Zap the Campaigner...Apparently

Robin Williams -- Campaigner

Just took this personality test based, supposedly, on the Myers-Briggs Personality types at 16Personalities.com.

I'm placing it here for when I have more time to read through this fairly accurate reading of me.  I am, apparently, a Campaigner!

Where to now in Syria?

In June of 2014, Fouad Ajami, one the most eloquent writers I've ever read wrote, "Today, with his unwillingness to use U.S. military force to save Syrian children...the erstwhile leader of the Free World (Obama) is choosing, yet again, to look the other way."

Yesterday came confirmations of chlorine gas used by the Assad regime and by "Save the Children warning that aid workers and medical professionals in eastern Aleppo were reporting the widespread use of cluster bombs, which are banned under international law." (BBC.com).

The West's (especially the US') dithering has allowed Putin's Russia to inveigle its way onto the centre of the mid-east checkerboard making any concrete intervention by the West impossibly dangerous.

More than two years after Ajami's indictment of Obama's failure to act, the UN's Human Rights Council has asked "the existing UN commission of inquiry to "conduct a comprehensive independent special inquiry into the events in Aleppo in order to identify those responsible for alleged violations and to ensure that perpetrators are held accountable." (swissinfo.ch).

A comprehensive independent special inquiry! It took two years for confirmations of chlorine gas attacks by Assad on his own people to finally become official. It's not hard to imagine the glacial pace with which the UN's Human Rights Council will be moving. And unfortunately, the report will probably come out only after many more civilian deaths have occurred.

Encircled as Aleppo is, it will take a month or two for the noose to do its work.  By then, all the rebel fighters will have died or faded away saving themselves to fight another day, and the civilian deaths will will be counted in the thousands.  And then, the  U.S. and others will point out the reason for their neglect of their ethical obligations as the presence of Russia.

Foregone

Foregone -- adjective

1. that has gone before; previous; past.

2. determined in advance; inevitable.

He will come to you, unbidden.  Gentle as a breeze through a window screen.  A fish breaking the glassy, silvery surface of your hard won peace.  Maybe you will be sitting at the end of a long dock.  Watching dragonflies chase meals.  The clatter of dishes from the neighbour your only complaint.

You will hear perhaps the sound of tires rolling slowly over gravel; an engine running a few seconds longer than it should.  Unbelieving.  That engine: you would know it anywhere.  The precise three second run-on.  Thunk.  Thunk.  Before you even turn, your senses, muscle memory, feel the crazy-truth of an old familiar pang.  Up through layers of sedimentation, obfuscation.  Years of therapizing, trees and trees of books, (such defences!), blown away like tiny, yellow specks of pollen.

Reach into the cupboard because there is no redemption in suffering. Bismillah. Drain your cup. Fill it again and repeat.

Forget the promises – broken, if not now, tomorrow.  Forget the hope, best left to the naïve; what is naiveté but stupidity with a ring of daisies?  Forget the ultimatums, the purview of children and the childish.  Forget the companionability; the gnawing need; the genetic imperative; the sense of belonging and the addictive sighs of contentment.  Forgotten too are the slope of his shoulders, his veined hands, the knobby knuckles that you soothed with your own hands and the wine stain next to his belly button.  The warm moisture of his breath mingling with yours.  Forget.  Forgotten.  Forfeit.  Forthwith.

You dare not turn. Use the darkened screen of your reader to surreptitiously view what’s behind.  Should be behind you.  So clever.  Fearful and clever.  A car, the colour of which is obscured.  Late model.  The occupant unseen; a conspiracy of light and shadows.  You drop your over-large sunglasses down over your “big-big” eyes.  Beautiful eyes, cow’s eyes.

Reach into the cupboard to find his razor and toothbrush.  The green floss sticks you’ll never use.  The travel size shaving foam.  Let your hands do the hard work; don’t let your eyes rest on any one object too long. Avoid sniffing the cap of shaving foam.  Wipe off the stains from his coffee cup, the dried signs of his toothpaste in the sink.  Shut your mind and casually drop everything in the bin.  Tie the bag off tightly.  Once, twice…just to be sure.  Bismillah.  Drain your cup and fill it again for a job well done.

Turn now.  You must turn.  How old are you?  You’re not some little girl after all!  Who would dare to come to your aerie, your redoubt?  The one place that you give yourself over to with no misgivings!  Turn now.  Turn.

The car door shuts, daring you.  And then, silence.  Not the sound of footsteps or a clearing of a throat or a simple “hello.”  Maybe you stood up from your camp chair or still seated turned around in the chair.  Your first sight of him after, what, a decade?  More.  Tall, lanky, a little older looking.  Cautious smile on his face, khakis sitting a little too high as usual by the grace of that chipped old brown belt. Moss green henley shirt, it’s sleeves rolled back to the elbows.  Left hand squeezing the other.  Nervous.  One glance, a gestaltic snapshot of his current state. 

Ah, the old familiar pang.

As he approaches the dock, eyes down, paying careful attention to his footing, you are not standing stock-still.  Your hand moves to the chair’s back to still the shaking.  Your eyes are watering, traitors to you, obscuring your vision.  Blinking now, your hand moves under your glasses to clear your sight.  The sight of him.  Unready, unsteady, undone.

“Hi, Em.  How’ve you been?”

Hike

trail marks lead the way

the earth a loamy black

crystalline shards of ice

litter the ground

 

my dog races ahead 

points her nose to the ground

standing stock still

she eyes me, urging my arrival

privy to conversations

unknowable to me

I spy the slovenly

mark of larger boots

ahead a train whistle and

the jarring call of a Jay

mar the trail

After Years

Today, from across the ocean,

I watched you slipping away.

As the flow of water across

the surface of rock slowly

seeps its way down and

disappears.

As the effort finally
gives way with a

small burp of electricity.

As the last thread of cataract

crosses the diameter of my eye

and brings darkness,

the etiology idiopathic.

And all the while I sip quietly

and eat to overfull, smiling.

It's Valentine’s Day

It's Valentine’s Day

This is the card I cannot give

I would have asked, but cannot

I would have said, but did not

You’re the most beautiful woman:

girlish laugh, the warmth of your hands,

the sound of your voice, the curve of your cheek

But I do not

Have never thought it

Meeting

wholly immersed for an hour

lost in a reverie of our present and 

of our past.  I cherish our chats

You permeate my life

But you don’t know this

I'm absent

it’s all the presence I need

I am not here

You will not read this

I did not write this

‘Little-by-little, my cart rolls on'

Books: Mission to Paris & The Yellow Birds

The Yellow Birds, written by Kevin Powers is the story of a young soldier who volunteered to fight in Iraq for the US Army.  It is also a story about the bonds formed between brother-soldiers, the traumas suffered by people forced to kill others and the suffering of the people that are left at home.
It is also about the trials that follow after all encompassing events, life changing events, traumatic events.  The trials are experienced by the returnee; where meaning in the old life that was left behind is no longer present, the returnee has changed or perhaps the people who stayed behind grew in the returnee's absence.  These and many other threads, layers, of psychological complexity are brought to life by Powers, and lyrically, in this finely written novel.


Mission to Paris is a spy novel written by Alan Furst, whom some people have compared to the likes of John Le Carre and Graham Greene.  The novel's protagonist is a movie star who is in Paris to make a movie at a time when France and the world are holding their collective breaths, while Hitler prepares to run roughshod over his European neighbours.  The story is compelling and well written and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys spy novels.