Week 39: 'He did something remarkable.'

Wonder spawned in: 2005/2007.
Wondered into being by: The people.
Wonderspan: 6 and 11 minutes. 
To experience this wonder at its best: Make sure you can hear the sound and click 'full screen'.

This Monday's way of loving is at times confusing and disturbing.  We are wondering at how people find a way to stand up for their own humanity in the face of war, from the point of view of those who fight in it and their families.

It is a set of issues that divides the nation - probably every nation.  To put it too simply, the purpose of the soldier, at best, is to protect life, and for this they gain the admiration and honour of others.  The way the soldier does they job, at worst, is by killing people -- bad people, good people, whomever they have been ordered to attack -- and for this the soldier is sometimes villified.  As General Michael Rose put it, '...no other group in society is required either to kill other human beings, or expressly sacrifice themselves for the nation.'

War can be worst of all for civilians, but war gets to soldiers too, who are typically wracked with fear and unknowing as they enter battle.  First-hand accounts often describe the intensity of the experience, in which all a soldier has ever known and cared about is compressed into every moment he or she remains gratefully alive and unharmed.  At the same time, often the same account will tell of horrific things the soldier has done to soldiers on the other side of battle, and to civilians.  And the horrors mutiply when war's chaos breaks free from the feeble rules that have been invented to contain it, as when US forces systematically tortured civilians at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and British soldiers severely beat a group of innocent Iraqi civilians, killing one.

In war, there is too much reality and, as T S Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much of that.  We civilians have no frame of reference to make sense of it or, perhaps, there is ultimately no sense to make.  We tell ourselves a convenient story about the people who fight in war - the best story we can manage with the litle time we devote to it.  One easy way out is to make soldiers into 'our heroes', which is an epithet civilians throw around like cheap paint but soldiers themselves use rather more sparingly for extraordinary deeds of valour.  Or we hate the soldier for his violence; a civilian who met an injured Vietnam Vet waiting to cross a road, told him it had served him right, while Donovan's song, Universal Soldier, tells us its eponymous soldier 'really is to blame' for all of history's wars.

Along this fault line we the people seem to be divided, with strong feelings on all sides.

Certainly, there are soldiers who have been heroic, by anyone's standard, and others who have been barbaric.  There are soldiers, as well as sailors and airmen and -women, who have been both.  I've never been in war, but from what soldiers have said to me and written, it seems that they remain pretty ordinarily human most of the time.  They care about other people as well and as badly as the rest of us do.  They ponder the rights and wrongs of war as deeply and as superficially as the rest of us do.  Beneath the layers of their training, which is really a form of conditioning, they hate to kill people as much or as little as the rest of us would.  Whether they act well or badly, the truth of who they are as human beings is pressed out of them by the life-and-death moments of war.  And most soldiers would tell you that war changes who you are - it can make you stronger, although it also harms pretty much everyone who is ever involved in it.

I wanted www.waysofloving.com to include stories of how people have found ways to stand up for their humanity in the face of war, when they are themselves the instruments of war.  Today's entry, then, is based on two stories of soldiers doing exactly this, albeit in completely different - sometimes confusingly different - ways.  Both stories are touched by some propaganda in how others (not the soldiers) have presented them but it's still possible to look past this, I think, to the stories themselves.

First, a US Army officer and lifelong evangelical Christian, tells his story as an interrogator at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, when a meeting with a self-confessed violent jihadi led him to make a  courageous choice.  'I grew up hearing stories about the nobility of service...'

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM98TuV-RB0  (6 min.)

Two mothers tell the story of how their lads, on the same British Army patrol in Afghanistan, were caught in an ambush.  Sam, aged just 18, was shot in the head; Ben, 26, saved Sam's life while himself in fear of being killed as Taliban insurgents bore down upon their platoon.  The two women talk frankly about what their boys went through and what this has meant for their families.  'It was the last operation of their tour...'

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kFjnhFmdS0  (11 min.) 

Some people think some wars are justified, others think no war can ever be 'right'.  Whichever of these views may be yours, perhaps you'll nonetheless agree with Ken Lukowiak, who pointed out in his memoir of the Falklands War, A Soldier's Song, that if political leaders had to fight their own wars, they would rapidly find a way to talk about peace.

Extra...

Three more accounts from the Soldiers of Conscience documentary:

• The soldier with no regrets but the demons come back: 'We are doing the right thing over there. It's just... people don't understand what it's like to be over there.' www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL9gUoHf58c
• The soldier who opposed the war: 'Nothing ever prepares you...' www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rkM95ur4IU
• The Major who teaches soldiers at West Point: 'War is necessary sometimes...' www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHVFwZfegPo

The Infantry is by far the most dangerous corps to be in in Afghanistan, with several times the average fatality rate for the Army as a whole.  The Infantry also takes the youngest recruits.  Rifleman Cyrus Thatcher was 19 when he was killed in an explosion in June 2009.  He wrote a letter to his family to be delivered in the event of his death, which was later printed in The Independent with his family's permission.  'Hello mum, this is going to be hard for you to read ...'

• www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hello-mum-this-is-going-to-be-hard-for-you-to-read-1753008.html

Lukowiak's A Soldier's Song is one of many superb first-hand accounts - written by someone who'd never written anything before.

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www.waysofloving.com

Week 38: ‘[T]he courage to plunge, wholeheartedly, into a world complex beyond our illusions of comprehension.’

Wonder spawned in: 1786.
Wondered into being by: An apothecary's family in Exeter.
Wonderspan: 3 minutes.

Today, for about £1,000 you can buy a round-the-world airline ticket and call yourself a backpacker who circumnavigated the globe.  Have you ever wondered who was the very first lone, globe-trotting traveller, before aeroplanes and ‘independent travel’ travel agents?

The answer is almost certainly James Holman, who lived in the early part of the 19th Century.  At that time no-one travelled long distances alone.  If people left Britain at all, it was to settle in another country, not go for a holiday.  Or it was for work – in the navy, perhaps, to the Americas, or on a tea clipper to China or India.  People who travelled abroad with return tickets were usually on the Queen’s business; they stayed within the Empire and could afford to be pretty comfortable, thanks to what a few imperial pennies could buy in a subjugated land.  No-one travelled entirely independently, without any protection into hostile lands, into Siberia or the Australian outback, or other kinds of then-untouched wilderness, travelling as a peasant would, hitch-hiking in carts and leaning on the goodwill of the people he met, all the way around the world, but James Holman was not no-one, and he did.

That an individual would travel in this manner and over such large distances would be remarkable even now, but to do so in the early 1800s was an historical achievement.  More remarkable still – indeed truly extraordinary by any standard then or now – is that James Holman, history’s first long-distance lone explorer, was completely blind.  The scale of his achievement is matched only by his baffling obscurity: hardly anyone has ever heard of him.

Thanks to the writer Jason Roberts, something of Holman’s astonishing life is relived in a superb page-turner of a biography, A Sense of the World.  Every page of the book contains a new, ‘No, surely not’ achievement of Holman's.  He learnt to ride a horse by using the clip-clop of horses’ hooves for echolocation, as a bat does.  He climbed Mount Vesuvius’ during its eruption in 1821, reaching the very edge of the erupting crater while the settling hot ash burned the end of the stick that he was using to navigate the slopes.  He traversed Russia, reaching the east of Siberia, and almost died of frostbite there on the back of a cart the hostile authorities used to deport him.  He invented a blind person’s writing machine so he could record everything he encountered and in his lifetime he wrote thousands of pages of text.  He became the world’s leading expert in the flora and fauna of the Indian Ocean, which knowledge Charles Darwin went on to use for The Origin of Species.  Holman, Jason Roberts shows, was feverishly excited about what the world had to reveal; his

‘adventures were neither acts of machismo nor self-aggrandizing stunts – they were, as he put it, a means “to enter into the business of life … communion with the world and its multiplying delights.”’

By his biographer’s estimation, James Holman clocked up a quarter of a million miles of independent travel in his lifetime and contacted over 200 separate cultures on every continent.  Roberts tries hopelessly to give his readers some sense of the scale of the achievement:

‘Alone, sightless, with no prior command of native languages and with only a wisp of funds, he had forged a path equivalent to that to wandering to the moon.’

The loss of any one of our senses is a heavy loss indeed, but Holman’s life was filled with the wonder of existence and all its abundance and diversity.  In this vein, Roberts quotes a paragraph that Holman wrote towards the end of his life using the writing device he invented:

‘On the summit of the precipice, and in the heart of the green woods … there was an intelligence in the winds of the hills, and in the solemn stillness of the buried foliage, that could not be mistaken.  It entered into my heart, and I could have wept, not that I did not see, but that I could not portray all that I felt.’

That, dear wonder-lovers, might be among the most beautiful paragraph of text ever written.  When I heard Jason Roberts read this passage on Radio 4’s Excess Baggage, I went out immediately to buy the book.  Please do the same and read this beautiful, compassionate and thrilling biography: Jason Roberts (2006) A Sense of the World: How a blind man became history’s greatest traveller (London: Simon & Schuster)  (Link goes to Housman’s Online Bookshop, an ethical mail order alternative to bad-egg Amazon.  http://www.shop.housmans.com/BookItem.aspx?item=9780743468053 )

The Holmans of today…

Holman learnt to navigate by tapping his cane and listening to the quality of its echo, which is now called echolocation.  The technique is practised by a growing number of blind people, who typically use their palate to make a high-frequency ‘clicking’ sound from their mouth.  To an attentive and skilled listener, a click’s echo carries information about the nature of surrounding objects, such as their size, shape and movement, and also tells the listener what kind of space they are in.  Just as voices in wood-panelled rooms sound different from the same voices echoing off brick walls, so a proficient echolocator can add an extra dimension to their perception by discerning surface textures.

Human echolocation uses the brain’s visual cortex, which both blind and sighted people use to imagine (i.e. create the experience of) being within a three-dimensional space.  So it’s not surprising, although it is startling, that blind echolocators feel that they can ‘see’ the world around them each time they hear their click’s echo.  When combined with ambient sounds, familiarity, and other intuitive techniques like contextual recognition and dead reckoning, an accomplished echolocator can build up an increasingly detailed ‘image’ of their surroundings and move around freely.

Daniel Kish, a highly skilled echolocator, teaches echolocation from scratch; he even takes young blind people on mountain bike rides through the forest, each with a piece of ticker-ticker-ticker plastic running over the spokes of the front wheel.  Ben Underwood, who lost his eyes to cancer as a toddler, used echolocation to roller-blade, skateboard, and play football, before he died from a recurrence of the disease at 16.  Lucas Murray was just seven years old when the BBC filmed him playing basketball in his Dorset back garden: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/8291720.stm

The emergence of the blind community as a social force in its own right is still recent in Britain.  Their journey -- first for recognition, then for equal rights, a political voice, and a place of belonging among society's diversity -- is not yet done.  The struggle reveals a peculiarly human passion to be, and in this, Holman's determination lives on.  None of us can fully sense and know the world -- what we think we know is always but a torn-off corner of what Nature knows -- but Jason Roberts predicts that 'there will always be people who must summon the courage to plunge, wholeheartedly, into a world complex beyond our illusions of comprehension.'  A question is, can those of us with all our senses intact also learn to do the same?

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www.waysofloving.com

Week 37: 'Yes, I made that'

Wonder spawned in: 2052.
Wondered into being by: The people.
Wonderspan: Less than 10 minutes. 
To experience this wonder at its best: Make sure you can hear the sound and click 'full screen'.

Today we celebrate the triumph of the bicycle over the motorcar.  You might remember the motorcar as a squat metal and glass box with four wheels - it smelled plasticky on the inside and outside it coughed carcinogenic petrochemical particulates and other chemical nasties 2,000 times a minute, which were bemoaned by mothers of asthmatic kids and responsible in large part for the climate crisis that eventually led to the mass recycling of all motorcars thanks to the sudden and unexpected mass-damascene conversions of first Holland, then France, then Canada, and eventually all the peoples of the world until the very last, haggard but ultimately gratefully carless penitent, whose name you almost certainly won't remember now, but for the record it was the famous author, male role-model, self-styled comedian, noisy lover and go-faster acolyte of road rage, Jeremy Clarkson.  You can find full details of Jeremy's conversion on Wikipedia under 'Bicycle'.

It all began way back in 1997 when one person became suddenly and unaccountably sane.  It was an  ordinary morning when she put on her favourite summer dress, took a flower from her garden and careened around the town using said flora to smash the windows of parked cars, as shown in this archive film from Pipilotti Rist.  It brought such joy to her and all around her that everyone joined in, even the police.

The Museum from the Future picks up the story, explaining in this mash-up of now-ancient footage of early car-licking and the later mass car walk-out of 2018, how the car began to dominate our lives and make us really really fat, and how we confronted this outsized trinket before it destroyed us all horribly with blood and stuff'.  And it came to pass that all over the world, cars were brought from far and wide to create henges in roads and fields so that we could one day remember the momentous change that society was undergoing and to say ta for that.

After 2018, it was discovered that one melted-down car could make sixty-seven point three bicycles although nothing could be done with the fabric seat covers, which were dumped in a huge landfill in Buckinghamshire marked 'Keep Out - Smelly and plasticky' and even though it was fabric, scientists say it won't degrade until June 3723 at the earliest.  Roads were turned over to pedestrians and cyclists, life was less noisy, people said hello and everyone wondered how they had ever managed before.

Making bicycles became a pursuit of true love; odd-bod bicycle-makers who laboured in obscurity for years were now social heroes, and people began to admire how things were made and the care things needed to keep them right, and they liked something more if it could only be done slowly, and they started saying 'If it's not for love, it's not worth doing' and 'If it's made with love, you can ride it with love' and 'If it's for love, it's for me' and things generally like that, as this early bicycle-making film shows:

'It's taking your pride in your work.  At the end of the day you've made something that people appreciate, sometimes love, and you can stand and look at it and think, "Yes, I made that."'

It wasn't long before we were making a whole load of other stuff out of old bicycles, like washing machines, for example, so we didn't need electricity so much, or to buy new stuff, and that was good because it stopped the planet from burning up, which it had been doing pretty badly for a while.  And the handful who whined and said cars were a little bit more fun than bikes and the M6 traffic jam on a Friday night in the rain wasn't that bad at all, never did this.

Thanks to Sunniva T and Will McC for some of the links for today's Monday wonder.  You can see all the Monday wonders on a map here: http://www.tinyurl.com/mondaywonders
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www.waysofloving.com

Week 36: 'I am in the joy business. I come out here to be with the people.'

Wonder spawned in: 2000s
Wondered into being by: Mostly anonymous folk
Wonderspan: Less than 10 minutes unless you want mooooore. 
To experience this wonder at its best: Make sure you can hear the sound and click 'full screen'.

This Monday's wonder is a travelling concert of street music - a whistlestop whizz around the spontaneous sounds of the world's towns and cities.  We're lolling under lampposts, perched outside cafes, larging it up in shopping malls and and going daft in city parks.  Street music is the original pop-up wotsit and it's still the coolest, simplest, cheapest and most joyful - brought into the centre of our societies from the people who live, in one way or another, at its fringes.  You're going to have a good Monday today.  Begin your carbon-neutral world trip by picking a link at random (the first one's my favouritest):

• The Sukaro Jazz Band in Melbourne play gypsy swing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDlvSimy3CM

• Banjo Ben and Abby the Spoon Lady play a bluegrass number in Ashville, North Carolina: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGbToeovkrg

• Petr Spatina wows Vienna with his 'glass harp' with added antics: www.youtube.com/watch?v=re-IGNui7Oo

• Travelling one-man band Ryan Baer is in mellow soulful, late summer mood at Waterloo Farmers' and Crafters' Market Cooperative in Waterloo, Ontario. His bucket's got a hole in it - we've all been there: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwV5OgV2_Ik

• Tombstone Pete on London's Southbank abuses the guitar to good effect: www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7QD34-n8OU

• We're Playing for Change again; Roger Ridley kicks us off in Santa Monica, California: https://vimeo.com/24790207    The video notes say that Roger was asked: with a voice as powerful as his, why was he singing on the streets? He replied, 'I am in the joy business. I come out here to be with the people.'

• Daft skiing music by someone somewhere in (it had to be) America: www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3pUImnYyYw

• Acapella Soul cheer up the New York subway: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWgOjEI52BI

• Back up on the New York streets, Melissa Kacalanos is playing one of the most ludicrous instruments ever invented: www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6Oy8FaBirQ  And then explains how they work: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT56auxMT74

• I think Bach would be glad that Nani Ion from Latvia would one day play his stuff on the accordion.  This is in Parma, Italy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGKZ4ELygcE ...

• ...while in Krakow an anonymous trio of accordionists salute Bach in his full counterpoint glory: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VDoEfHBABI

• Dub FX (probably not the name his mum gave him) turns an Amsterdam street into a cathedral and fills it with sound while giving us a loopstation lesson in the process:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bioYs6oAD8g (Thanks to Sarah G for suggesting this one)

• In Jaisalmer, India, this musician really belts out his song on his kamaicha - one of the world's most ancient bowed instruments.  He seems to enjoy every word; I'd like to think it's a love song and that he sings it to remember some love he's glad to have known: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv_7sULmnm0

• A wary child takes a prudent step back from crazy-haired Ivan Hayek as he plays pop on the accordion in Munich: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG3bE858QTw

• On Edinburgh's Royal Mile, Daniel Waples and friend play their Swiss-made hangs: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_DhNLCyVss

• Is this the funkiest street band in the world?  They hang out in Las Palmas, Gran Canarias, creating a fusion out of just about every musical style there is.  I've no idea what they're called: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXFyarzpahg  And if you liked that, here's some more: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR2p3UED4VU

Phew, dizzy.  So, what have I missed?  Latin America, East Asia and the whole of Africa, for starters... Leave a comment to share your own...

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www.waysofloving.com