with another lift giver, life saver. You are selling your eagerness, your image, your musical self- and i sit back and contemplate the long line of yur back, imagining the ways your limbs will later uncurl themselves from our crumled bed of night time exhaustion; and wonder who you really are. Whorishly we will sell ourselves, in differeing ways, both to others and eventually to each other. We tried to remain aloof from the world, thought we were so wise and yet as is the way of the time it construed ways to bring us back down to earth. I thought i could out bid you, play this game far more magnificently than anyone else but you were conquered by another and i stepped of this board into the swirling mass of contradiction, of contemplation without clarity!

I hope this cold city affords you more warmth, my bony branch like limbs are not a comforting pillow to envelope you, may these new arms be a soft cushion to your world weary head.

Respect

It is a cold thing,
this respect you speak so willingly of!
It conjures up images
of starched Victorian children.

Stiffly standing sons,
who call father 'sir'
A no 'dinner fore bed'
'Spare the rod spoil the child'
Kind of respect

It is a hollow word,
devoid of meaning.
Dead and passionless
yet it is the only one
which now touches the listening ear

I am not to be loved
Only mistress or whore
A mad moment of lust
Never more than fleeting
moment of exploding ecstasy

Only dry and barren
Respect
to warm my solitary bed
Its bony back, cold comfort
Your constant retort,
My only compliment
in the web of desire and deceit
You often cunningly weave!

India

I not only lost you to another woman, I lost you to another continent as well. You broke the final cords between me and my Indian lover and now after all these months you leave for Indian shores. Even i can see the irony!

The hot Indian sun can become tiresome but its land is varied and exotic, let this new lover be a soft accepting cushion for your weary head instead of my bony branch like self.

Just be wary of mirages and night sweat delusions. I shall think of you at night in foreign beds, other arms encircling you, while in the dry heat of the night cities reverberate about your head. I will not have Asia's constant heat to dry up my sadness. I must find someone else to come slam up against me, to knock you out of my mind. I will erase you from my mind with my body, a lustful force will wash away the imprint, the scent of you on my skin.

Only this aridness could have dried you up so soon.

Old Woolf essay ?

'The old world ended in 1915;' (Lawrence). Discuss the effect of the Great War on the work of one or two writers in the modern period.


The great war broke out in 1914 and finally came to its terrible conclusion in 1918. It had been the first example of what would become modern warfare and thousands upon thousands of people died. It began with optimism and the cries of 'It will be over by Christmas' and then slowly the massacres of Verdant and the Somme eclipsed all patriotism. The war not only shattered the lives of those directly involved with the fighting, it fractured the whole social and political framework of the country. This 'old world' that Lawrence describes of Victorian colonialism and class structure was indeed broken down during the war, but also the old world of literary style and form. The emergence of the literary movement of modernism pre dates the war, but it is radically shaped and influenced by it, in particular Virginia Woolf's stream of conscience novel 'Mrs Dalloway'.

This old world and its differing sensibilities is summed up by Woolf, in her criticism of the works of Evelyn 1 'We seek the encyclopaedia, not the scissors' This is an example of the sizeable distance between experiential collection of knowledge, the going and the doing in order to learn, the way previous thinkers would collect knowledge and then its contrast with the modern day collective canon of knowledge that could be accessed without direct experience required. This distance from direct experience would be in sharp contrast to the reality of the war as was experienced by men at the front, their view of the world was based upon received knowledge and the shock of the experiences of the trenches would have created many casualties, not only in a medical sense. Woolf has to find a way to communicate this experience, without the use of the previous conventions which she has discarded. Yet in Mrs Dalloway, and in what may be considered her more successful works, to 'The Lighthouse', 'The Waves' and 'Between the Acts' she seems to be using more rigid restrictions upon time and place, in order to focus her readers attention.

'In Mrs Dalloway, a convention or art form has been evolved which is more than adequate to take the place of the older convention of narrative and characterisation. The necessary circumscription is imposed by the narrow framework of time'2

By reducing the time frame of the novel to one day, Woolf allows the reader to become intimately acquainted with a small number of characters and yet as we follow Mrs Dalloway through her day, the whole expanse of the wider world is expressed. Woolf includes the character of Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Reiza, and thus bringing into the novel this sense of the 'tension between misery and happiness'3 and also as a perfect example of this 'old world' struggling within the new context of modernity that it now finds itself. Woolf has not rejected the canon of pre-modernist works and in her characterisation of both Clarissa and Septimus this old world is allowed to shine through, in their soliloquy's the poetic phrasing of Shakespeare is interwoven with the descriptions of their direct experience of the world. Septimus, is a man, for whom the collision of the old world of received knowledge and romanticised colonialism with the vast brutality of the war, who has been unable to remain sane. Woolf carefully links the old world and the new and the differences between them with her characterisation of Clarissa, as 'Old' and Septimus as being unable to connect the two disparate worlds which his experience has forced into direct confrontation with one another.

The novel was written sometime after the catastrophe s of the first world war, some way into the decadence of the 1920's and yet the characters precede the war and are now standing upon the brink of this new age awaiting the rise of more economic change and political upheaval. In some ways Woolf's work encompasses the old world and the new, yet seems to predict the coming of another greater change within society. In the characterisation of Peter Walsh we see the culmination of these changes in society, his dismissal of Clarissa for staying within the confines of her marriage and of society when Woolf makes a careful link in Walsh's thinking and the mechanics of the modern age.

'Clarissa had grown hard, he thought... looking at the great motor cars capable of doing-how many miles... for he had a turn for mechanics...all of which Clarissa knew nothing whatever about'4

Yet Woolf does not allow Walsh's pomposity in his knowledge of the world be held up as an example totally in opposition to Mrs Dalloway. Walsh still holds on to his beliefs stating that the future of civilisation lay in 'the hands of young men, such as he was, thirty years ago, with their love of abstract principles'. Interweaving this with the example of Septimus as a young student of Shakespeare.

'Was one of the first to volunteer, he went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole..'5

Woolf manages shows that ultimately both have failed, they are isolated from the world that now exists, their reasoning and love of knowledge acquired has not allowed them a way to engage with the world as it now stands. In Walsh's mocking of Clarissa for her stoic removal from engagement with the world at large, and in Septimus's transformation into 'manliness' both are held up as parodies of themselves. The thoughts and ideologies did not give them any grounding with which they could shift and grow as the world that they were part of disintegrated around them. Even if the character of Clarissa is a source of mockery and disparagement for Walsh, he is reduced to crying in her presence, she dominates him despite his seeming masculine superiority.

The use of this powerful but seemingly insignificant femininty is highlighted as the character of Clarissa muses about her own invisibility as wife, and appendage to her moderately important husband 'the oddest sense of herself being invisible, unseen; unknown6 And yet she is presented as vibrantly alive in her role as hostess, the party giver and is the key character within the novel, it is indeed named after her. Feminist critics argue that it is with the emancipation and furtherance of these great women of society that created a way forward within this modern world. All the male characters within the story are at odds with the world, Walsh feels like he has failed in his literary ambitions, Mr Dalloway has not forged a great career in politics and Septimus Smith is crushed within himself and his acceptance of patriarchy and its mores ' congratulated himself on feeling very little and very reasonably'. Susan Gubar describe Mrs Dalloway as 'a kind of queen whom regenerates the post-war world' 7 This seems a little flippant though, for Woolf is not trying to hold up an example, a model but is rather trying to look at the differing ways in which people can cope with change in their private lives and within their public ones. Yet it does seem that Clarissa disengagement with the political world has allowed her a greater capacity for growth even in the last stages of her life, than perhaps the male character's whom have been ensconced within the rigidity of Victorian ideas of patriarchy.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel, is the use of the use of differing perspectives, free from the constraints of normal narrative conventions. Although we have a fairly limited selection of characters we shift through their perceptions of each other, constantly revolving and looking at scenarios from every angle. These shifting perspectives, lend a sort of visual impact more akin to cinema and film techniques and also to artistic practise. As Proust wrote in relation to the cubist movement, that there could not only be a two-dimensional 'plane psychology but also a depth 'psychology in time and space'. Woolf seems to be echoing the fracturing of the social strata that the war created, as she breaks up the narrative framework with her differing perspectives and narrators. This depiction of the ending of the old world and the beginning of the new within the direct experiences of a selection of characters, is in direct contrast with works that went before. Woolf does not moralise or seem to be trying to really engage with the larger issues as corporeal items in themselves but rather she wishes to become involved in the minutiae of individuals' experience of these changes. It is as if that within this that she actually presents us with the reality of human experience, the whole expanse is expressed within ordinary daily experience, in the relationships between people and the conflict between the internal and external world of the characters.

What is most obvious in Woolf's work is the absence of the author from within the text, or narration of actions taken by the characters. It seems as this banishment of a directive voice that Woolf is echoing the changes in society, the lack of an authoritative voice echoes the changing roles of governance and the rise of an individualistic standpoint in which the individual has to challenge everything around them. From what is now a post modernist standpoint, we have learnt that this challenging of percieved authority, lays at our feet a more difficult question, how can one claim meaning in anything, but Woolf continues the process that the calamities of war and economic change started off with out giving us any answers as to how they will be resolved. Septimus' suicide leaves us in no doubt that this old world has definitely ended, and yet the lack of impact it seems to have upon those gathered at the party echoes that this old world that had survived was not going to continue much longer. Woolf illustrates this removal from reality with the example of the elderly Miss Parry

'an indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the war, which had dropped a bomb at her very door, from her deep meditations over orchids8

This refusal to be able to engage with the time that is upon these characters, is typical of the English ruling classes at the time after the war. The twenties were a time when large economic disasters, such as the Wall street crash in America, and the crippling reparation payments of the recovering German nation sent the allies into a further paralyses, that actually resulted at the end of the thirties another war, the largest conflict ever seen by mankind, the second World War. Rezia in her walk with Septimus through the bustling indifference of the city streets seems to offer a somewhat frightening vision of humanity which eerily seems to speak of mortality and of atrocities yet to come

'Are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth' 9

Which as contemporary readers seems to be a direct link with the death chambers of Nazi Germany, and the annihilation of one complete race. The disturbing changes within European social and political bodies, meant that there was a rise of far right and fascist politics, and nationalism. The old world had been challenged and was unable to shift in a way which could allow progression in a positive way . Theories of eugenics and race degeneration abounded, with even Lawrence outlining a plan of extermination as early as 1908
' if i had my way i would build a lethal chamber as big as Crystal palace'10

Alex Zwerdling argues that Mrs Dalloway is a 'sharply critical' examination of the ruling classes at this post war period. He argues that Woolf's characterisation, is indeed giving us a picture of

'A Class impervious to change in a society that desperately needs or demands it, a class that worships tradition and settled order, but cannot accommodate the new and disturbing' 11

What is important to note is that Woolf could have written a very different novel, one whose response to the situation of post war Britain could have been considerable more damning and controversial in its content. Yet it is through the form, characterisation, and the experiences of everyday events that she presents her novel. Woolf subtly weaves an illustration of a society in decline and sets up contrast with her characterisation of Septimus Smith, but she does not seem to be intent upon a moralistic standpoint in the traditional sense. Rather her work is interested in the patina of life, in capturing the essence of experience empirically through direct contact with the characters minds. However she is not totally removed from her novel, she is still dictating form and in limiting herself to a set time-scale she is reductive. However what Woolf encourages us, as the reader, to do is to accept and see the character within there own contexts. And within in the final closing words of the novel, Woolf brings us in a complete circle enforcing the notion that we have only ourselves and our perceptions of the world, we begin with Clarissa and end with Clarissa having been swept up into her world and the people surrounding her. Woolf implies that it is within ourselves that the answers, to the problems that the war and the changing society created, lie.














Bibliography

1.Mrs Dalloway- Woolf, Virginia. First published Hogarth press 1925, Penguin Classics edition reprinted in 2000 Edited by Stella McNichol, Introduction and Notes by Elaine Showalter.
2.Virginia Woolf: Her art as a Novelist. Bennet, Joan. Second edition, first published in 1945 this edition 1965, Cambridge university press.
3.Modernism and Eugenics: Childs, Donald.j. First published 2001, Cambridge university press.
4.Modernist Writing and reactionary Politics, Ferrall, Charles. First published 2001, Cambridge University press.

The shape of things to come?

Not only reduced to buying a copy of Elle, but because of nail biting boredom, a long wait for my train and a lack of tobacco for my nicotine craving lungs am also reduced to reading it from cover to cover including the plastic surgery adverts in the back. It always amuses me that a magazine claiming to empower women, and containing heartwarming articles telling us to love our curves/wonky noses/droopy bosoms (delete as appropriate) likes to sell its advertising pages to the cosmetic surgery market keen to cash in on altering these very imperfections we are supposed to love. In a poem by Denise Levertov she highlights this dichotomy with the wonderful last line 'and with what frivolity we have pared them [our dreams] like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair' In this post-modernist fall out of doing whats right for you, a collective feminist ethos cannot stand the ground to comment on this irony, instead falling into the trap of stating that it is ok for woman to have plastic surgery as long as it is for themselves and their own self esteem. We are incapable of resisting the gloss of these adverts, the inherent message that to hate our bodies and wish to change them by going under the surgeons knife is an acceptable method to feel happier in our own skin. Society seems to have lost the ability to see beauty, when we look with the aesthetic eye ( and that is not a critical eye), and the same is true of viewing other peoples creative output; we can begin to revel in the tiny variations which make up the unique beauty of humanity.

Brick Lane Babe

You would have been so beautiful,
my baby, with skin of Kashmiri cream,
and eyes of glaring green intensity
My exotic Indian babe

I knew that moment,
he let the tug of love
loose within me
that this was a doomed affair,
You, a tiny bundle of atoms
would not uncurl a fist at the sun.


Your father was a man of three continents
Broken apart by their past.
under an arduous weight of
existence
he could neither choose you or me
so you were not born
i walked away
from the torrid heat of love

I let your grip on my womb be torn asunder
broke the union
of mother and child
felt you slip
Into the recesses of my mind

Only these scents of spice
As i walk down brick lane
can call your memory back
In my ghostly motherhood
i hold your fat little hands
and let your grandmother oil your head
and give Allah praise for your birth

Only Asia's unwavering heat,
this aridness,
can awaken these dreams of you......

St Pancreas

Watching wine bottles,
gently swaying,
through steamed glass
in wavering heat-

The tang of red wine
lays heavy on langerous lips
which try to remember
the taste of bourbon and tobacco
which hung upon yours-

A taste was all i had
a mere sliver of saliva
flesh probing flesh
velvety smooth over liquid heat
fleeting yet remembered-

I need to return to that kiss
as moment in time
fracture it
seal it again
with everything that has now come to pass-

To imbue it with meaning now
to imprint it deep
and change the course
that history laid at our feet.

Flood

Sunlight filtering through your hair,
was how my dawn arrived.
It was a strange way to awake
My chin in the crook of your neck
And daybreak a haze of chestnut brown.

Stranger still,
it had wrapped round my mouth
So that i came up like a drowner
gasping for air.

It was as if you were all a flood
Your waters overwhelming me
And it was then i understood
That you and i were doomed
And in you i had already drowned
Lost at sea, never to be found.

On 12 inch

This whirling mind at 2000rpm,
spinning in vivid techni-colour,
Is wearisome sometimes,
In it's giddying speed,
However i need constant propulsion
to allow me to re cooperate
I want to be on a journey again
in a moving vehicle
wheels spinning under me
Travel and movement
not of my minds making.

As needle turns gently in its groove,
this music slows the soul
to a constant 33rpm
And fluidity can be finally restored.

Ratawicka 104

Warsaw rain,
and a wind whipped up in my hair.
In clouds of smoke,
i travel now,
through metal clanging doorways,
i step out of this skin.

In this dust filled space,
thick with the sound of another era,
i am the foreigner now.
In burnt light
our heads are haloed,
like the saints that watch from the walls.

Steam arises as hands wash like a child,
this head of mine.
Cradled close
Madonna has not held
even the head of Christ,
with such delicacy.
I take off my clothes,
let the straps slide off shoulders,
feel the soft silk of skin on skin,
Waiting for the thrust of flesh into flesh,
in the cobwebs of night.

No longer a desert,
which we failed to traverse across,
but an intermingling,
an ocean with tumultuous waves.

Arms and limbs entwined,
sleep still evades,
heart thunders a tattoo into the night,
one cannot soar without falling...

Our shadowed present

There are no great gestures left, no-originality in the grandiose, the magnificent. All virtue and value have slipped together. Nothing is true, nothing is fresh. So i shall take my place within these small gestures, the little details, those which are ignored. I can only express the expanse within the minutia. i can only find meaning in this feather touch, the way the rain makes your hair curl, the way the smoke catches and plumes- Only in the smallest detail can i find it.

Henry hoover

This smiling plastic face
With its smug parody
Of 50's housewives',
uncontrollable joy,
At new domestic appliances,
Looks leeringly at me.
incongruous it may appear
Languishing in the dark cupboard

But each night it puts more spite
into its grin
Ready to greet me the next day
with renewed venom
It is conspiring with the dusters,
plotting a coup with the mop
as co conspirators
They secretively ridicule me
Well i say,
'ill shut the door on you
An never clean no more!'

Bridport interantional writing competition

www.bridportprize.org.uk

Glastonbury

A hand is watched by eye,
turning over in crystallised light.
Flung skyward in expressive delight,
then groped
with passionate force.

Feet follow each other,
through this plenitude of grasses.
Hill climbed,
breath shortened,
eye to eye we shall not meet.

Yet hip to hip we fall back ward
Into a sepia past.
Limbs of entanglement
remembering
this cavernous depth
you never fell into before.

A canopy of laced green
limits the vista.
Dawn cannot break,
our tussle holds it back.
Dispassionately now
here on this precipice,
as I watch you from the bottom;
you fail to see with eyes
which still cannot help
but adore the empty air.

This air cools the skin
and the mind,
as the grass tickles the spine
Flung back in redemptive pleasure
emotions sweep up and over,
as bodies expire within each other.
All this is past,
all is gone,
crushed to dirt and indescribable things.

bed head!

I've been lying in repose all morning trying to disentangle myself from the constricting bed clothes of sleep and wading through the different layers of consciousness. The wind has been circling the house all night malevolently like a panther, it rolls and tumbles, scratching at the door. Why drag myself upwards, why should i take myself outside and fling my atoms to the wind? It would buffet me and bluster me with its icy forthright fingers, nothing would give me respite or shelter.

However i wonder if this safe existence hiding away in this darkened, warm room, is not simply another form of bondage! We like to call the chains that bind us, constrictions which the inauspicious stars endowed upon us, because it is too raw too difficult to acknowledge that perhaps we have been complicit in shackling ourselves, that is too sado-masochistic ! But we are the ones whom deduce from perception our state in the world, and is it not clear that perception is a human faculty which is open to interpretation as well? I could lift these limbs of mine into action and very often i force them to be fluid to follow the impulses the synapse reactions in my brain. However there is not a clear enough reason in my existence for this constant propulsion this constant gypsy unease which makes me uncomfortable in any situation that lies dormant and unmoving.

I fear a lack of progression but remain somewhat entombed within it. I need to be fully awakened from this slow decay of my brain and body. I am here lying awaiting the sharp knife which will plunge into me, the sharpness leaving me so cleanly severed from all that has come to pass, the bonfire of the vanities which erases all the rhetoric all the parody and falseness all the imitations all the times i have to bury my real expressive self under pretences of normality.

Facebook | Charlie Tuesday Gates's Links

Facebook | Charlie Tuesday Gates's Links

Facebook | Charlie Tuesday Gates

Facebook | Charlie Tuesday Gates

Eclectic images

Last night i managed finally to get myself into the darkest depths of east London, to a warehouse in bow for the esoteric and eclectic event known as The Living Room. Hosting a selection of performances in the basement room of this old industrial unit, guests are invited to crowd in amongst the mish mash of furniture and kitsch artifacts to watch the new, exciting and sometimes down right weird perform. From storytelling hoop la dancers and performance poets, to blues and ragtime acoustic guitar sets there is something for everyone over the course of the evening.With a bar selling cheap cider and a quaint tea party offering tea and cakes on a fantastic array of china you can sup to your hearts content, smoking indoors is also allowed. Also presented in the warehouse spaces in the complex is the sculpture exhibition of Charlie Gates, titled Something Stranger featuring her unique take on sculpture which includes elements of do it yourself taxidermy and surrealism as well as a clear fondness for the perverse and macabre. The night runs on every other thursday from 8 till late so if your in the mood for an eastern adventure check it out

Breaking/dismantling

Dawn Chorus.
Pink sunrise with argumentative children,
Whom i have to wake and dress,
Opening shutters to let in the morn
And jangling the keys down corridors
Clatter and chatter
Occasionally pierced with a full throated
'Fuck you, you fucking knob jockey'
As doors slam and showers rush.

Breathless trips traipsed up and downstairs,
God these smokers lungs are tight.
No fag till morning work is done,
And with five kick off's and a hair pull before toast
Amongst the china and voices
'Tis gonna be a long ol' day!'

Passed from care to education,
responsibility finished,
Its time for cigarette,
At back of the woodshed,
Ripe with the musk of damp earth
And Virginia green foliage

Contemplative inhaling
Eyes and thoughts
see round corners
and
Espy the carcass of discarded furniture
And visions flood
dusted down and made anew
Of flowers upon and books within


A zealous headteacher is all
'out with the old and in with the new',
So skip is full of antiques,
i can't say no to old furniture,
Destined for the bonfire.
And its heave - ho of cabinet,
Into car, woody arse out of the boot,
like hitchers thumb.
Precarious drive through
murky malevolent pines
till the wrestle with wood begins again

Sweated hefting, sledge hammer bashing
Of the old sofa which has to move over to make room
-breaking its spine
Whilst my ex-lover
the day's muscle for hire
looks on in jest
Its out with the old and in with the new for me too

This sofa where we first fucked-
I take to pieces in minutes
Each blow of hammer a release on this hot terse day
We struggle upstairs with walnut weightiness
And breathless with exertion
When all is in place
Sit back to smoke and contemplate
Our labours

Cryptic conversations in the garden,
A bugbear of attraction playing on my lips,
But a summer shower cools this lust
And its to work i must return.
I watch you leave,
And drive across the chase
my mind recalling
the taut line of leg
as it once moved
across crumpled bedsheets

Cornering too fast on slick tarmac,
This rusted car fails yet again
As lorry dominates the road
And i sit and wait for impact
Time seems illusory
and the world beautific.

Shards of glass momentarily catch the afternoon sun
obliteration is a million little reflections
beautiful and golden in this millisecond!
So quickly things can be destroyed
yet are slow and cumbersome to replace.