Confusion, suffering, despair... and resistance

(not the picture I meant to take and share, but in it's own random way a snapshot of where we're at, perhaps...)

This is not the photo that I meant to take.

I meant to take a photograph of a new bookshop at the foot of Leith Walk. But all the tram works got in the way and I didn’t have the time to get off the bus because I was on my way to see someone about a new project.

So I wasn’t focusing properly on any level, really, and that’s why the picture is a mess.

But I’ve kept it in because it somehow represents what is happening as we try to gain a glimpse of the future & there are so many obstacles in the way & and so much destruction & so much confusion & time & change are moving so fast the ground keeps shifting under our feet & we are just apparently being carried along helpless by it all.

And there it all is in the messy photograph.

It began like this. I was living at home in Edinburgh and on my way to rehearsal, and all the road closures meant I had to change buses.

So there I was waiting for a number 7, or maybe a number 49, at the bottom of Leith Walk when I saw there was a new bookshop.

I can’t resist a bookshop, so in I went, and liked the feel of it, and wanted to help them by buying a book, and so rather randomly bought one called “Upheaval” by someone called Jared Diamond, because we are in upheaval and I liked the look of it.

I’d never heard of Jared Diamond, but he seems to be a big name in some circles. And when I got home I discovered that Bill Gates said this book made him feel better about the state of the world, not much of a recommendation, but too late to get my money back, open the book JC and start to read it…

…And I found that what Diamond does in this book is begin by looking at a personal crisis.

It was a moment in his life when he had to re-think who he was and his place in the world.

Diamond points out, quite rightly, that nations go through this process too. Go through it in periods of crisis.

And then there has to be a kind of collective questioning of national identity and national institutions.

And out of that comes change…

It’s happened over and over again, Diamond argues and it’s important to think about how these crises came to be positively or negatively resolved.

And how we resolve the crises in our lives can give us a clue as to how we can resolve the crises in our societies.

Because the personal IS political…

So he looks back at the crisis in his own life and thinks about what it took for him to resolve it. And how that relates to what it took other countries he knows well to overcome their national crises.

Then he thinks about present crises in the US and the world and explores the conditions in which they might be resolved… and I like the mix of the personal and the political because it makes sense and because it’s enlightening.

I like his questions, even if I don’t always agree with his answers; and I’m a bit disappointed to see that England is not one of the countries he examines as being in crisis.

Because England certainly is, and it’s getting worse by the day, and dragging us all down into dangerous destructiveness.

Self insight is one of the pre-conditions he lists as being necessary for a country to move on from crisis, a pre-condition the English government conspicuously lacks.

One of the many reasons for me voting yes in the independence referendum was that it would have given England as well as Scotland the chance to re-consider its place in the world and re-think the way we express that in our political institutions and our relationship to each other.

It was so desperately sad that a toxic mix of cowardice and lies denied us that opportunity.

But the questions remain: and are more urgent than ever.

One of the things I appreciate about Diamond’s book is that it offers ways forward, and it offers hope.

And hope matters more than ever right now, because the forces of reaction are fighting back with all their power, and committing acts of such destructive folly that it’s easy to despair.

The questions have to be answered and the business of trying to answer them is unstoppable.

It’s happening everywhere and on every level. Happening in spite of all the obstacles being so frantically put in our way.

At some deep level, I suspect, there is a kind of collective understanding that the forces of reaction have lost.

And all those who identify themselves with them, and all those addicted to the wealth and the power that comes their way from the present order of things, are frantically trying with all their power and their force and their strength to hold back change and deny the urgent reality of the state of the world.

But they will fail.

The state of Israel can shoot a journalist dead and then send uniformed thugs to attack the mourners around her coffin

But Palestine will rise.

Mr. Putin can shell and bomb hospitals and schools and keep on turning the country he hopes to annex into smoking heaps of rubble

But Ukraine will rise.

Ulster Unionists can keep saying no until there is not the breath in their bodies to enable them to keep saying it

But Ireland will say yes.

Johnston and his contemptible accomplices can lie and lie and lie

But the truth will out

And the truth will destroy them.

Republican lawmakers can make abortion illegal

But they cannot stop women taking control over their own bodies

They cannot stop women saying our bodies our selves and you pathetic patriarchs cannot suppress women for ever

Church men and bigots and hate-filled activists can try to suppress trans-ness in every way they can

But we will keep rising

Because we have always been here and always will continue to be.

From the big to the small. From the sublime to the absurd.

Even in the block of flats I live in, caught up in endless parking wars, as we try to rethink the primacy of the motorcar in our transport systems.

They’re certainly happening in Leith Walk: right next to a bar so scary I’ve never dared enter it, right next to the site of the old station that gave “Trainspotting” its name.

Right in the midst of the present chaos of the tramworks, which in their own half thought through way also herald a new understanding of our city.

Of what our city is, what our city is for, and how it will function in the future.

And here’s me, back on the number 16 bus crawling through the roadworks, reflecting on how it somehow feels like an amazing re-thinking of Leith’s  identity to have a new independent bookshop right in the centre of it…

Argonaut Books, the shop is called, and I like that. The Argonauts were brave voyagers who went on a journey to a new and unknown world.

And we are all on that journey too…

https://shop.argonautbooks.co.uk