Ending Eminem’s End: War Poetry/Liberation Poetry

I believe Eminem has decided to stop his touring, to renounce as it were his public life. Too bad because more than ever we are in need of poetry, of words that sound with the resonance of truth. I hope he comes back.

Poetry shapes the world. Ezra Pound (E.P.)

Words shape us. They create a shared reality. Television, newsprint, film and video, the computer, internet and now blogs: we have moved into the hyper-reality of video images flashing at the speed of light and millions of bloggers adding words to the communication mix. The question is, with this increase in technological savvy and its consequent explosion of words and images, are we more, or less, free? Are we communicating?

Yet today what we see are words in the service of ideology, a plague of conflicting ideas, of words enslaved to fixed ideas. It wasn’t always like this. Our development as a species was made possible only by the use of language. There is some interesting research which shows how our tool-building capacity and our use of language evolved together. Words as tools. Poetry as tool of liberation.

Poetry: A sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures,…but gives us equations for the human emotions. (E.P.)

We have an innate sense of the MAGICAL quality of words: poems, incantations, prayers, songs, mantras, even the Bible is supposedly a code of numerical meanings and truths. In older cultures the power of the spoken word was integral to the dissemination of history, knowledge and magic, of being. Now words fall flat, empty, or at worse are used to entice and enslave us to be good consumers, or words become the ammo of the corrupted and tiresome world of mainstream politics.


Poets: Unacknowledged legislatures of the world. Shelly

Isn’t that the battle today? Words, and from words, BEING. The problem with most words is that they become STATIC ideas. Where poetry should indicate and crystallize experience, should like odors from the kitchen lead us to the table where we eat, instead words and ideas are enclosing experience in word-boxes. We smell the putridness of ideas and forget we are hungry! And with this explosion of politicos, pundits and experts, (all with their blogs), words become like piranhas: they consume us, kill spontaneous life, pacify us, make free thought and free being impossible.

These words and ideas that tend to devour us can only fall upon minds already conditioned “to enjoy what they have been brought up to consider enjoyable, or what some essayist has talked about in [sweetly flowing] phrases… These minds think only ‘the shells of thoughts’, the thoughts that have been already thought out by others.” (E.P.) Words today fall on deaf ears; ideas fail to persuade because they are dead wood and only poetry can break these ‘shells’, can make ideas germinate anew.

Words today promote herd-thought. Led to the slaughter by words the voice of the gods and real magic have been usurped by demon shepherds who corral us into word-pens, or worse: a certain sheep is raised to be ‘an elected official’ who 'has the voice of the people' and takes the herd over the cliff.

How can poetry and words be revitalized and become tools for liberation and not oppression? If discourse today, from the left or right, from the politically correct or the compassionate conservatives, is unable to communicate or convince, it’s because it lacks the resonance of poetry.

Image is understood not as an idea but as a radiant node or cluster…a vortex from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. (E.P.)


Words, and from words, images: they can transmute us from what we were, to what we are becoming. Images and the forms in which they are organized and constructed become living forces inside our consciousness, not only intellectual forces but forces at the level of feeling. What the poet perceives and lives intensely, perhaps more intensely than most, she tries, she must, communicate. Poetry gives us powerful and potent ideas that provoke feeling: realizations beyond mere intellect that conduct us to primal archetypal constructs of being, of real knowledge.

Poetry: An art vital only so long as it is interpretive.... (E.P.)

Come along follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength
Come with me and I won't steer you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
To the light at the end of the tunnel…..
Take us right through the doors.
Eminem, from “Mosh”

Can words show us how to live? Can poetry become an owner’s manual for enlightened social revolution?

Even HILTER was a master of word and image. But he was a masterful EVIL shepherd, who could get the herd to the feed-trough, and like Daddys everywhere, kept strict order at the table with the relentless use of fear. The question becomes then, how can poetry confront in a SIMILAR but fundamentally subversive, anarchic manner the foundational desires of the human soul. Where Hitler bottled, blocked and channeled words into closure, into death, we want instead to excite toward freedom.

Can millenniums of crusty habit, of herd-behavior be so easily upended? If it’s erotic, beautiful, exciting, liberating and free, and by free I mean it can’t be dirtied by money. That must be its litmus test: no money which means anarchy: and if we mean chaos by that word, OK: risking chaos, attacking every mental and social structure that is grounded in herd-authority.

Herd-sports, herd-hate, herd-war, herd-accumulation, herd-talk radio, herd-shopping, herd-drugs, herd-porn, herd-fashion, herd-TV, herd-Hollywood: take any herd-energy of today and ask yourself could poetry substitute and fill those needs satisfied by those herd-activities. Who among us herd-creatures can know what to feel today in this Babel tower of ideas, in this charnel house? Who is capable of looking into and seeing its many rooms and god forbid that we should truly feel the horror!

Poetry, or rather experience, guided by poetry, could shows us once again how to feel, how to unshackle true desire, how to end the reign of the TERRIBLE:

An uplifting plague, this crawling light, his erect anger, her true walls, such white pain, our red reason, one vertical beauty, many sexy works, the thrashing love, a thousand fat wishes, that green death, those turtle dreams, a larked poem, two zigzagging freedoms, a heaving song….

Liberation poetry: is it possible? Bomb Poetry?

Those two bombs of 1945, which they said ushered in PEACE, still echo: echoes that passed through Korea, Vietnam, Chile, the Falklands, Sarajevo, Bosnia; that vibrate now in Afghanistan, Iraq and the hundred other civil wars the world over; that echo still in the ghettos of the poor in revolt, in the hunger pangs in Africa or Brooklyn, in the suicided teens, in the depressed, and in the psychotics in the overfull madhouses. Echoes over echoes from millenniums past: of the clanging of amour and sword, of the sound of fist against body. Even in the thunder of storms that waken us in the night we imagine we hear the echoes of war. Yet not simply the war between brothers, men and nations but that one primal battle each of us wages in our own hearts, the battle against our one loneliness and one death. Instead of staring directly, nakedly into that abyss, of discovering there a common denominator that might unify humanity, that might bring forth compassion, empathy and love between peoples and even nations at war, we instead create structures and ideas, a world of NEGATIONS of that which we are: That peace of 1945 was FALSE. And we still live that falsity. We are creatures passing through, biding temporarily our time on this one earth. If we live then on this earth, as long as there is ONE war then there is no peace.

It is here thus that the word, that poetry, when it strives and reaches it highest and purest intensity- through its music, rhythms, forms and imagery- can return to us the basic truth of the miracle of communication, this miracle over death, overcoming the tragedy of life to remind us of our magical origin, transcending our “all to humanness” to sense our divinity. Poetry’s purpose is liberation from the dead wood of ideas: poetry as divine protest, that says no to violence, no to war.

The Politics of Hate

Do things have to get worse before they get better? I get around a bit checking out all the many blogs. It’s fairly obvious, if we don’t consider the ‘apolitical’ blogs (recipes, what my dog did today, personal stuff, etc,) that there are two diametrically opposed worldviews presented in blogland. Those on the right who love to hate the left and ‘liberals’, as if their raison d’etre was to destroy any political influence, gains and activism of liberals and the left in general. And then those on the left side of the equation where we find just as many passionate voices and just as many name-callers and at times intolerant points of view as we find on the right. I saw one blogger who thinks that in the USA we are even headed for civil war. If you have ever checked out a discussion forum on a Yahoo news article it is incredible the level of bigotry, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, meanness and stupidity that you can find there. And as expected the comments there also for the most part divide along Right/Left lines.

Are we living in two Americas? Are the persons who participate in this new medium representative of the divisions we could expect to find among the general population? Do blogs influence anybody or anything? Does a ‘left-blogger’ expect to win over a ‘right-blogger’? Could we ever find some common ground between these disparate points of view where both sides could save face as it were, and we could all work together to solve some of the urgent problems that we as a nation, as world citizens, are facing?

I once read somewhere that one should try to speak simply and clearly when confronting complex things, as if we were speaking to a child of ten years old child. I like that: certainly some comments I’ve read recently don’t go beyond the level of a 4th grader!

So, what makes the world go round? Many, if not most, might agree that money makes things go. We work to have money to survive. Now those leaning toward the right would add that this is the best and only system we have; that yes there are problems, that other systems (socialism, communism) did not work so we have to work with what we have. After all look at all the wonderful achievements mankind (with Capitalism) has realized. They might also accuse those who criticize this point of view of a certain hypocrisy: ‘It’s just too easy for you who benefit from the American system, that in fact has guaranteed your right to freedom and wealth and provided you all the privileges you enjoy, to turn around and hate America!’

Others would counter, yes, money does make the world go round but it does so only by a structure formed like a pyramid, where many, if not most, are poor, and a few rich persons (or countries) decide and control everything. That this is the root cause of all the bad things, from pollution, to war, to child labor, etc. And that we also love America and are just as patriotic because it does give us the right to criticize and you guys on the right have forgotten what’s written in the constitution about individual freedoms and the right to free expression.

Both sides in their own way use the same words: liberty, justice, freedom, etc. And the bickering goes on and on and everybody’s getting hotter under the collar.

Well little Joey (my theoretical ten year old), I say that both of these points of view are wrong. It is not money that makes the world go round. It’s not profits and Capitalism, or exploitation and poor workers, or rich nations in relation to poor ones. Yes these things are true and both sides when they speak about ‘the system’ are right in what they say. But there is something much more fundamental and basic to life, society and humankind. How is it really that schools and hospitals and roads are built and function? How did it happen that we created cities and farms and medicine and rockets? How is it that millions can even live altogether in one city without hurting one another? How is it that food is brought all the way from the other side of the world right to your dining room table? Is it because we hate one another, live in fear, wage war, are greedy and self-seeking, are divided into rich and poor, need police and guns and jails and banks, have the stock market, are forced to work? All these things on the surface seem to guide and order our lives. But are all these negative aspects, these structures, laws and systems responsible for the good things people and nations do? Is there not rather an underlying positive aspect: the fact that we cooperate, that we basically are a peaceful and collaborative and imaginative species? That without these basic qualities of respect, love, empathy and tolerance for THE OTHER, that without this divine capacity to imagine and create we would have perished as a species hundreds of thousands of years ago! It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention but I say love and caring, and the desire to help are the seeds of the fruits of invention.

But why do people forget this, and if people remember these things, Joey asks, will that solve our problems?

Not right away but UNLESS we have find this basic respect and tolerance for those we see as ‘the other’, for those we call ‘enemy’, for those we disagree with, what other possibilities are there? To use force, strength and violence; to out number the other guys; to weaken, discourage and dominate them? Let’s say you and I disagree Joey, that we are having a big fight: yes I can make you do what I want because I am bigger than you. But you will always remember that I forced you to accept my way and you will never forget that. It will flavor our relationship until the day you are big enough to try and make me accept your way.

We say: means determine ends. The manner in which I resolve a problem determines the nature of that future relationship. This is true between individuals, groups, and nations; true between those on the left who want to defeat those on the right, and vice versa.

To finish I think there is something in common that those on the right and left both share. There seems to be in the ‘American spirit’ an underlying ‘nameless hope’. Call it the American project. I think it has always been connected to our origins, to this land. (Leaving aside for the moment the genocide of Native Americas.) One feels it in the passion of all the writers of blogs, one would like to imagine it in the hearts of the soldiers in Iraq, and I even believe many politicians have this same hope. I can only wish that along with this feeling and desire for change, of this fundamental hope of improving life, that we can always place along side it the words: tolerance, respect and patience. And a new pledge of allegiance to the principle of ‘do no harm’. There is much that is wrong, much right in our country, and each of us sees the world their way. Before we can begin to address these many overwhelming problems, it seems a new communication grounded in respect has to be the first step. And above all: Stop the violence!

Who protects them

Who protects them the wandering refugees searching for water and shelter waiting for the day of the return home Who protects them the hungry unfed in all the deserts jungles and towns and cities the world over Who protects them the exploited working hours upon hours in dust and poisons and darkness Who protects them the lonely isolated in prison or home or wandering Who protects them Who protects them the mothers worrying for their children waiting in their loneliness for the homecoming Who protects them the children aching for love Who protects them from fear from desolation Who protects them the women raped in war walking the sidewalks opening then receiving Who protects them the women loosing their sons and daughters to war disease famine Who protects them without their men racked by monthly pain birth pain love pain Who protects them our women who love us Who protects them the soldiers in fear killing or killed boy soldier girl soldier Who protects them the elderly starving for companionship for an ear that listens a place of usefulness respect and peace Who protects them



Who protects them the wealthy and powerful the pundits and politicians bankers lawyers Who protects them though they have all they need Who protects them they who also fear Who protects them their position their money mansions cars diamonds pools gardens Who protects them that conduct millions who direct manipulate and take who order killings Who protects them men of business believing organising risking trying loving hoping Who protects them the torturers the guards the captains Who protects them the pimps the dealers of arms drugs of women children of organs of unfit food and chemicals and death Who protects them the presidents and mayors and bosses the princesses the kings the dying bishop Who protects them

Who protects them the poets isolated in their frustration and folly Who protects them from madness desperation Who protects them from themselves from the extremes of drug and drink all excesses unto death Who protects them and gives them strength and inspiration fortitude insight and solutions

Who protects them in the madhouses the neurotic the psychotic the addict the drunk Who protects them the teens in trouble in rebellion they who challenge us be it vagabond or our best friend or best enemy Who protects them from medication isolation from the leather straps on the legs and arms from the needle and electroshock and from us Who protects them

Who protects them the innocent the children the only innocent Who protects them the cruelty the whip the TV the cock Who protects them from the dark and the nightmare from life Who protects them a love that demands that limits and bargains a love that wants instead of just is Who protects them in the schools left alone to compete to learn to hate to respect division rank class and privilege Who protects them the innocent in the night as they sleep and the earth shakes and destroys Who protects them

Who protects them the trees that give shade and beauty that hold the soil that breathe our life’s air Who protects them from the axe and bulldozer from the killing rain and heat Who protects them from profits and global business from the cow-eaters Who protects them from the tree-cutters who buy their daily bread bought with their destruction Who protects them from the readers of books and newspapers from the receipts bills tickets packaging ass-wiping window cleaning we the paper users Who protects them they whose disappearance will bring our final demise

Who protects the earth wrapped tied circled and divided by fences borders satellites missiles planes buildings bridges highways monuments cars trains tunnels ships mines farms pastures garbage and landfills Who protects her waters her air from us who take and never give even her wind we harness Who protects her eternal turning her circling her voyage her life a life bombed and burnt and dirtied to no end Who protects her sun also dying her moon ever faithful Who protects the earth


Who protects us those we love those we hate those we love to hate Who protects my friend my father and brother my brother of different colour Who protects my lover from my jealousy my pettiness my neediness Who protects my lover who gives what I need but not all I need Who protects those who make my bread and clean these streets who make the mines and bombs and bullets that destroy lives and limbs Who protects them who create death to earn their wages Who protects them who grow my food who it bring it to my city and Who protects those who build cities

click on image to enlarge

Who protects memory our history our one truth of one human effort Who protects the history of us all equally dying Who protects us born naked and dependent we who disappear in sadness Who protects our testaments our stories Who protects the memory of the lone man dying forgotten in his room Who protects the knowledge of the old ones grandmother grandfather Who protects those mountains who watch down over us without judging Who protects the stars who from afar are curious of us and give us mystery and desire Who protects the sky and heavens and the wind that moves all Who protects the birds and our brother animals insects and fishes Who protects that which we take into our bodies so that we may live

Who protects our creator

Who protects me

Limits

There is a new video in the This Week’s This series: “Limits”. It’s a divergence from the usual form: an experiment in sound (music), action and editing.

“A cinema studded with dreams, which gives you the physical sensation of pure life… A certain agitation of objects, shapes and expressions that is interpreted by the convulsions and jerks of a reality which seems to destroy itself with irony, which makes the extremities of the mind cry out.” Artaud

(click on image)

Experimental film? It’s a genre little known by the viewing public of commercial cinema. It’s goals and intentions are far a field from the concerns of mere storytelling. I like to use examples from the visual arts to speak about theatre, or in this case cinema. It’s easier to speak about. Can we imagine a film in the style of cubism for example, or abstract expressionism, or pure abstraction? We thus get an idea of the aspirations of experimental film. There is a desire to approach the directness and immediacy of music, to be free from “the tyranny of the written word”.

Antonin Artaud: Almost 80 years ago he was already critical of the tendency of film to follow a literary form, that is, successful only to the extent that it must be supported by words. A big fan of Charlie Chaplin he wanted, like in his theatre, a cinema “where psychology itself is devoured by action”.

Think of our dreams, or a nightmare. Words hardly ever play a part and if they do, those words have weight…doubles…shadows which terrify!

“Dreams have more than their logic. They have their life where nothing but a sombre truth appears.”

And as in dreams, some paintings and most always music, from the void of our separateness a truly chaotic, anarchic journey is set in motion. From the interchange of forms, light, shadow and rhythm our bodies are confronted physically: bodies as vehicles. We are transmuted from what we were, to what we are becoming. It is cruel this crisis of the birth of feeling. It wells up inside of us, subjecting us to its power and unknowable mystery. Springing from the very source of our entrenchment to life and death we are touched, our souls quickened to its finest edge.

Amorino dormiente di Caravaggio

Perhaps this is why we don’t remember well our dreams. “Because they are the human skin of things. The derm of reality,” where we find the essential answer to the enigma of being. The veil is torn away and we stand face to face with our nothingness. And we wake up- and go and make the coffee!

Link to "Limits"

note: All the quotes are from Cinema and Reality (The Shell and the Clergyman)". Collected works, volume three, Antonin Artaud.

Being or Not Being?

Yes, there is an obvious reference to the tragedy of old Hamlet. It’s been said that the substance of tragedies is reserved only for the great: the kings, the mighty, the rich, the heroic. Yet I want to speak about a larger human tragedy: that which all of us face, in daily life, with our own struggles to find meaning and a PLACE.

Darfur, Sudan

The largest single group of humans being are not being. Could we imagine a city or region 19 million persons strong? Well that is the number of refugees world-wide: persons forced, or forced to choose, to leave their homes because of war, famine or persecution. They have no place, no rights, they are not. If we include the homeless of our great cities, those living in shelters, on the sidewalks or tin-roofed shantytowns, this number explodes to how many MORE millions, or billions?

We are all under arrest.

Yet beyond this injustice that we only intermittently hear about in the media (around Christmas time, for example. Or remember Darfur, Sudan: they are still out there, for years now!) there seems to me a more universal, perhaps unacknowledged tragedy of our species: we have lost the right, the human right, to be. I believe it was Kafka who expressed succinctly: we are all under arrest.

There is a mistaken conception that so called primitive peoples, before the emergence of cities (civilisation?), somehow lived a rather “less-than” existence. Less comfortable, less intelligent, less free. That they lived shorter lives, suffered on-told difficulties and were subject to a certain barbarism. Yet if one were to compare our so-called modern way of life (even the middle-class in USA suffers from an incredible and subliminal angst of falling, of just barely keeping abreast of poverty), the litany of problems in our society is endless. And at the base of these problems is a lack of connectedness; of an unrealisable existential human prerequisite of place, of being. We can’t just BE.

Paradise lost

You can’t live without money.
I don’t know how to stop the wars.
I am not allowed to travel without a passport.
I haven’t the right to smoke marijuana.
I am not allowed to take my clothes off.

In this five phrases, these five prohibitions (from Paradise Now of The Living Theatre), we can perhaps feels the state of arrest in which we live. So obvious these phrases are as to easily pass our scrutiny. Looking at just one: the gates of Paradise are closed, we cannot move freely across the borders and fences that separate peoples and lands; a ridiculous piece of paper, tied to governments, nation-states and the money system is my only ticket. And without money I cannot be: I cannot have a home, a room of my own, a piece of earth; cannot, in USA especially, even stay on the sidewalk.

(Footnote: we do see an explosion of “nakedness’ on the Internet where the average Joe, or Mary, all too easily reveals everything. Yet this “freedom” seems to be a rather pathetic expression of a society bored with itself, with too much ample leisure, expressing perhaps distortedly natural desires and needs that have been repressed in modern life. The rite of Saturnalia was an seasonal orgiastic event of old cultures that expressed and liberated this need. But it was holy.)

Accepting life on life’s terms.

Life on life's terms: a magical phrase of 12-step programs, having much in common with yoga, Buddhism and other spiritual disciplines. Yet, there is a point in everyone’s life when we realise that we are indeed under arrest. From adolescence onward we see that the game is over, that we have to leave behind us the joys, hopes and camaraderies of youth. We suddenly discover in our parent’s downtrodden spirits, in their almost insane and automatic acquiescence to “life”, all that we must forever forsake. In short, we grow up. (See Growing Up Adsurd, by Paul Goodman.) Many do not make the transition. Some refuse and pay often a heavy price in suicide or “madness”.

Judith Malina in "Paradise Now"

Again in ancient societies this transition was ritualised, made sacred, heroic. A young man or woman became integrated into the tribe, her place was structured, perhaps dauntingly so. One can easily ask today: how are our teenagers integrated into modern life? Our ritualised events too easily become the fodder of the prevailing winds of commercialism (MTV), nationalism (and its consequent militarism), religious extremism (evangelical also!) or the competitiveness of commercial sports (where we become only spectators).

No more tribes.

What’s all this about? If we want to understand the root causes of the mess we call modern times (and its antidote), then the answers lie in an anthropological analysis of the transition from tribal life to city life (Quickly Gary, before the last existing tribes become the domain of Disneyland!) At a certain point groups of strong men, each probably led my one convincing and terribly strong and violent man, decided that they could take advantage of new advances in agriculture (that created abundance and surplus), and to make a long story short, created the city-state and a class (slave) system. Then generation after generation came to believe its lies and forms (that they were natural), and that this was the only secure and right way to live: the rule of class, law and money, enforced by the violence of the state. Then Alexander the Great (among others) conquered half the known world (the other half lived on in the Americas), destroying tribe after tribe, creating more or less the situation we have today. Granted this is a gross simplification (see Thom Hartmann for a more detailed study), yet indicates directions, tendencies and experiments already tested or in practice.

The holy people

Where is the holy man (or woman) today? Are they to be found in the bad girls and boys of MTV? (Hats off to Eminem and his anti-Bush video!) Are the communes and communities, the free love, music and experiments of the sixties finished, to be seen only in pale and sad commercial enterprises like Woodstock II? Is there a holy people out there?

Suffice it to say: “Yes” they (we) are out there in their temporary autonomous zones. (Required reading: TAZ by Hakim Bay.) The gist of this is that we must become holy: we must link up to the experiments that are still happening, Rainbow Family, Campo Carlo (here in Italy), or create anew our sacred societies. We cannot wait for a revolution but must create these free spaces now; we must create examples in our art and street theatre and in our protests for the next generation of rebellious teens; we must follow the visionary poets (see my video, Living Poetry) and rappers (non-commercial!); or, we must walk the earth...

a Sadhus in India

“…this time however I come as the victorious Dionysus, who will turn the world into a holiday…Not that I have much time…”

Nietzsche

On a personal note.

Householder: in yoga is a person who maintains a family, a home. The opposite are these wandering holy men and women, (the way of a Buddha, a Mohammed, a Jesus). These you find still in India (the sadhus, the wandering hermits). They renounce all ties to place, they embrace the ALL place. The TerraPiena (Full Earth). The entire earth becomes home.

I refer to these exemplary figures, NOT because I consider myself one of them: far from it! Yet at a certain point, one begins to ask how can we best confront this horrible and cruel system. And a certain confluence of events in my life- lack of work, expensive rent, inability or incapability of founding or finding my tribe, has led me to a point where once again I am packing up my belongings (very little indeed besides books) and leaving my keys with the landlord and setting off down the road.

Perhaps if more of us refused to pay the Pied-Piper of private property; if we cut our ties to work, landlord, taxes, automobiles, electricity, non-organic food, meat, pharmaceuticals, cell phones, (Internet?); if we refused the city and its ordering principles of class and law; if we left western privileges behind and set out to volunteer our time with those doing work in, for example, Afghanistan (Emergency); if we successfully created new tribes, far from cities; if our art was focused on the struggle for existence of those who can’t PAY for art, and we only brought our art to them; if we stopped watching TV or buying the news of mass corporate media; if we stopped voting; if we stopped trying to be rich, famous and successful through the system that grants riches and fame; if more of us simply appeared, jut showed up- (just being)- well, changes would occur! (I am not anti-technology per se, or proposing a false primitivism. These are rather strategies of resistance: perhaps we must live a period of refusal, as a way of protest in order to take responsibility for the technologies we choose to use.)

Pygmy tribal group

Lastly, there has to be nourished a simple idea that we are one family on this earth: that we must see the other as brother and sister; that yes, some of us are trapped in cycles of hate, violence and revenge, but like in our own homes, brothers may fight, may passionately disagree yet they do not resort to killing, and indeed take responsibility, each for the other. There is relatedness based in respect for kinship, recognition and value, because they are family. And it is this that must be nurtured among the greater human family.

Wandering 'till the truth be known.