Of Love and War

Monthly Newsletter | October 2024

The monthly newsletters are an amalgamation of musings and two poems (one by another poet and one by me, as per a practice introduced to my master’s cohort by poet Alice Oswald).

Please scroll down for upcoming online courses and event announcements.

Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.

— James Baldwin, from Meeting the Man

Listen via audio:

Hi friends,

I’m writing to you from a cafe on a grey hot morning in Queensland. The New Moon rose over the bush earlier this week and astrologers tell us to brace ourselves for the psychic effects of another solar eclipse.

On Tuesday we all woke up to the news of Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon.

‘Hermana, they are taking us to war,’ my friend Angela wrote me in a text.

Terrifying images of Iran’s missiles falling like comets across Tel Aviv, the clamour for moral supremacy on social media, the Mad King Biden reasserting his ‘ironclad’ support for Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ in his usual grimace of a strange mix between agony and exaltation.

More people murdered in the last few days than Hamas did on October 7th.

One million innocent Lebanese people made homeless. On million new refugees.

And then my partner and I had a big blow up in the garden.

You see, war does not satisfy herself with one place.

War is a god. And when she arrives on Earth, she slithers her way into every human heart because once, not so long ago, love and war were reigned by the same god.

Ishtar, Athena, Aphrodite were all goddesses of both love and war.

That the old goddess of love was also the goddess of war is confronting to an overly-sanitised worldview that orders the cosmos by dividing good and evil. But our early forebears knew that there was no venerating love without also paying libation to the temple of war.

So what to do?

There is someone here for everything. I think first we have to know what our art is, or our skill. I am not a politician. I wanted to be (albeit for a very short period!), but turns out I’m an artist. However, I am political. I think everyone and everything is.

We are all storytellers. And everything we tell is fundamentally political because it carries consequence. I don’t think it’s wise to underestimate the universal law of causality- that everything is connected and our opinions and actions (or non-actions) matter. Our words, matter.

Our imaginations make worlds.

And so living itself is a political thing. I don’t see how it can’t be.

A few days ago, Andrew from @coffeewithkeats posted the following from JFK’s commencement speech given at Harvard University in the summer of 1956:

“Don’t teach my boy poetry,” an English mother recently wrote the Provost of Harrow. “Don’t teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament.” Well, perhaps she was right – but if more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.”

Choosing ‘not to be political’, like Pharell Williams verbosely announced in his interview last week, is political. It is a choice to not engage and withdraw a voice from the global narrative. This will affect the whole story.

We seem to associate not being political with some kind of freedom.

But what freedom can we have when bombs are dropping on children?

‘Nobody is free until everybody is free,’ the Civil Rights activist Fanny Lou Hamer declared in her speech at the founding meeting of the National Women's Political Caucus in Washington, D.C. on July 10, 1971. This (as far as I’m concerned) fundamental human principle was echoing Martin Luther King’s famous words he wrote on the margin of a newspaper while in jail in the 60s:

West Bank, Occupied Palestine, 2011.

In the days and weeks to come, I think we need to observe very deeply. To bear witness, a fundamentally human responsibility that I elaborated on in my piece Being Human: A Rank to be Earned.

I think we need to read each other’s myths. So we expose ourselves to other cultures and ways of seeing. If we are only reading western media or listening to political commentary from conservative channels, we are missing so much of the full picture.

None of us will be able to see the full picture. But we all instinctually know that there must be unity between humankind because that is the only way we will survive.

And yet, war has been a part of our modus operandi for as long as we know.

New doctrines have arisen that preach about a past Golden Age that we enjoyed at some point in our history, but there is no historical evidence for this. And I think it is much more likely that clan warfare has existed since our earliest beginnings.

If you’ve been under this imaginal Fig Tree with me for a while, you will know that I will write about current affairs as much as I do about mythopoetics and ancient knowledge. I don’t think there would be a point in writing about them without making them relevant.

Expressing opinions and getting involved in the conversation does not mean having to have the answers. We can leave that to the people who are actually involved - like the Palestinians and now the Lebanese themselves - or to individuals who have been specifically trained in the fields of politics, human rights, law, etc… In fact, unless we’re pretty damn well prepared, we should probably be taking great care to not act as though we have all the answers.

I have shared some of this excerpt form the Gulag Archipelago in my commentary on October 7th, and it is just as relevant here:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956

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Poetry Offering

I’ve added an extra poem to the usual two this month- I couldn’t decide between Wendell Berry and Mahmoud Darwish, so here you have them both along with one of mine.

How can we possibly assert our opinions 
as absolutes 
if we have not lived in a world 
where we can get arrested 
for writing a poem?

— early morning reflections on the clash of dogmatic certainties bombarding social media

This is the poem that got Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish under house arrest. His words were turned into a protest song. Here is a full list of his works. 


Identity Card
By Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, from Third World Resurgence, 2016

Put it on record.
    I am an Arab
And the number of my card is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is due after summer.
What's there to be angry about?
Put it on record.
    I am an Arab
Working with comrades of toil in a quarry.
I have eight children
For them I wrest the loaf of bread,
The clothes and exercise books
From the rocks
And beg for no alms at your door,
    Lower not myself at your doorstep.
    What's there to be angry about?
Put it on record.
    I am an Arab.
I am a name without a title,
Patient in a country where everything
Lives in a whirlpool of anger.
    My roots
    Took hold before the birth of time
    Before the burgeoning of the ages,
    Before cypress and olive trees,
    Before the proliferation of weeds.
My father is from the family of the plough
    Not from highborn nobles.
And my grandfather was a peasant
    Without line or genealogy.
My house is a watchman's hut
    Made of sticks and reeds.
Does my status satisfy you?
    I am a name without a surname.
Put it on record.
    I am an Arab.
Colour of hair: jet black.
Colour of eyes: brown.
My distinguishing features:
    On my head the `iqal cords over a keffiyeh
    Scratching him who touches it.
My address:
    I'm from a village, remote, forgotten,
    Its streets without name
    And all its men in the fields and quarry.
    What's there to be angry about?
Put it on record.
    I am an Arab.
You stole my forefathers' vineyards
    And land I used to till,
    I and all my children,
    And you left us and all my grandchildren
    Nothing but these rocks.
    Will your government be taking them too
    As is being said?
So!
    Put it on record at the top of page one:
    I don't hate people,
    I trespass on no one's property.
And yet, if I were to become hungry
    I shall eat the flesh of my usurper.
    Beware, beware of my hunger
    And of my anger!

Next is the great American poet and novelist Wendell Berry and his poem Enriching the Earth, from Collected Poems 1957-1982.

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

Lastly, this is a poem I wrote after the garden blowup with my love. I suppose it’s what inspired the title and theme of this newsletter.

War in the Garden

We stood in the garden and roared 
loud and chthonic

and a dark pit opened between us
in the soft groundswell
of swollen tomatoes
and lettuce folds. 

This was no joined howl at the moon
or in applause or delight,

these were arrows of accusation
shot hot at each other
across fleshy onion leaves
like fallen stars

'YOU'-- a bee lands on a dandelion
'Well, YOU'-- garlic bulbs compete for the sun
'No, YOU'-- small bushes of basil puff out like courting robins
'But YOU'-- the first signs of my wildflower seeds poke out of the dirt eager as dawn

we yelled and we yelled 
and the garden grew,
and at one point I worried
about how tired he would be
from yelling,
and I wanted to stop
but I yelled more.  

We were both right 
and we were wrong

awfully wrong

           gardens aren't places of war- or, are they?

- I don't know what I believe anymore,
the ground invasion of Lebanon 
has shaken everything again -

can I change my mind?

          gardens can't be places of war, can they?

I thought them to be somehow guarded 
like Israel's iron dome
or the maiden's Moon Palace
and yet there we stood, 
in love 
and war

as life continued on.

I think of the Sumerian goddess Ishtar 
wielding her sword of battle in one hand
and holding the heart of the world in the other,

or Athena wearing an iron helmet
and the soft tunic of wisdom.

I wonder if they could hear us,
the new watermelon and corn seedlings
that we planted last weekend 
and that burst with promise, still,
in our fury.

I wonder if the red lilies and alyssum 
that had just begun to bloom
would fold in on themselves 

because there was war in the garden

an uncharted universe of
soil 
and tears.

And then we were tired and we were sorry
and we held each other a few times,
and I remembered the pale blue t-shirt I nuzzled against 
was the same one he wore the day we met.

I suppose when the god of war
arrives on Earth,
her tentacles are not satisfied
with one land only,
they reach everywhere.

Announcements

I am deep in the throes of writing my book, so will be taking a hiatus from teaching until the New Year. This includes the monthly ceremonies. Thank you to those of you who have been joining regularly or have just discovered my work. I will send out my events calendar for 2025 towards the end of the year.