Any man's death diminishes me

While Ernest Hemingway’s short stories are without a doubt some of the finest in American literature and perhaps the best of what he had to offer, his message in For Whom the Bell Tolls is what I like to think of when I think of my grandfather. When he quotes from John Donne’s Meditation XVII, “No man is an Island, entire of itself." Ernest evokes at the same time the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and the reality of the human condition. None of us, in spite of what we may believe, or have been told, is ever alone.

We are all in this together, or as Donne put it “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." Still in hard times like these you can’t help but wonder if the mayor of Bay City, a small town in Michigan, ever had the time to read Donne or my grandfather’s novel and what he was thinking when he found out that he had allowed a 93 year old man to freeze to death in his home.

The Bay City house where Marvin E. Shur froze to death

Marvin E. Shur owed over a thousand dollars to the Bay City utility company and the company had put a “limiter”, a kind of automatic circuit breaker on Mr. Shur’s electricity meter. Over a period of ten days the limiter was designed to encourage the “client” to pay up, by slowly reducing the electricity that he could use. If, at any point, the 93 year old had decided to turn up the heating in his house (quite probable given the frigid artic temperatures outside, -23C/-10F) the limiter would have automatically shut off his power. The utility company says that Mr. Shur could have easily switched the power back on, but that would have meant going outside into the cold to flick a switch on the limiter and no one had bothered to contact the old man to tell him that he could do this, or to verify that he was physically capable of venturing outside.

Mr. Shur was a widower with no children and the city coroner estimates that he finally died of hypothermia two days after the limiter was installed on the 13th of January. On the 17th, his body was found by neighbors who noticed that the windows of his home had frosted over. Shur had tried to dress as warmly as he could with two pairs of pajamas, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The news of the death of this retied factory worker and World War II veteran, couldn’t perhaps compete with the torrent of corporate media hype surrounding Obama’s impending inauguration but it certainly had a lot to do with the country that the Prince of Hope was about to lead and the degeneration of America’s sense of solidarity and humanity.

Utility companies in many areas of the Midwest and Northeast of the US have been steadily increasing their rates, and for the poor, the unemployed and the elderly this is an enormous hardship. Often they are forced to decide between food or heating their homes. The mayor of Bay City, Charles Brunner (a democrat who later flew to Washington for Obama’s lavish inauguration festivities), has shown little remorse for what he has done. In fact, on the same day that Shur’s death was reported nationally the mayor voted with the town council to increase the town’s utility rates by 3%.

“We’ve gotten very creative in the ways we purchase power, but it’s a very complicated market and it’s an expensive market,” Brunner said after the meeting. “and we have to pass the costs on.”

Lecture at Ohio State University

For those of you in the Columbus, Ohio area, I'll be talking about my memoir, Strange Tribe, and all things Ernest at OSU's Wexner Center Film/Video Theatre on February 17th at 7:00 pm.

Boxing Day!

Seeing as how it's Boxing Day here in Canada I thought that I'd post a music video "Give Me Your Heart" (just click on the link) from The BoxCarBoys, a new group from Brazil.

Love out of mind

Mind


Not that the mind
Is out there all alone
Attempting to make
Sense of it!
No.
The mind is many-limbed
It can run and jump,
It can turn a diamond
Slowly in its hands
And hold it to the light
Just as it can peel the pith
Of an orange or smudge
A taut canvas with its blood.
Animal mind that pounces
At philosophy, that tears beliefs
Down to their bare bones,
That longs to be free from the bars
That bind it to all that is rational,
To all that will one day die.
And the mind has ears and eyes
And roams the world
In search of clues as to the guilt
Or innocence of those who speak
Of systems that would betray
The body and forever damn
The soul. Truth is no common soap
And honesty no detergent and the loss
Of one’s good name is nothing compared
To a loss of mind, for within that universe
Unlimited and detailed distances
Unfold, so that in such a river
On such a day in such a summer
Two lovers bathed and exchanged
Vows that had been seeded
In the stars that Dante once observed
From the hills above the doomed city.
All cities are doomed, only
Love will outlive their destruction
In time out of mind.

John Lyons


14 December 2008

The Ten Fingers

Here's a meditation on heat and love from John Lyons

Sofía

The ten fingers
Of a seven-year old
Holding a semi-transparent
Pebble up to the light
As she tells her father
That she has found
A diamond, a rather
Coarsely polished
Stone picked from
The obscurity
Of the path
We are walking,
A chip of once
Molten rock
That has the hue
Of lightly cooked
Salmon - all nature,
All life being
About heat
And the loss of heat,
And what we
Carelessly take
To be incandescence.
It is close to sunset
And two woodpeckers
Sit idly on the condominium
Wall, wondering perhaps
Whether to call it a day,
To head home
As we all do,
At the end of a long day.
All out of the same
Cosmic soup, the spiral
Of life, the green parrots
With the bright red patch
Beneath their wings,
And their endless
Endless chatter,
The owls lazing
In the palm shade,
The convection of clouds
Gathering in the distance,
The unceasing transfer
Of energy from liquid
To gas, to liquid, and love
Precious love
In all its simplicity
Passing back and forth
between parent and child,
as tactile and as real
as the sample mineral
held in the hand and yet
of a beauty that could
put any flower
by any other name
to shame.

18 November 2008

Waldir

Here is another beautiful poem written by John Lyons on the day of his father-in-law's death.

Waldir

There are names
And there are names,
Drenched in emotion
But free from tears
Names that sail
Freely along the coast
Of Ilhabela
Names that dwell
On the tip of the tongue
Names that are in essence
A kiss
Or a warm embrace
Names that love
The laughter of life
And scoff at death’s
Dismal victory,
names that purr after dark
just as Carol
is purring still
on the stairs
in São Carlos;
there are names
soaked to the core
in honour
in dignity
in respect,
names with a fierce
tenderness,
names that are
essential to the smooth
running of life
and that cause us to stand
to attention
as they pass us by
or as they pause
to spend a few years
with us, names
that charge the memory
with indelible moments,
names that bear
testimony to the stubbornness
of love, to the fact
pure and simple
that love outlives
pedestrian life that ultimately
cannot keep pace, cannot go the distance, life
that empty misnomer!
What’s in a name?
That uncommon denominator
That we carry from
The date of our birth
Up to and beyond
The moment of complete
Release, no longer
The wounded bird
Held in delicate hands,
But a name that soars
In the beating heart,
For ever and ever.

John Lyons

November 2nd 2008

Real Change

On Tuesday America will elect Barrack Obama as its next president. The corporate media continues to talk of “tight races” in “key states” but I can’t imagine that anyone who knows anything about what is going on in America really believes them. By now it should be obvious even to the most die-hard neocons that John McCain and his born-again sidekick Sarah Palin are about to be wiped off the political map of the United States.

The Republican Party is in serious trouble and the Democrats, under Obama’s leadership, could do much to rectify the obscenities of Bush’s eight years in office. With absolute, filibuster proof majorities in the both the House and the Senate they could change whatever they felt like changing, literally. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal from the start and crimes against humanity, you say? Well, they could end them in one day, simply by voting to cut off the funding to continue W’s massacres. Of course, they could have done that back in 2006 when they defeated the Republicans the first time around, but they didn’t.

Come to think of it, in 2006 they could have also impeached Bush for any one of a number of his crimes against the US constitution, but that too was undoable. “Impeachment is off the table”, said the newly elected House majority leader, Nancy Pelosi (the same woman who later on would so whole-heartedly push for the tax-payer funded bailout of the Wall Street Banksters).

Gordon Gekko from Wall Street "Greed is good"

And speaking of Wall Street and the class of thieves that continues to run America, the Democratic controlled Congress and Senate could have passed laws two years ago to re-regulate the investment banks that were selling the toxic “sub-prime” securities that are now wrecking financial havoc across the globe. But they didn’t. They had better things to do, even though many of them, I’m sure, had a very good idea of what was going on and a realistic vision of where the housing bubble and the billions being spent on the Iraq war would lead us. They knew and could have done a lot when there was still time to prevent the disaster, but chose not to.

Instead, when the meltdown began and the stock market was losing an average of five to seven hundred points a day, the Democrats were the most enthusiastic supporters of the initial 700 billion dollar give-away (to the same criminals who had caused the disaster in the first place). The entire Democratic leadership stood behind the most massive wealth transfer from the poor to the filthy rich in the country’s history. “We must save the banks and the bankers to save the people”, they told us. A bit like the US soldiers who used to torch South Vietnamese hamlets with their Zippo lighters to “save” them from the Viet Cong.

In 2007 the US Census reported that roughly 40% of the nation’s wealth was controlled by the richest 1% of the country and that the top 10% owned almost two-thirds of America’s wealth. These are figures that were published last year before the crisis and the bailout and the daily stock market slides, and yet they remind me more of the kind of income disparity you’d expect to find in a Sub-Saharan nation or a Latin-American dictatorship à la Pinochet, not in the United States. And yet that is what we’ve become. An oligarchy where a miniscule minority of the population sets domestic and foreign policy and every four years holds elections so that the rest of us can participate in electing their representative, who will run their property (the United States) for their exclusive use and benefit.

I, however, am sick and tired of this system of lies and terror and hope that sooner or later the people of America will finally rise up against their autocratic rulers and take back what is rightfully theirs. Change is not just necessary, as Obama tells us, it also has to be real.