Heightened Speech

This is the August issue in the Last Post of the Month series, commenting on my blog and what it is trying to achieve.

What did Martin Luther King Jnr achieve when he gave his I Have a Dream speech 50 years ago this week? The speech contained no new demands. It was not strong on analysis. Instead, for thousands of civil rights marchers in Washington on the 28^th August 1963, and on behalf of millions of people who have watched and listened to it since that day, his speech gave them back their own experience and the aspirations arising from their own experience, now in a heightened form.

You could say that the speech distilled this experience – except that the listener’s experience has been mobilised rather than stilled. You could say that it captured this experience – except that the speech emancipates its listeners, releasing them from their particulars (‘free at last’) and entering them into a wider communion of autonomous human beings.

With Dr King as their mediator, e pluribus unum.

In the rhythms of his carefully chosen words and in the cadences of his sing song voice, Dr King provided the point of entry into a world which already exceeded the particular status quo, as it also transcended the status quo of particulars. Thus he found the form of expression most suited to the democratic content of the civil rights movement.

In its own small way, Singing The News similarly seeks to release particular experiences from the confines of what we are supposed to be and how we are meant to react in order to hold down our allotted role in the status quo. Instead, this is news for and about people in the fullness of their human being.

To this end, the heightened form of Singing The News is intended to heighten us – to give us more stature as human beings, to give more stature to being human. But whereas the heightened form of Dr King’s speech came about in response to a substantial political movement, today there is no such movement for me to respond to. Heightened form is all I have with which to call our common humanity into existence.

This is cause for concern. Isolated forms – formulated in isolation from political or economic progress – are highly unstable; they can easily become regressive rather than progressive. Also, it could take the rest of my working life to ascertain whether form – in the form of heightened speech – is enough to work with.

By which time it’ll be too late (for me) to do anything else!

The Rhythm Is The Message

He got rhythm.

Seated at the conference table, flanked by guy-in-a-bow-tie (hey, buddy, the sign says ‘White House’, not ‘Barber Shop’) and baby-faced-woman with Lady-Exec hairstyle, the President is a picture of panache: Barack Obama, who doesn’t have to try….too hard. 

Apparently effortlessly, he is establishing the likelihood of American air strikes against the Assad regime. Of course there are cracks to be covered, not least the anomaly of stopping to explain the effectiveness of imminent military action. Which can only have the effect of making it less than imminent, thereby reducing its effectiveness. But the way he speaks effectively conceals such flaws.

This presentation is a sit-down, low-key affair; cadences are reduced accordingly. The rhythm’s the thing. It is audible throughout the President’s remarks. We can hear it, for example, in his enunciation of the following four words:

‘The kind of attack’.

Here they are broken down to show the underlying rhythm:

The Kind-of-a Ttack. Daa da-di-da daa.

In 4/4 time, beginning on the fourth beat of the bar: Crotchet, Triplet, Crotchet, Rest.

Again: The (Crotchet)/ Kind-of-A (Triplet)/ Ttack (Crotchet)/ Rest (Crotchet).

Thus Obama’s phrase ‘the kind of attack’ is couched in rhythmic form. His words acquire their sonority from the rhythm in which they are couched. If certain phrases resonate with the public, it is because they are formulated as rhythm; because they are composed of rhythm between words as much as the words themselves.

It so happens that the phrase used above to describe Obama’s way of speaking, is similarly comprised of the exact same rhythm: ‘the rhythm’s the thing’; Daa da-di-da daa.

Exactly.

But the thing about rhythm is its combination of exactitude and variation. Obama’s speech pattern is four beats to the bar. Precisely. But it also sounds something like but not quite the same as the speech of previous Rhythm Kings such as Martin Luther Jnr. Who patterned the democratic aspirations of the day, who formulated the degrading experience of many into one uplifting note, so that Obama could echo that sound and evoke its democratic content 50 years later. 

Except that as he evokes the sound, even as he syncopates Reverend King’s rhythms as King himself previously played with lines laid down by Abraham a.k.a. Aaabr’m Lincoln, the content is removed, discarded, negated.

So when Obama says ‘the kind of attack’, it matters little whether he is talking about the Assad regime attacking Syrian civilians, or the U.S. Air Force attacking Assad. What follows – the rest of the sentence – is largely immaterial. What precedes it – evidence, whether there is or whether there ain’t a case for causing further carnage – hardly comes into it. The substance – such as it is – is derived from the past; from the way that Obama’s speech pattern evokes a tradition of evocative rhythm.

(From an idea developed by Mark Beachill in his doctoral thesis.)

Wrong Way Home

But what were you doing there perched above the North Sea, with you yourself pushing 60?

Helicopter approaching Sumburgh Airport, Shetland, at twenty-past-five on Friday. At least I’ll have the weekend, you must have thought.

When it ditched into the sea and turned over ‘in seconds’, did it take you too long to crank up your old bones and get the hell out of there? Perhaps you banged your head struggling to get out of the cabin, or just couldn’t keep afloat till rescued, like the younger ones managed to do.

Pushing 60 you should have been pootling round the Edinburgh Festival - naah, too many tourists.Or home in Inverness, ensconced in the Castle Tavern, chasing down the whisky with a half of heavy. Instead your name came up at the police press conference: one of four fatalities. Low key affair: handful of reporters, rows of empty blue chairs in the hotel room they always use.

You made it back to Aberdeen on the Monday morning ferry; paper work complete (somebody has to sign for these bodies, y’ken), transferred to the waiting hearse after a respectable amount of time for passengers to disembark.

Sorry it wasn't the weekend you were hoping for.

Korean Character

‘I am just a bit too tired to worry about it now.’ On BBC Radio 4 for the few seconds before the translation overrides the actualite, we hear a Korean voice that is clear and clipped. She doesn’t sound at all tired, this old woman who was separated from her ‘parents and siblings’ 60 years ago, when North and South Korea sealed their borders. 

She is one of 70 000 South Koreans registered for the the Red Cross re-unification project - families, that is, not Korea itself; now re-starting after a three-year gap due to worsening relations between Seoul and Pyongyang. But before the cessation there were 18 rounds of family re-unions, and the old woman's hopes never materialised: 

‘A decade ago when I first heard about the reunions, it felt as if I could almost meet them tomorrow. But so many re-unions have passed and I have never been picked, so I wonder whether my chance will ever come.

‘I am just a bit too tired...,' she concludes.

Sixty years of separation. Nearly twice the global average lifespan of a century ago. Threescore years, though not (yet) the extra 10 to make up the full Biblical complement. But already enough time to live a life and build a nation.

   

She's too tired to worry about it now. She's not going to let herself get excited at the prospect. Hasn't the energy.

Is this proof of your resilience, evidence that you’ve got on with what you had to get on with, worn yourself out with real cares and concerns instead of pining for the life that wasn’t there?

Or should it make us even more sad for your loss, that you’ve lost even the sense of loss which used to burn right through you when first left alone?

Yes, you - the elderly Korean lady with the unexpectedly strong voice.

Cairo Twist

‘God has already written what will happen.’ Swathed in black, swaddled baby in her arms, the young Muslim woman was protesting against Egypt’s military government but seemed fatalistic about what might happen on the protest march. Another demonstrator, who said his brother had died at the hands of government forces on Friday, insisted that ‘they will kill us, I know, everybody knows, but it doesn’t matter’.

Do you share their crazy cocktail of political activism and religious fatalism, and did it help you when guards fired tear gas canisters – the size of a can of Coke – into the back of a prison van? If you were one of the three dozen and more who died inside the vehicle while demonstrations carried on until the curfew kicked in at 7pm, were you more able to accept what was happening because God had already written it? 

Shards of exploding plastic. Toxic mist – your last ever body spray – metabolising into powder; blistering skin. A few seconds and your face is pixel perfect for a nightmare. The fluid filling your lungs is pink and frothy. You know this because you’re coughing it up. What comes to mind: what does strawberry cappuccino taste like? Any time now you’ll die of ALI-ARDS (acute lung injury-acute respiratory distress syndrome). 

Did you cough more or less because ‘it doesn’t matter’? Did God choose you because you’re worth it? 

Here in the UK, I am trying to understand the Egyptian twist of disquiet and quietism; in the streets and mosques of Cairo, the playing out of ancient and modern, religious humility and secular self-worth. How can you people reconcile the two? On the other hand, how else could you live with the contradictions you are facing?

Back and Forth

Tassled and garlanded, India’s first indigenously built aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant II, was launched on Monday 12^th August by the Defence Minister’s wife. In keeping with Indian tradition, she marked the occasion by throwing a coconut at the ship’s hull.

Alongside Mr and Mrs AK Antony, the procession of dignitaries at Cochin shipyard included the head of the Indian Navy and the minister for shipping.

If it was a building instead of a ship, INS Vikrant II would be the London 2012 Aquatics Centre: both structures follow the same wave form. Fish shapes for people to swim and sail in; designed to show that athletes, sailors, all of us are responding to nature nowadays rather than overriding it.

How different is the new Vikrant from its eponymous predecessor? Built on the wartime Tyne as HMS Hercules, laid up for 15 years, then bought off-the-peg and re-named by the Indian Navy. Nice bit of schmutter for posing against Pakistan, the man from the Admiralty must have said. Feel the width of this flight deck.

Back in the days when warships were all corners and angles (not curves and waves), and ratings stood to attention like a heap of iron filings.

‘Vikrant’ meaning the one who steps forward. To boldly go.

On Monday, members of Vikrant II's launch party must have felt the world opening up to them; rewarding India's audacity. Only four other countries – France, Russia, UK and USA – currently have this capability. We’re already in the Top Five!

Only hours later, 18 Indian sailors died in the confined spaces of an Indian Navy submarine which exploded into flames in Mumbai Harbour. Minus his wife, the Defence Minister was obliged to go on TV to offer his condolences, duly echoed by the head of the navy.

Another memorable day, but on this occasion Monday’s ‘historic’ footage was running in reverse.

Acid Casualties

In Stone Town, Zanzibar, two young British women were attacked by men on a moped who threw acid at them. Prompted by a photograph displayed on the website of the project which the women were volunteering for at the time, this short piece seeks to sketch out why the attack took place. Unashamedly conjectural - fanciful, even - it is perhaps more factual (literally, of what has been done) than labelling the incident as 'Muslim extremism.'

"I joined the music project organised by an NGO in my country. I'm wearing the T-shirt one of the volunteers gave me. Tommy Hilfiger or somesuch. And there we are, me and Josh or somesuch, mixing the track with me on drums and him on guitar. It's his hand on the faders and he fades down the kick drum with that double kick on the fourth which I sweated to get, and brings up his guitar.

"Of course he turns and smiles and asks if that's OK, and I say it is OK but that is the moment when I am not OK with this NGO set-up nor will I be so ever again.

"Suddenly I see myself from outside myself, looking in on him and me, and I see it's always going to be him first, his hand on the controls, me off-centre and the editing screen full face on him. Volunteer Boy with the right-on beads and less than a beard like he's never going to grow up. But standing always and forever above me.

"I hadn't thought of it before. There was no occasion to think about it. I assumed that the music would level us; two young men equal in front of the music, for the sake of getting it right.

"It wasn't to be.

"That moment sparked in me the desire to burn these people and the flawless skin they come wrapped in. Daughters and sons who've never done anything wrong, of parents who've done everything right.

"We will mark you in one way or another."

Contrasts

(1) Ariel Castro's house on Seymour Avenue is 'yet to give up its ghosts' (May 2013 when his three women captives were first discovered). Today it is a ghost: there is a dark shadow haunting Lot 2207, imprisoned there by Google Earth which obliterated the house online before bulldozers moved in to finish the job.

(2) The white clapperboard house would have been a building block of the old Dream (built 1892). As featured in Walker Evans' pioneering book of photographs-as-art (1938). But the American Dream - well, that's what it always was. Evans' most famous pic is the Pin-Up of the Dustbowl (the beautiful woman who would have been sexy, too, if she hadn't been strung out by real hard times). Now on Seymour Avenue the old Dream Home is remade as nightmare; all the more dreamlike because it no longer exists.