I’m slightly concerned that the bomb-makers seem to be following me. I arrived in the UK last year in the middle of the 7/7 bombings, and discovered that some of the bombs may have been manufactured near my old home in the Hyde Park area of Leeds. Now it turns out one of the properties raided last night was very close to my last home, on Forest Road in Walthamstow. Anti-terror squad take note: next time I move, keep a close eye on the Clifton area of Bristol.

Well, it would have been highly peculiar to find bomb factories in Clifton, a bastion of wealthy Englishness. Still, Westbury-on-Trym, the home of the recently arrested 19 year-old “charged with terrorist offences relating to explosive substances”, is a mere three miles away.

I don’t think this has half as much of the “isn’t that weird” synchronistic frisson as I thought it might. I’m kind of getting used to it…

(I should stress that I knew nothing about it, as I’m slightly concerned that the bomb-makers seem to be following me. I arrived in the UK last year in the middle of the 7/7 bombings, and discovered that some of the bombs may have been manufactured near my old home in the Hyde Park area of Leeds. Now it turns out one of the properties raided last night was very close to my last home, on Forest Road in Walthamstow. Anti-terror squad take note: next time I move, keep a close eye on the Clifton area of Bristol.)

Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson of Scotland Yard said, “We cannot stress too highly the severity that this plot represented.” Naturally, the prevention of mass murder is welcomed. But I say again: this threat definitely can be stressed too much. I’m reminded of a Fry & Laurie sketch where Hugh Laurie asks of something or other, “Is too much bad for you?” Stephen Fry’s withering reply is, “Of course too much is bad for you, you twit! That’s what ‘too much’ means. Too much water is bad for you!”

Of course we’ll have to let the politicians have their moment, their chance to appear as if they’re actually serving some useful purpose. Little George W. Bush remains stuck in Power Through Scare Tactics 101:

The American people need to know we live in a dangerous world, but our government will do everything we can to protect our people from those dangers.

What’s scary, of course, is that many will swallow it whole.

It is fascinating, however, how poetically the vulgar throes of the world move. The inevitable dwindling of fossil fuels arrives, maybe a little too late for those supposedly omniscient “market signals” to respond to climate change, but certainly in time for us to pull back from total disaster, if we choose. Similarly, with the prospect of planned new efficiency measures in aviation being outstripped, in carbon emissions terms, by increased demand for flights, perhaps we can discern a silver lining to this particular terrorist threat, overblown or not.

So I say: be afraid. Be very afraid. Buy every fear-mongering lie the politicians and media throw at you. I welcome draconian security measures at airports. Let’s have full luggage and body inspections for everyone on every flight. Intensive screening interviews for anyone not known personally by airport security staff. Let’s stick everything in luggage: only naked people allowed on board.

If we can’t get this monstrously destructive aviation monkey off our back with some simple good sense and restraint, maybe this manufactured hysterical fear thing will do the trick.

Long live Bush and Blair! May their reign of fear never cease!

In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.

John Mueller, ‘A False Sense of Insecurity?’

Via WorldChanging.com, I just read this report (PDF) by John Mueller, just published by the “market libertarian” thinktank, The Cato Institute. The fact that it’s basically saying the same thing about our collective over-estimation of the “terrorist threat” as Michael Moore and Adam Curtis reveals how right/left political distinctions are often hazy, shows that people can acknowledge important common ground, and gives me a little hope.

Whether more people will pay attention just because someone who also thinks the free market is the bee’s knees is saying it, is another matter.

The report makes use of statistics such as that quoted above to highlight to trivial overall threat posed by terrorism. It may be the case—given that the Cato Institute “holds regular briefings on global warming with known ‘climate skeptics’ as panelists”—that Mueller thinks there’s nothing that warrants the level of concern we invest in this threat. However, in his post about the report, Alex Steffen makes the obvious point that our society’s lack of sustainability threatens all that is claimed for terrorism: the end of our “way of life”, high death tolls, political instability, etc. It seems to be an obvious large-scale irrational diversionary tactic, conscious or unconscious. Rather than face real threats, fantasy threats are obsessed over to the point of paralysis in facing reality.

Why did I call this post “Drugs and terrorism”? To be crassly sensationalist, of course. Still, it was interesting to read in Mueller’s report that “risk analyst Paul Slovic points out that people tend greatly to overestimate the chances of dramatic or sensational causes of death”. The classic comparison, used extensively by Mueller, is car deaths: 3 million in America in the 20th century, and no one mourns. Mueller refers to transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, from the University of Michigan, who analyzed “how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile.” The result? “There would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out.”

This strongly reminds me of the “drug war”. Between 1997 and 2001, how many died from alcohol and tobacco in England and Wales? Up to three-quarters of a million. Cocaine, speed and ecstasy combined? 857. Opiates? 5,188. No prizes for guessing the gruesome toll from cannabis, mushrooms and acid: zero.

All this seems to show—via truly, truly dispiriting distortions in our society—how powerful and unavoidable the imagination is. Has the gradual sidelining of imaginative activity in our culture pushed it down, and out, into places where it probably shouldn’t play too prominent a role, like national security and national health policy?

I recently spent some time looking into the single recent “mushroom death”. In 2005 a man in Manchester ate some mushrooms and—wait for it—leaped to his death out of his 23rd floor flat. Never mind that he had been out on the town drinking heavily as well—the story fed straight into the debate about the legal status of mushrooms.

The idea of someone getting really drunk and getting run over, or crashing their car—it doesn’t seem to bother people, even though it happens many times, every day. Yet the idea of taking mushrooms and being confused enough to jump out a window scares the shit out of people. There is the element of mushrooms generally being an unknown experience for most people, and hence surrounded by fear; but I’m not sure this explains it. Neither does the fact that they’re illegal, with all the fear that entails for many “normal” people (the mushrooms were legal when that guy died). I wonder if it’s people’s involuntary imaginations at work. Somewhere they are aware that the effects of mushrooms make you more aware, too aware sometimes. People involuntarily place themselves in the mind of the deceased, and find a painful consciousness of death (never mind what the deceased actually experienced—I’m speculating about the imaginations of the living here). This would also explain the relative lack of fear and hysteria in the face of alcohol deaths. Aside from “being used to them”, we know at the back of our minds that being pissed probably blunts the violence of death a little.

People not only “overestimate the chances of dramatic or sensational causes of death”, we respond to them differently when they happen. We’re unnerved by our conscious or unconscious imaginative participation in the death. Part of this is probably natural; but I wonder how much it’s exacerbated by our generally undramatic, numbed day-to-day lives.

As Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories said, “I don’t think people get many visceral experiences these days. Humans are made to have extreme experiences. They are landmarks in your life.” Cast adrift without these landmarks, their spectre looms for us in their most extreme, fearful form. They become barely imaginable; but imaginable enough to drive us collectively mad with fear.

After so many years of compromise, expedient lies and unchecked arrogance, Tony Blair seems to have utterly cracked in the wake of extremist Muslim terrorism landing, inevitably, on his doorstep. He hasn’t cracked in the theatrical way that we usually associate with going insane (that might affect his polls). But if we take a moment to feel our way into his mental processes (wearing very thick gloves of course), we can sense the frighteningly hermetic isolation of individual psyche from collective reality that speaks of schizophrenia’s catastrophic split.

Public discussion on the crucial issues here is crippled, as ever, by basic logical errors. We conflate the condoning of terrorism with understanding terrorism. As anyone will agree (in any other context), understanding a problem is pretty much a prerequisite to solving it; therefore, in this simple, scared way of thinking, our fear of capitulation to the forces of barbarism instantly scuppers any chance of moving past this dark phase of history.

Keenly aware of his tottering reputation as Iraqi civilian bodies pile up, with the glaring absence of Hussein’s WMD’s as a damning backdrop, Blair has refused the opportunity for sanity and rationality. As British civilian blood is spilt, on British soil, perhaps people’s sympathy with what is occurring in Iraq (and elsewhere) peaks. Now would have been the time to take stock, to come clean, to appeal for hard-nosed analysis and comprehension of the situation we’re in.

Instead:

Of course these terrorists will use Iraq as an excuse, they will use Afghanistan. September 11 of course happened before both of those things, and then the excuse was American policy, or Israel. They will always have their reasons for acting, but we have got to be really careful of almost giving into the sort of perverted and twisted logic with which they argue. [...] And you know there is a kind of insidious way of the way that this is looked at where people say yes we entirely abhor the methods of these terrorists, but nonetheless we sort of understand what they are saying about American foreign policy, or Iraq, or Afghanistan or Palestine. No, let us be absolutely clear about this, the legitimate voice of Afghanistan is the man beside me who was elected, not al Queda or the Taliban. The legitimate voice of Iraq is the Prime Minister who was appointed after a democratic election, it is not the Jihadists who are killing innocent people in Iraq. The legitimate voice of the Palestinians is Mahmoud Abbas, the President elected by the Palestinians, it is not terrorists. And therefore I think when people talk about the links between whether it is Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Palestine in what has happened, of course these people will use these things as an excuse, but let’s be absolutely clear, if it wasn’t that it would be something else, and nothing, but nothing, justifies what they are doing.

Press conference with Tony Blair and Hamid Karzai, 19 July 2005

So basically, these terrorist guys are just doing it because they’re “evil”, and they use various conflicts involving Muslims around the world as an excuse to get their nefarious kicks blowing people up. Don’t you understand? Even if the entire history of the Christian West’s relations to Islam had been one big jovial knees-up, these guys would be killing themselves and dozens of others in the name of the oppression of squirrels, or something.

Note Blair’s final point: “nothing justifies what they are doing”. Justification and comprehension are conflated, and any attempt at either is booted out the door with a tone of condemnation that no one dare argue with. He even tries to rationally take apart the “we don’t condone them, but I can see where they’re coming from” perspective. But any pretence at rationality is washed away in a tide of bland, forceful democratic rhetoric. The underlying attitude is: “Now no-one can criticise our foreign policy, because some people who claim to be its opponents are vicious bastards.”

In claiming no connection between the London bombings and Iraq, Blair has chronically deepened the hole he’s been digging for himself. Pointing out that 9/11 happened before Afghanistan and Iraq is nonsensical, reducing terrorism to some simplistic reaction to single events. Of course the London bombings may well have happened if Blair hadn’t waded in with Bush to decimate the cradle of civilisation; but I don’t think doing so lightened these guys up. Also, how we should proceed from here in Iraq is a distinct question from, “Why did these bombings happen?”

What is this defensiveness that can’t separate these questions out? Blair should at least be up there saying, “OK, folks, we’re running about in the Middle East trying to convert this country to democracy by force, plunging this volatile area into bloody chaos. On top of our history there, I think it’s safe to say there’s going to be some mad bastards trying to lash out at us by blowing some of you to smithereens. I really don’t want you to get blown up, but I thought I’d warn you. You all voted me in so I assume you’re behind this Iraq thing and are prepared to face the consequences. Sleep tight.” But no, reality is too much to bear for Tony now. So, just as any opposition to oppressive, militaristic Zionism is conflated with anti-Semitism, anyone trying to place these “al Qaeda-style” attacks in their historical and global context is obviously trying to justify suicide attacks.

These terrorists, says the New World Order, aren’t historical, they have no context; they’re just evil, leaking into the world without connections to our real conflicts and international resentments. On such terms are holy wars fought. Bush and Blair’s crusade against jihadism is just the other side of the same coin. Christianity and Islam are reduced by our leaders, these hollow earth-denying capitalists with no vision of a viable future, and terrorists to their basest roots in human fear and rage. People will keep dying violent deaths until we truly divine the connections at work here.

You’ve studied philosophy; you know how much serious time is spent proving the reality of the external world. Imagine having to prove what every animal knows! You know that our main tradition says the world has no qualities whatsoever – no color, no taste, no texture, no temperature – and some of that tradition even denies its existence if we aren’t there to perceive it. Ascetic world denial, world destruction going on every day in our philosophy classes. Terrorism and nihilism are already in our Western worldview, so the terrorists are the incarnation of the nihilism inherent to our system of thinking.

James Hillman

Painted Cave Road

The first thing that caught my eye as I scrolled northwest from LA on Google Maps was the Chumash Painted Cave Park just north of Santa Barbara. Michael had told me before I slept on the hill in Topanga Canyon that we were at the border between old Chumash and Tongva territories, and I’ve been fascinated by archaic/traditional rock paintings for many years now, so it seemed like a good first stop on my journey back towards the Bay Area.

I wasn’t quite sure of where to turn off the 154 snaking north into the Santa Ynez Mountains, but when I saw that the name of the unassuming turn-off I was approaching was “Painted Cave Road”, I thought it was a good bet. Frequently reduced to the width of a car, this road wound up the steep mountainside in ever-tightening twists and turns. The actual cave – just tucked away slightly above a stretch of the road shaded by small trees – was fronted by marvellous natural honeycomb-like formations in the rock. Surely, I thought, a wonder that attracted the people who decorated the cave to this site in particular. It seemed no coincidence to me, either, that just a short clamber down from the road next to the cave was a babbling stream, flushing sparkling fresh water through this parched landscape (many rock art sites in Europe are also oriented in relation to water features in the landscape).

The paintings themselves lurked in the upper rear reaches of the shallow cave, the mouth of which was sealed off with iron mesh. It was only on inspecting photos that I could discern the obvious reason for this protection: pointless contemporary initials and other doodles etched into the original paints. The paintings themselves were crowded clusters of crosses, serpentine figures and circles with all manner of decorations suggestive of solar connections. One curious figure stood out as slightly anthropomorphic, with its apparent waving hands, odd triangular shape and strange top hat-like summit. Well worth visiting, as much for the stunning natural frame as the enigmatic art.

Pacific Coast Highway

Heading north past Lake Cachuma and on towards Santa Maria and the Pacific coast, I jammed the personal stereo adapter I’d picked up in Burbank into the car’s cigarette lighter socket and tuned the radio in to the weak FM signal it started broadcasting my MP3 player on. A nifty little solution, but not necessarily ideal. I pegged Sonic Youth’s blasted guitars as the best soundtrack for the blazing heat and semi-arid hills, but every now and then I’d pass a break in the enclosing landscape and some energetic Latino pop would take over for a minute. A surreal occasional taster of the airborne culture around me.

Morro Bay heralded the start of the breath-taking coastal drive, and by then I’d decided that I would press on to reach Big Sur before the end of the day. So, armed with a huge bag of nachos, some passable salsa, and Spearhead’s bouncing funk, I followed the setting sun northwest.

Big Sur

My main association with this place before arriving has always been the Esalen Institute, a centre for the “human potential movement” whose list of occasional teachers reads like a roll-call for popularisers of modern spirituality who are canny enough to avoid the tacky marshes of the New Age (think Terence McKenna, John Lilly, Colin Wilson, Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson and Stanislav Grof, for starters). Heck, Hunter S. Thompson was once the caretaker-cum-security there.

Well, I noticed the “by reservation only” sign for the centre’s 120 acre grounds in passing; Big Sur’s associations with people I’m influenced by were quickly swamped by the mind-stopping beauty of the place. Low, almost perpetually cloud-capped mountains rise to the east, the Pacific waves crash on the craggy shores, and in between Route 1 wends its way through stunning redwood forests. I felt like having a soundtrack, but nearly everything seemed out of place against such a swell of natural grandeur. Early Spiritualized instrumentals eventually fell into place as the perfect accompaniment. (It’s no coincidence that Sonic Youth, Spearhead and Spiritualized are in alphabetical order. As just skipping tracks is a damn sight safer than browsing through my music folders while driving, the fact that the perfect soundtracks for the series of landscapes through which I drove that day were by bands following each other alphabetically was a grand blessing of serendipity.)

I spent a night at the Fernwood motel, reading Michael Ortiz Hill’s book Gathering in the Names, occasionally unable to hold back a tear or two as I drank ale at the Redwood Grill. Co-written with Augustine Kandemwa, Michael’s “spiritual twin brother” in Zimbabwe, who initiated Michael as an nganga (healer), it charts the intertwined course of these men’s lives up to and past their meeting and mutual initiatory experiences. Michael’s experiences as a nurse in the UCLA Medical Centre, tending to the terminally ill, trying to comfort those with hideous facial cancers, dealing with the often cruel practices his job required of him, became the core of his attempts to ground his Buddhist commitment to compassion, via the African tradition of water spirits he had recently taken on. It’s sobering reading.

The nearby Henry Miller Memorial Library is well worth a visit, for books, sculptures, coffee and donation-based net access. (Miller said that Big Sur was the first place he learned to say, “Amen!” That’s quite a claim given the life he’d lived until he moved there, but then, Big Sur really is that stunning.) Of the local state parks, the Pfeiffer had the most humbling redwoods, though the Andrew Molera – with its meadows and big beach – ended up seducing me for the longest time.

After my second night, in a cabin by the redwood-lined Big Sur river, I was refreshed and ready for my last burst of the Bay Area before flying home via New York.

One last night with New York

I was glad I left a night and a day spare between my flight into New York from the west coast and my flight back to London – it gave me a chance to catch up on the whole trip with Gin, a new friend I’d only managed to briefly hook up with on my first pass through the city. It was hot, but not roasting in the extreme as during my previous heatwave-plagued stay, so it was nice to experience the place without nearly keeling over. We ended up bar-hopping in Williamsburg, catching a fantastic thunderstorm just after midnight, getting utterly soaked in gorgeous cooling rain. The next bar had a black-and-white photo booth, so we captured our merry, sodden selves for posterity.

Gin got really excited at the prospect that we might not have missed the free pizza at a bar near her place, but it was past 3am by then and it didn’t seem likely. Happily they were serving until 3.30. Half three in the morning, buy a pint and you get a good, free pizza. I’d not had pizza in New York so far; seemed like a good way to start, at the end.

I woke the next morning to Gin ragging me about London having won the Olympic bid. The proposed construction’s threat to the Lea Valley had left me lukewarm at very best regarding the 2012 Olympics in London, so I couldn’t even muster some playful boasts of nationalistic victory. We just headed over to Union Square to enjoy some cake from the farmer’s market and some stupendously good iced green tea smoothies.

Welcome home

My flight was from JFK at around 6pm, to land at Heathrow on the morning of the 7th July at around 7am (which would be around 2am by my barely-catching-up-with-New-York body clock). I decided to coast through the next day on caffeine and not crash until the next evening as a way of dealing with jetlag, so I drank some beer in-flight, watched National Treasure (my review: piece of shit!), and generally kept awake.

I was on the Piccadilly Line heading into London by around 8.30am, but the train kept stopping every now and then due to some sort of signal failure at Caledonian Road. By the time more delays were piling up – due to “power surges” – as we approached Zone 1, I was wishing I was back in New York with their air-conditioned subways (which I don’t know for sure are more reliable, but the “grass is greener” effect was kicking in as everyone on the tube started cursing London transport under their breath).

My aim for Finsbury Park as my place to switch to the Victoria Line was scuppered by Leicester Square, where the Piccadilly Line service was completely cancelled. I lugged my bags over to the Northern Line, and managed to get up to Warren Street to switch to the Victoria. Any hope of getting straight home was lost by Euston, however, where the tube just sat there.

It’s odd in retrospect; at the time, I was just increasingly irritated at London Transport, my whining Englishness just flooding back into place. Sat with about twenty other people in a tube carriage, doors closed, we listened to the repeated calls in the station for everyone to leave Euston as our driver repeatedly apologised for the delay.

Eventually the doors were opened and we were asked to evacuate the underground station. Up above at the main Euston rail station, it was pretty hectic, people asking staff in exasperation what was going on with very little information forthcoming. I decided to just grab a pastry and some water, go outside and rest for a bit.

It must have been around 9.45am when I was walking away from the continental pastry shop in Euston, when alarms sounded and a call was made for the whole station to be evacuated. It was a minute or two later, as I stood amidst the chaos of people wondering whether I should get out of this mess (still in my dazed mind something to do with transport inefficiencies) or just sit at a bench with the young Asian woman who was tucking into her sandwich, that an almighty BOOM startled us all.

It seemed to me to come from the direction of the station itself, with a muffled quality that suggested it was underground. In the next day’s slightly confused reporting, it seemed that the tube bombs had gone off in a haphazard staggered sequence, and I thought it was perhaps the Russell Square blast echoing back up the tube tunnels. But learning that all the tube devices went off together at 8.50am meant one thing: the bomb I heard was the Number 30 bus to Hackney, just round the corner in Tavistock Square, the sudden boom muffled and deflected by the buildings between it and where I stood at Euston.

My first reaction was to head for the nearest friend’s home, which was Lee’s place off Tottenham Court Road. But as I streamed with everyone else who was heading west along Euston Road, watching the police cars and motorbikes amass, aware of the helicopters above and sirens everywhere, still not really thinking too much about what might actually be happening, I at least thought: “Heading further into central London probably isn’t the best thing to do.” As it happens it seems Lee is currently out of the country, so that would have been a fruitless journey anyway. I was just desperate to be somewhere familiar where I knew I could crash out if necessary (this was around 5am by my time now!).

I headed back past Euston station, looking for signs of smoke from the station itself to no avail. No one was really panicking. Many people were milling about talking on their mobiles, some joking about the chaos, most queueing impatiently for the still operating but gridlocked buses or just walking away. I saw one young woman in tears on her phone. I just walked. Exhausted by lack of sleep and my ever-heavier rucksack, I slipped into the first green space I found, Oakley Square. I used “Oakley” once as a warm-sounding pen name, one that would reassure people that I was an affable old folklore researcher, not a red-haired druggie occultist. Maybe that echo of warmth drew me in, I don’t know. I just took my rucksack off, drank some water, and finished the last few pages of the book that I’d not managed to read on the tube. Sirens blazed down Eversholt Street.

I rejoined that road going north, and decided Angel was my best destination. There’s buses going my way there, the Victoria Line if it starts again, plus a company I do work for, someone familiar faces at least. I bore right, following my nose. A little way down this road, I overheard a girl on her mobile talk about some “gas explosions”. Hah! I chided myself for the panicky torrent of fears about terrorist attacks I’d built up by now. Gas explosions! Of course! (Hindsight note: gas derives from the Greek for ‘chaos’.)

But then my new-found clarity was derailed as the building I was passing became intensely familiar. What was this place? Where did I know it from? The realisation gradually arose out of the swirl of confused familiarity that I’d been here a few weeks before my trip to the States, to attend a Social Dreaming event themed ‘Living in Contemporary Times’. The idea of Social Dreaming is basically free associating between each other’s dreams, sticking to the dreams themselves, to gradually, and collectively, divine the landscapes of dream that we share, that reflect our social, global concerns rather than just our personal peccadilloes. The blurb for the event began:

Contemporary times are suffused by tragedy. Natural tragedies, like tsunami, cannot be avoided, but human tragedies can. AIDS, poverty, genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, threats to democracy, totalitarian-states-of-mind, Holocausts, Gulags, corruption, wherever they occur in the world, are now part of our conscious awareness because of mass communication. They cannot be denied, or wished away. And there is the unintended, silent, looming tragedy of global warming, which may end all civilization. Will the human spirit allow us to survive?

That day was interesting, but not exactly revelatory. Much more existentially shocking was this moment, realising I’d blindly wandered to this spot again. As I turned around to survey the area, I was boggled to see, just across the street, the other end of Oakley Park. It was this park that myself and Jeff Gormly (who invited me to the Framemakers symposium in Ireland) had briefly retired to during the dreaming event to stretch our legs. I’d not recognised it at all when I wandered in from the other end.

Of course, by now I realised I was actually heading for King’s Cross, so I thought maybe I would catch a bus there. However, I bumped into a small group of people on Pancras Road saying, for a start, there’s no way I was getting to King’s Cross, and, what’s more, this really wasn’t about gas explosions.

We were all pretty “up”, all set on getting to Angel whatever transpired, chatting happily to the overwhelmingly helpful people who directed us along the canals towards Angel. None of us really knew what had just happened – we just helped each other on our ways home. Forget “The Blitz Spirit” – this was just people thrown into nervous excitement by having their mostly dreary routine demolished, their weary crusts cracking open to let natural kindness and communal goodwill through.

I got on a 73 bus at Angel, still with no real idea what had happened. Approaching Newington Green, though, a guy got on with a little radio playing for all to hear. It’s strange and unnerving how events take on the hue of “reality” when you hear about them in mass media for the first time. Something between our need to share and collectively validate experience, and the many forms of bastardisation that modern politics and commerce have subjected this need to. In any case, the woman on the radio was talking about explosions on the tube network, plus an apparent bomb on a bus. People were probably safest in buildings, as there had been no warnings and public transport was being randomly targeted.

I wasn’t the only person to get off at the next stop.

I then realised that my MP3 player had FM radio, too, so I stuck that on to see what more information I could gather. It was only as I approached my friend’s hair salon on Stoke Newington Church Street that the reality that people had just lost their lives sunk in. I choked back tears, and arrived to meet the first familiar face of the day.

As I said, the whole series of events in London on 7th July have been very slow to sink in. Thankfully no one I knew was involved in any way – which left me pondering just how close my brush was. Some news sources, like the BBC, seem to have the ill-fated Number 30 heading towards Marble Arch before its diversion, even though the wrecked destination sign in all news images plainly says Hackney. Those going with this as the destination have the bus calling at Euston and then being diverted south towards Tavistock Square. There’s still confusion over the bus bomber’s actions. It seems obvious to me that the destruction of at least one above-ground target would serve the terrorist’s image-motivated purposes, giving us a clear picture of devastation for our fears to totemise. Even so, the speculation that the fourth bomber had caught the Victoria Line south from King’s Cross, only to get off at Euston when his bomb failed, catching the bus there and detonating late… It all inevitably conjures that “alternate timeline” of personal nightmare, where I don’t go to get a pastry, and decide to get on the first bus outside Euston going northeast.

Equally inevitable is the necessity of not dwelling on this, and trying to digest the realities of what happened. Especially, the reality of suicidal bombing attacks happening here and now in the city where I live. I’ve been tremendously encouraged by some of the reactions from Londoners. The refusal to be swept into knee-jerk reactions has been much stronger than I’d hoped – but then, the aftermath of 9/11, and the Iraq War, have really lowered the bar for hope.

I’m doing jury service at the moment, and it’s odd that I’ve had the opportunity of having dinner every day with a group of Muslims (among the rest of the east London cross-section in the juror’s canteen) in the aftermath of this event. Their response is pretty strong and united: why are these extremists wrecking decades of effort at integration in Britain? One woman was denouncing them for claiming support from the Koran, arguing that if it’s advocating murder, it’s not religion by definition. Part of me looked down on this as a bland state of denial; part of me wondered if she’s speaking from the heart, and would argue the case for loving religion in the face of every one of the billions of examples of horrendous violence committed in the name of a higher spiritual power. In all, I just felt it was good to have this close one-on-one contact with Asian Muslims in the wake of these attacks, an experience my routine never gives me. Even if they’re saying the same things that are flashed past you on the news, actually talking with people usually makes a huge difference. (Well, not the greatest revelation, but I need reminding sometimes, OK?)

With talk of laws against “indirect incitement” rumbling around Westminster, my heart sinks. I wonder if British people are feeling each report of bloody deaths due to suicide bombs in Baghdad a little more keenly now we’ve had a taste. It seems it’s only by extending our sympathies (think a little about that often trite phrase) more globally that we might have enough collective insight to unpick this nasty historical tangle we’re in. We already have enough laws to lock up pretty much anyone presenting the slightest danger to society. Passing new ones just looks like a political façade at best, a theatrical display of apparent “action”; at worst, we’re tying our own shoelaces together, setting ourselves up for some serious falls a little way down the line.

At a time when honest, open, fearless dialogue is merely the starting point for moving forward, new laws potentially restricting publishing, art and journalism would be disastrous. Extending our sympathies, in the widest sense, to everyone caught up in this brutalising cycle of oppression, dominion, pride, fear and revenge, requires much more than lip service to today’s victims and the frequent use of the word “evil”.

History is by far and away the biggest hole in my education, I feel, and in that I imagine I’m typical these days. Of course we long since left behind the world that could be practically comprehended by any single person—and since that watershed, things have continued to complexify exponentially. But I still sense that there’s a yawning gulf between the fragmentary story I have of our collective past, and the story that I’m capable of constructing.

What’s my motivation to elaborate and refine the story though? What’s the point? The best I can offer off the top of my head, in this rambling stream of "open source philosophy" that I call a blog, is that just as history is the sum of individual experiences (and more), the collective capacity to respond wisely to events is the sum of each individual’s historical consciousness. Sounds pretty impressive, but it’s a little too abstract to really motivate you. And while I’m sure there are myriad forces that impel myself and others to broaden and deepen our reading of the human story, current events highlight a crucial motivation: horror. The question "Why?" is never more urgent than when brutality threatens to render sense and reason redundant.

It seems to me that it’s precisely in these instants, when reason itself seems threatened, that we need to dig deeper—just as Freud realised that the "irrational" was a gateway to understanding individual motivations—looking for fossilised remnants of forgotten struggles, the discovery of which will expand our reasoning to embrace the unpalatable. Historical consciousness is the only way this "larger picture" can be achieved.

Still, Chechnya’s past is much more "forgotten" to me than to Chechen separatists. Doesn’t historical awareness perpetuate these conflicts? Blood feuds, ethnic and national rivalries inherited down through generations, bitter memories of abuse and slaughter burning away, fuelled by and fuelling the abuse and slaughter they engender… I often wonder if above is enough like below, macro like micro, for large groups to reflect individual traits such as pathologies like Repetition Compulsion, "the mind’s tendency to repeat traumatic events in order to deal with them"—and its extremist cousin that goes as far as visiting traumatic events on others in order to deal with them. This vicious cycle is a sorry truism for criminal psychologists who study serial killers (overdone in Hollywood of course, but retaining its kernel of truth). But for peoples and societies it’s hard to get to grips with—not least because it’s both complex and unscientific (despite the efforts of evolutionary psychologist Howard Bloom).

Talking of unscientific, I read a interesting but disappointing book recently called The Master of Lucid Dreams by Olga Kharitidi (subtitled "In the Heart of Asia a Russian Psychiatrist Learns How to Heal the Spirits of Trauma"). It has a Casteneda-ish edge to it, the Russian being initiated into an undocumented tradition of Sufi dream control in Uzbekistan. But Kharitidi isn’t a shady anthropology student, she’s a professional psychiatrist accustomed to dealing with severe rape and abuse cases in Siberia. Whatever the veracity of her story, it makes for interesting reading. The tradition she stumbles into holds a belief that severe trauma can incubate psychic entities, "spirits of trauma", that can be inherited, gradually aggregating across individual to families, across families to societies. She tells us that the previously secret tradition had been revealed to her, an outsider, as its guardians feel that these spirits have become so powerful that there is no longer time to be concerned with the coherence of their lineage.

Similarly concerned with the flow between individual and collective, and between victim and victimiser, is Stanislav Grof‘s salutary research into LSD psychotherapy—which was subjected to the rigours of coping with the inner struggles of Holocaust survivors in post-war Prague. His theories focus on the impact of the birth process on the individual, how the oceanic peace of the womb is violently disrupted by its sudden evacuation, with "no light at the end of the tunnel" during the most physically constricting phase.

His emphasis on the birth trauma always flits through my mind when I register the seemingly interminable violence and suffering in Africa, our species’ natal landscape. Or when reporters on the war in Iraq use the phrase "Cradle of Civilization". It also struck me in 2002 when the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was taken over by Arabs and surrounded by Israelis. I’m sure you can fill in your own obviously selective, but nevertheless resonant examples.

I guess these are the places we’ve been the longest—the places with the longest histories, the most baggage, where the spirits of trauma have really dug themselves in. Can some deeper level of historical consciousness unravel these choking knots in our story? Will they only dissolve when we evacuate Mother Earth? Or will we drag them with us until we see sense? Fucked if I know.

From my window here, I’ve been marvelling each day at a spectacularly ambitious, wonderfully realised web across the road. It stretched from the lowermost branches of a tree on the other side of the street, at least three or four metres off the ground, and connected to the wing of a parked red sports car. The main supporting thread must have been four or five metres long. And that’s coming out the arse of something no bigger than my thumbnail. It was thrilling to see, tempered slightly by knowing that the spider wouldn’t have an inkling that the big red thing would just go one day.

The fact that these creatures can spin such fantastically beautiful, crafted webs gives them an air of otherness that goes far beyond the fact that their bodies are so little like ours. You can see the genesis of animal gods in there—us generalists who have traded in particular talents for a Swiss Army Knife lump of planning and imagination, our imagination and admiration clubbing together to revere and draw inspiration from these beings that casually do things it would take us years of learning to accomplish.

Today I drew the curtains and was slightly saddened, but unsurprised, to see a silver hatchback in the place of the red sports car. "Ah well," I thought. Then I reeled. The web was still there. Or rather, it had been rebuilt—in exactly the same place, only attached to the wing of the hatchback this time. That’s persistence.

But then, such resilience seems to pale next to some of the things we manage with our capacity for foresight, despite its obvious drawbacks like reflexive loops of fear and doubt. Reading stories from survivors of the school siege in Beslan, Russia, two things struck me, beyond the unutterable horror. One is how the level of unbridled desperation shown by the attackers so totally undermines their motives. The least I usually get from terrorist attacks, in terms of the perspective of the attackers, is an awareness of their desperation. But hundreds of dead and catastrophically traumatised children make even that seem trivial.

The other was this:

Ruslan Pukhayev said his seven-year-old grandson Gennady was slightly wounded in the left shoulder by an explosion.

The boy sat on a stretcher dipping a biscuit into some warm, sweet tea. The grandfather hovered above him.

"It’s incredible. Of course it’s amazing," the old man said.

"The whole thing is horrible for him. The whole thing happened before his very eyes. It will be years before he understands it. My God, who needed this?"

It struck me as amazing that, even in the immediate aftermath, tending his injured grandson, this old guy could conceive of the day the kid would understand the event at all. That’s tenacity.

by Gyrus

On September 11th 2001, I was on a walking holiday around the Dingle Peninsula in the west of Ireland. I became aware of the attack on the World Trade Centre when I walked into a net café in Dingle, where some American tourists had just found out. They were gobsmacked. I was a little bemused, and just went to check my email. I overheard someone say that the buildings had collapsed, but they thought they had been evacuated. So hey, we lost some skyscrapers, I thought.

Then I started to realise the impact this would have on the world. The carte blanche that would almost certainly be given to the Bush administration to increase anti-terrorist (and anti-anything-else-we-don’t-like) surveillance and military measures. The tightening grip of fear and prejudice. I felt sad and angry. Then the American girl sat next to me burst out crying. I thought it was a curious over-reaction, maybe the American illusion of total cocoon-like safety being shattered. Then I remembered a friend who was on holiday in New York. As I trawled through the news sites that weren’t experiencing a meltdown, I realised that the Twin Towers were a tourist attraction, and that no, the buildings weren’t fully evacuated. Many, an unknown number, had just been killed. I felt unnerved and queasy, and had to go for a walk.

Of course, when I passed a pub with CNN on the TV, I was instantly drawn inside—for a pint to ground me as well as to see what had happened. My heart sank and jaw dropped as I watched the repeated footage of the second plane hitting, the towers collapsing, the distress, panic and disbelief. I thought of my friend, too. I felt burning anger towards the perpetrators.

Days later, in an article on Osama bin Laden in The Guardian, I read how his training programme "brainwashed" prospective recruits:

Many al-Qaida trainees saw videos of such [Stinger] missiles and other weaponry daily as part of their training routine. Showing hundreds of hours of Muslims in dire straits – Palestinians on the West Bank, Bosnians being shot by Serbs, Chechens under attack from the Russian army and (most of all) dying Iraqi children – was part of al-Qaida’s Ipcress-file style induction strategy.

So I thought to myself: What’s the real difference between CNN and al-Qaida training videos?

Both are voluntary (I’ve not heard of al-Qaida press-ganging recruits, however extreme they are). Both utilise repetition to emphasise a perspective. But one is consciously seen as an initiation into the dedicated service of a specific cause, while the other is… "the news".

Admittedly, however subtly Western media manufactures consent for its cause, there’s a lot more flexibility and freedom in the expression of different viewpoints compared to the lines of communication among extreme fundamentalist Muslim groups. Were the emotions triggered in me by the events just a subtle form of "brainwashing"? I don’t think so. My personal connection to the situation in New York—my friend there—was bound to make it more affecting than people I don’t and may never know being bombed in the Middle East and central Asia.

That’s callous. You mean you don’t care about all those men, women and children just because you don’t know them?

Yes and no. As a compassionate person, my heart goes out to everyone who dies or suffers needlessly. But it’s a human heart. And that means, besides being able to empathise, it is also limited. If I felt deeply unnerved and queasy every time people were killed in the world, I wouldn’t be able to function. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I don’t sit down and decide who I’m going to feel for—I just feel when I do.

I believe that absolute, universal compassion exists. I’ve felt it, from time to time. It’s crushing, liberating and vast. But most of the time I live in the relative world, where my sympathies hover closer to home most of the time.

However, it wasn’t just my friend—I felt for, and cried for, the rest of the people in the WTC.

Come on! You know most of those people in there were capitalist scum. Their lives, supporting America’s commercial, cultural and military dominance of the world, cause untold suffering. They had it coming. They were a lot less innocent than the people in Palestine being bombed by Israel, or the Iraqi children being starved to death by US sanctions.

Sure, many of the people in the WTC led the kind of lives that often make me sick and angry. But I don’t think they should die for what they do. I don’t think mass murderers should die for what they do, let alone greedy people. I may have had some emotional conflict over this if my friend had died in New York, but such are my beliefs.

If you believe in violent revolution against global capitalism, I disagree with you. I don’t think it’ll go away if we ask politely, but I do think it’ll bomb us the fuck out of existence if we try to do the same to it. It has bigger guns. We need to try something else.

If you don’t believe in violent revolution, but do utterly oppose global capitalist hegemony, and when the WTC collapsed with thousands of people inside, you joked about it, or felt a righteous sense of "about time", I think you’re a fucking cowardly hypocrite. You won’t take on the massive risks involved in opposing this system violently, but are prepared to bask in the aftermath when someone else does. Fuck you.

The WTC was destroyed in a well-timed attack designed to create a shocking media spectacle, because of its scale and concomitant symbolic value, representing US commercial might. For so many people with anti-capitalist or anti-American feelings—not terrorists but peaceful, mostly decent people—the success of this focus on symbolism was such that this is all they saw. An American icon crashing to the ground. It’s all I saw before I realised it hadn’t been evacuated in time. But even knowing, intellectually, that thousands had died, many people still only saw a symbolic, if violent, attack on American values—the bully that we all know America is getting its comeuppance. Why did so many people not feel anything for the people who died?

Because they were all affluent fuckers who have been isolated from the suffering they cause! It was time they faced their karma.

Well, I don’t believe that if every rich person in the world was killed anything would be solved. There’s plenty of greedy, hateful, uncaring people who aren’t skilled, intelligent or lucky enough to be wealthy. And—shock horror!—there are people who are wealthy who aren’t evil, and whose death would be a cause for sympathy if they hadn’t been as dehumanised as most Third World Muslims are. Besides, as I said before, I don’t believe in the death penalty. Let alone a vast, indiscriminate one without judge or jury. Isn’t that—despite the manipulative, unthinking use of the word by the media—barbaric? Just because they hate US dominance too, when did we start becoming apologists for barbaric religious fundamentalism? Did I miss a meeting?

One of my best friends has devoted most of the past 6 years of his life to political activism, fighting tirelessly and without compromise for the environment, for human rights, for civil liberties, for peace. When I first met him, he was working in a bank to pay off debts. If he’d lived in New York instead of Leeds, he could well have been in the WTC that morning. And the world would have lost one of the best souls I know.

I know that no intelligent people need it explaining to them. The vast symbolism of this attack hides its indiscriminate violence. Good people died. If you’re so hung up on money, what about the janitors, cleaners, waitresses, cooks, temping staff? What about the firemen? Over 300 firemen died trying to save lives. Did you manage to smother awareness of their inconceivable bravery and selflessness as well, as your political beliefs obliterated your human connection to the deaths involved in this catastrophe?

And of course, the number of deaths here are so large that the 200 or so passengers and crew in the hijacked aircraft are not even worth bothering about. Who cares, if America’s finally reaping what it’s sown?

But this may be the only way that America’s going to be woken up to the suffering it causes.

Perhaps. As you may have guessed, I oppose violence such as this. But it’s certainly made many people more aware of certain things. It’s given me, for one, a burning desire to learn as much as I can about what America actually has done, and what the situation really is in the Middle East and central Asia, beyond the media—mainstream and underground—I happen to have consumed.

But as it stands now—22nd September 2001—the main upshot of the terrorist action is to have united American people behind their barely-elected, widely criticised chimp of a President in a way I would never have thought possible. One woman’s reaction to Bush’s recent speech to Congress was—spoken through near-tears—"I don’t think he understands the words he’s using, and I’m embarrassed that he’s our President." Of course there are Americans who realise its government’s evils as much as anyone. (Some of them probably died last Tuesday.) But they have now been marginalised like never before. And internationally, it’s the same story. Many countries are bravely trying to moderate America’s response to the attacks, but the US currently has more support in the international community than it ever hoped for.

You were saying something about America "waking up"?

What I don’t get is why you’re so broken up about the victims in this attack. I’m sure you’ve heard about the violence in in the Middle East, the starving babies in Iran and the war-ravaged people facing famine in Afghanistan. Haven’t you just been conditioned all your life by the media, which dehumanises these "strange foreigners" and never, ever goes into as much depth about their suffering as it does about suffering in the West, when it happens on this scale?

Yes.

What? After all the time you’ve spent analysing the mechanisms of psychological conditioning, studying the methods of applying it in the media, trying to inoculate yourself against its insidious influence? You admit that all your emotions about this are just conditioned responses?

Not just conditioned responses. It’s not as simple as that. We’re all conditioned. Just because you’ve read or heard some things about "conditioning"—which inevitably focus on the negative aspects, its abuses in the hands of media manipulators, advertisers and politicians—you think it’s something that you can get rid of and be "free".

To me, culture itself is a form of conditioning. I feel empathy more closely with people I share cultural common ground with than I do with people from other cultures. This is natural. The dark side of it leads to bigotry, racism and needless prejudice and violence. None of this detracts from this basic fact of human emotions enmeshed in culture. I had much more common ground with a lot of the people who died than I do with anyone from the Third World. This is because of where I was born, not prejudice or racism.

However, I think my reaction had a lot more to do with the amount of media coverage I consumed in the attack’s wake. I was on my own in rural Ireland, and the immediacy and scale of these events made me hungry for understanding. I watched the TV in pubs for the first two days, then bought the papers every day for the following week. I read the analysis and commentary, but also read the first-hand reports of the scene in New York.

There is an element of "rubber-necking". For a start, the dramatic footage of the second plane crash and the crumbling towers contained a flicker of a thrill. Anyone who relished the perverse plane-crash fantasy in Fight Club (not to mention the final sequence) can understand this. Then there’s the morbid curiosity of the details of the aftermath.

But there’s also an attempt to grasp what had happened. Yes, we’ve been relatively cocooned in the West. Despite the IRA and psychotic nail-bombers here in London, September 11th ushered in a new awareness of danger and fear in Western cities. I wanted to understand this.

Now, had there been a week of media saturation as intense as this in the wake of an especially tragic incident in the Middle East or Afghanistan, my lack of cultural common ground with the victims would no doubt have melted away in the face of the raw pain and suffering. But this doesn’t happen, and probably will never happen. Our connection to anything outside our immediate physical environment is through media. The suffering of the Third World is, with a few notable exceptions, criminally under-documented in our media. Even the mass of coverage in non-mainstream sources just can’t compete with the sheer weight and impact of repetitious TV and newspaper reporting.

So what to do? Involving yourself with more non-mainstream media—creating as much, if possible, as consuming—is a natural step. Limiting your intake of mainstream media to that which gives you the information you want should also be considered.

But, besides being aware of how the media distorts and conditions, I’m also aware of how it desensitises. Surely, as much as my reactions were inevitably conditioned, the reactions of people who just restated their political beliefs about America, without expressing sympathy for the dead, were a sad result of desensitisation. And perhaps also conditioning—reflexive, knee-jerk "anti-Bad Things" righteousness.

(Even if some of the people I’m blindly referring to here have tangibly suffered at the hands of US foreign policy, is there an excuse for ignoring American people’s suffering at the hands of vengeful terrorists? If America’s so fucking blind, how has it managed to produce people who, having just lost loved ones to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, have the immediate compassion and insight to plead against violent retribution?)

By consuming the media that I did, and opening myself to its impact, I chose to be conditioned into feeling some of the distress that people in Manhattan felt. I also choose, whenever I connect to any human disaster through the media, to open myself to its impact, as much as I can bear. I refuse to allow the overwhelming amount of human misery around us, and the overwhelming amount of media coverage of it, to blunt my basic human responses to suffering. And I know I would be truly fucked if I allowed my political beliefs to blunt them. To say, "The government of those people is evil, therefore I shut off my emotional connection to their pain." That seems to be a very dangerous path to follow.

You’re kind of glossing over the fact that these people elected their evil government.

Fact? Do you know how many people who died voted for Bush? Just as America dehumanises fundamentalist Muslims—barbaric or not—these hijackers surely had dehumanised their victims—government supporters or not—to the point where they were able to kill them. Should we also dehumanise them in the name of "democracy" (a process that, as we all know, became shakier than ever during the election that put Bush in power), in order to shrug our shoulders at their deaths? Likewise, we should guard against homogenising the millions of Afghanis currently under threat—thanks to their unelected leaders—into an obscure mass, whose suffering in the name of bagging bin Laden is seen as "justifiable retribution".

Communications media can open us to the experiences of people across the world. They can distort and manipulate our perceptions along the way. They can be actively used to effect such distortions. But, short of everyone suddenly becoming as courageous and mobile as frontline journalists, they are the channels of knowledge that keep self-awareness alive in this deeply dysfunctional, but potentially fruitful and precious global community.

Most of us are conscious of the mazes of self-deception and illusion that often have to be navigated when you’re a self-aware being. This is never an argument for less self-awareness, except for the alcoholic or junkie. Only more self-awareness will lead us forward. As a species, that means more media. Not more for its own sake, but more intensely active and involving media. Not immersive world-denying Virtual Reality, but collaborative, self-critical and life-affirming media. Honing and refining our critical faculties is crucial in this process. Equally crucial, though, is retaining the capacity for human response—allowing ourselves to be affected. Anything else will feed an encroaching numbness, and we won’t even feel the death of the future of Homo sapiens.

Postscript

I gradually discovered the world of blogging alongside the invasion and occupation of Iraq this year, and a positive outcome of this conjunction has been, I feel, discovering native bloggers from the country in question. There are quite a few, in fact; I’ve ended up reading Baghdad Burning, a wonderfully written journal that gives fascinating insights into life in Baghdad, from the daily fear of violence to local recipes and customs. An essential counterpoint to media coverage, and definitely an effective way of nurturing human sympathies across cultures, grassroots expressions from "over there" that go well beyond the news-centric conception of "coverage" are a hugely encouraging phenomenon. There is of course the danger of the divide ceasing to be across geographic and/or cultural lines, but across the lines created by media literacy and access. I say, stay aware of this danger, and use this awareness to constantly endeavour to increase media literacy and access. Gyrus, 29/11/2003