still

Unbelievable. Take a look at this article in the Globe and Mail, published just a few days ago.

Thankfully people have started to notice the blatant misinformation printed here, as evidenced by the retort, published a few days later. Still, I would like to read this book by Frances Widdowson, “Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry”, to see just how she frames her argument, and what evidence she uses to back it up. Perhaps people more informed about Native issues can enlighten me on just how such counter-arguments can intellectually survive in these times, in the face of so much contrary evidence…

The Vancouver Olympics are turning out to be another Beijing. I just hope that the issues raised won’t be pushed aside from the public glare – oh so conditioned to the two-week public consciousness of this era – in the same way that the Tibetian sovereignty has.

Oh and Happy Halloween, I guess.

farther out

Sorry about the inconsistent postings – I have been very busy with essays and readings, and on top of all that, I am compelled to write in every bit of free time that I have. My current personal project should be completed in about a week, so I can start writing some serious articles again. But in the meanwhile, here are two videos from “Inside Story” on Al Jazeera English about the current situation in Sri Lanka. It is the most recent all-round coverage that I’ve seen, and gives you a good idea about what the current situation is.

PART I:

PART II:

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And some musings on other fronts… I was browsing Aleister Crowley’s Magick Without Tears recently when I came across a passage that was rather striking in the light of the current financial ‘crisis’ that the whole world seems to be moaning over. The reason I’m being so facetious about this is rather complex, and I won’t get it into now, but suffice to say that there is a crisis, and that it shouldn’t be so bloody surprising. Anyways, before I quote the excerpt I will give you a brief definition of what ‘Magick’, as used by Crowley and the schools of Hermetic thought, is:

“MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.

(Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge.  I therefore take “magical weapons,” pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magical language” i.e. that which is understood by people I wish to instruct.  I call forth “spirits” such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people.  The composition and distribution is thus an act of MAGICK by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.)”

From this follows:

“Every intentional act is a Magical Act.”

And then finally, under Theorem 27,

“Every man should make Magick the keynote of his life. He should learn its laws and live by them.

(Illustration: The Banker should discover the real meaning of his existence, the real motive which led him to choose that profession.  He should understand banking as a necessary factor in the economic existence of mankind, instead of as merely a business whose objects are independent of the general welfare.  He should learn to distinguish false values from real, and to act not on accidental fluctuations but on considerations of essential importance.  Such a banker will prove himself superior to others; because he will not be an individual limited by transitory things, but a force of Nature, as impersonal, impartial and eternal as gravitation, as patient and irresistible as the tides.  His system will not be subject to panic, any more than the law of Inverse Squares is disturbed by Elections.  He will not be anxious about his affairs because they will not be his; and for that reason he will be able to direct them with the calm, clear-headed confidence of an onlooker, with intelligence unclouded by self-interest and power unimpaired by passion.)”

And there it is, a beautiful passage written in 1943 about the necessity of acting on and within primary causes. Of course, there is a lot more complexity hidden beneath this veneer, that of the existence of ‘primary causes’ being tantamount, but I will have to leave the exploration of that for another day… I do not agree with Crowley about everything, but at times, he can be quite insightful.

Oh, and there are now three(!) rather prestigious universities offering Masters programs in Hermetic Philosophy and Western Esoterism: the University of Amsterdam, the University of Exeter, and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Unfortunately, the chances of me learning Dutch or French to a level of proficiency to pursue a post-graduatate program are stratospherically thin, and the Devil knows I would NEVER live in bloody England.

hush

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I don’t want to go on like a root in the shadows,
hesitating, feeling forward, trembling with dream,
down down into the dank guts of the earth,
soaking it up and thinking, eating every day.

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(excerpt from Walking Away by Pablo Neruda)

minding my busyness

Essays are weighing me down. I have been occupied in theses and arguments for a few weeks now, the result of bad time management skillz. Not skills, but skillz, those fabled angels of badassery and coolhood, descending to wreathe the worthy in serene sparkjoy regalia the likes of which even Swedenborg would have raised an eyebrow to. But anyways, I have never seen these mythical beasts. I hold out some measure of hope though, putting out a glass of unpasteurized milk and a seal I made to denote my penitential masturbatory practices – once a week, no more – as a token of my eternal gratitude would that I were eventually recognized. Oh yes, I know, these particular radiant spheres need to be wrestled to the ground in order to divulge their secrets, you need to truss up their wings and threaten to take a hot poker to their soles – ha – in order for them to even look you in the eye. But I’m ready…

. . . . .

So I came across this a few days ago, published in the Montreal Gazette:

NORMAN MATCHEWAN, Freelance
Published: Thursday, October 09

The Barrière Lake Algonquins’ decision to peacefully blockade Highway 117 was not easily made. We have always preferred co-operation to confrontation. We do not wish to disrupt the lives of Canadians. Unfortunately, it seems their governments otherwise ignore or dismiss us – or worse, treat us with contempt.

During a protest at federal Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon’s campaign launch last month, his assistant insinuated that I was drinking. After the media scandal forced Cannon to hold a meeting we had been requesting for two years, he vilified our community’s majority as “dissidents” in an op-ed in regional papers.

The government has now tried to add “criminals” to the charge. To avoid negotiations, the government allowed Monday’s peaceful blockade to be dismantled by the Sûreté du Québec, which without provocation shot tear gas canisters into a crowd of youth and elders and used severe “pain compliance” to remove people clipped into lockbox barrels.

But the governments of Canada and Quebec have never been overly concerned with the rule of law in their dealings with Barrière Lake:

In 1991, Barrière Lake signed a historic trilateral agreement with Canada and Quebec to sustainably develop our traditional territories – a United Nations report called the plan an environmental “trailblazer.” Yet in 1996, the federal government tried to hijack the agreement by replacing our legitimate chief and council with a minority faction who let the agreement fall aside.

We have always ruled ourselves according to custom, outside the electoral provisions of the Indian Act: Elders nominate eligible leaders who are then approved, by consensus if possible, in assemblies. Participation is open only to those who live in the community, speak our language, and have knowledge of and connection to the land. But in 1996, the Department of Indian Affairs encouraged this faction, located mainly off-reserve, to collect signatures for a petition; Indian Affairs then imposed this group on us, claiming our leadership customs had evolved into “selection by petition.”

The was not the truth. In The Gazette, former provincial Liberal cabinet minister Michel Gratton issued a devastating rebuke: “This unilateral and sudden decision to dismiss and replace the existing chief and council goes against the grain of every democratic principle.”

We suffered grievously for a year and a half. Although we barred the minority group from our community, they colluded with the government from Maniwaki. On the reserve, we were deprived of federal transfers for employment, education, social assistance, and electricity. We lived in the dark, educated our children as we could, and barely subsisted off bush food.

A resolution was finally achieved in 1997 by Quebec Superior Court Judge Réjean Paul and two federal facilitators, who restored our legitimate chief and council and renewed the trilateral agreement. To prevent future interference, they helped codify our leadership customs into a Customary Governance Code that the government promised to respect. This is our aboriginal right protected by the Canadian Constitution – the highest law in the land.

Even this proved little deterrent to further meddling. In 2001, the federal government pulled out of the trilateral agreement and started favouring certain community members opposed to our legitimate leadership. Paul mediated again in 2007, concluding that the opposition to our chief and council was “a small minority” whose leadership challenge “did not respect the Customary Governance Code.”

But when this same minority group conducted another supposed leadership selection in January 2008, the federal government quickly recognized them. In court, we forced the government to release an observer’s report they relied on: not surprisingly, the report stated there was no “guarantee” that the Customary Governance Code was respected during this selection.

Yet again, the government is throwing democratic principles to the wind by ignoring our customs and the wishes of our people. And Cannon has the audacity to call the overwhelming majority of our community members “dissidents”!

To resolve the crisis, we are prepared to participate in a new leadership selection according to our Customary Governance Code. We ask only that the federal government appoint an observer and promise to recognize the result, and that they and the province honour our agreements.

We set up the blockades Monday morning as a last resort, to inspire in the government a changed attitude. Our good faith and patience and reasonable demands have so far been rewarded by broken promises, deceit, and deplorable interventions. Is this all we can expect?

Norman Matchewan is youth spokesperson for the Algonquins in Barrière Lake, which is 130 kilometres north of Maniwaki.

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Pictures of the protest here. They launched a tear-gas canister which hit a child in the chest, arrested nine people, including a pregnant woman, an elderly woman and two minors. There’s a video of it here.

Oh Canada, our home and native land indeed…

a poem hiding in my doucments

This is not my work and I have no idea who wrote this. I just found it lying innocently in my accumulated pile of writings, unimposing and humble. No matches on google, so I doubt that it’s by a published writer (as far as google is a judge of these things). Are one of you the author? And perhaps gave it to me to edit or read in some time immemorial? Anyways, it kicks some serious iambic ass:

…

Against all wishes for stability

Our child refuses to walk

Preferring calloused knees

To an eternity in balance

Coaxers and rut-givers we

Cut her channel straight

Line the walls of her trajectory

With sandbags and stones

Crust the tops with a

Geometry of glass

And still she bloodies her hands

This child of older vines

And scolds the servants for

Disinfectant and coos.

balderdash

I feel sorry for people who think Hegel is still relevant. His pompous grandiosity is at first intimidating, bullying around modest duo or triple-syllabled words with gusto, constructing sentences so bewildering as to prompt even Hegel to say, “Only one person understands my work. And even he does not.” But then, after the illusion of a superior complexity has vanished, and we are left to regard the bleak bare bones of his thought, one is forced to concede that, after all, it is a fallible system. The Dialectic, while giving rise to some truly emancipatory ideas, is at best limited, at worst dangerous. It always strikes me as amusing to see hordes of Western philosophers struggle with the question of being as if it were the most noble and difficult enterprise (most of them masochistically delighting in this arduousness), while the simple sages of the Eastern hemisphere have uttered the same truths a thousand years before, and in a few concise lines…

Still, we mustn’t throw the government out with the Conservatives as the old adage goes, and there is one Hegelian concept that I definitely think should be preserved (and destroyed), that of “sublation”, or Aufheben.

But the point of this post is not to bash Hegel, but really to share a few hilarious tidbits from Paul Strathern’s lecture, “Hegel in 90 minutes”:

Regarding The Phenomenology of Spirit:

“One cannot produce an 800 page work in any language without it meaning something. Armed with this article of faith many a scholar has ventured into the quagmire of Hegel’s prose. Some have emerged as Marxists, others as Existentialists, and still others have not emerged at all, the Hegelians…”

Regarding attempts to explain Hegel:

“So any attempt to encapsulate Hegel’s thought is like trying to infer, from the tiny bone at the tip of the dinosaur’s tail, the huge, lumbering, extinct beast from which it originated.”

On Hegel’s lecturing methods as inferred from the journals of former students:

“Meanwhile Hegel continued doing what he knew best: bamboozling lecture halls filled with scores of earnest students. With his snuff box laid out before him on the lectern, and his large, lank-haired head bowed, he would shuffle awkwardly through his folio of notes, turning the pages forward and back as he hesitantly delivered sausage-like strings of abstruse qualifying clauses, his words frequently interrupted by bouts of coughing, until at last rising to a plateau of pure abstraction, he would occasionally achieve an apotheosis of unexpected eloquence which momentarily lifted his speech above the constantly conflicting theses and antitheses of jargon, to a sublime pinnacle transcending all meaning, where it would expand as if on its own accord before bursting into yet another fit of coughing…”

so john…

It has been almost 10 days since my last post. I recall making some promise about maintaining at least a weekly output, and I am glad that I come back to this in time. There have been many oaths, many promises that I have made to others and myself that I have reneged on in disastrous and shameful ways. I shall learn to take care in my speech. Mindfulness is not important, but essential in living an authentic life. In fact, as soon as I finish writing this, I will take to my rather forlorn looking sticky-pad, write down M-I-N-D-F-U-L-N-E-S-S on eleven post-its and append them to the wall that immediately faces my bed, so that on waking I will be jarred into this fact. Sometimes extreme measures are necessary. Rest assured, in your times of distress and frustration, sticky pads will always be there with their abundance of yellow, geometrical comfort. Take heed!

Much has occurred in the last week, much more than I am able to explore in any meaningful way at this juncture. The Activist Assembly held by the Canadian Federation of Students last week on Friday and Saturday afforded me a kaleidoscope of ideas in relation to revolutionary thought and praxis. The two key-note speakers, John Ralston Saul and Linda McQuaig, lived up to their reputations as some of the leading progressive thinkers in Canada. There was much put out in terms of practicable policy alternatives on the current hot-button issues like education, social program spending, Native land and equality issues, and so on. I suppose that one of the reasons I had been avoiding the activist sphere in a meticulously unconscious fashion was my fear of such important and essential issues being (a) aestheticised and appropriated into a heuristic doctrine for an individually emancipatory morality; or (b) reduced from complex social problems indicative of, and an inextricable part of a diseased whole to a reductionist dogma whose very simplification, in the supposed service of pragmatism, obscures the very identity of the problem.

Those, among others, were my fears. I do not say that they were completely allayed. But, for the most part, those that I met and am beginning to work with in some capacity do realize that the complexity of the issues requires a reaction of equal fastidiousness. Real sweat must be shed. This is WORK, no getting around it. The days of banging pots and pans out of a Venezuelan window at an appointed time are over. This is not to say that direct confrontation is an outdated method. No, on the contrary, radicalism is exactly what is needed at this time. Radicalization involves confrontation, it involves risk. Without risk, the politics of privilege and power manifest themselves in the discussion rooms in an unequal balance. We do not hold any of the chips. No, in order for change to occur there must be a non-privileged negotiation, and for this to occur risks must be taken. However, this radicalism can materialize in many ways. It need not happen in violent protest, it need not occur in the public sphere at all… The Revolution, when it comes, will be like nothing no one has ever imagined. And it is necessary that it be so, because it is the only way we will let it happen.

There is so much more I wish to say about this. I want to delve into the nature of radicalism in more detail, and how it can or cannot be compatible with authenticity of being. This latter problem in particular has been nagging at me. I have recently concluded a debate with S. over this issue, and will set down my thoughts in due course. Also, there are rumors about that Sri Lanka has acquired and is about to use chemical weapons, which if true would prove to be absolutely devastating. Research and a story soon.