The Politics of Dancing

Between 1919 and 1921, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War Freud outlined his theory of the Death Instinct; written in the shadow of the great slaughter of trench warfare. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ Freud, who had been struggling to understand the tenacity to which some patients had clung to their illness, posited another force at work both destructive and antithetical to life, working to counter the narcissistic pleasures of being alive. As theory this always rung true for me, chiming with my own professional experience and sometimes the internal rhythms of my own heart. Recently I have had conversations with several intelligent and thoughtful people respecting global warming, in which we talked about the Gaia hypothesis, an understanding of the world as a living organism, albeit one now heavily infected by a parasite, the species homo sapien. If it is to survive it will need to develop a way to respond to this infestation, in short to either get rid of us al...

Children are no longer taught to commit poems to memory, to learn, as we used to say, by heart. Indeed I am not sure how much poetry, if any, is taught anymore. I cannot remember being taught any at secondary level and that was in the 1960’s. The art of memorizing poems or lines of poems came to me late. It was not until I was in my late teens that I learnt the pleasure to be gained by lodging evocative lines in my memory, really an extension of a love of song lyrics, particularly Bob Dylan. The first poem I remember committing to memory was Dowson’s ‘Cynara’, a poem that George Orwell, rather snootily, described as having the charm of a pink geranium or soft centred chocolate. “I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.” Ernest Dowson is al...

Three items of news this week, a meeting was being convened to identify and honour the names in an old photograph, Labour members of parliament imprisoned as conscientious objectors in the First World War The Conservative MP and Shadow Spokesman David Davis has resigned his seat on a point of principle and intends to fight a by-election in protest and the extension of pre-charge detention to 42 days allied as it is to the steady erosion of our basic freedoms and civil liberties. Thirdly we have witnessed the disgusting spectacle of ‘pork barrel’ concessions being extended to the Ulster Unionists and other sundry MP’s in exchange for the erosion of fundamental civil liberties; and all for what, to gain some populist votes by wrong footing the Tories to make them look weak on security, with the added bonus of favourable editorials in the Sun newspaper. When told of Mr Davis’s stand Mr ‘rent a quote,’ Denis MacShane described it as a ‘stunt,’ a description now taken up by the Prime Min...

In 1972 I was 16 years of age and working alongside my brother as a Shoe Repairer for William Timpson Ltd. At around five thirty one evening Mr Timpson himself descended unannounced upon the shop. My brother and I were washing our hands prior to going home. This Mr Timpson was incidentally the father of the winner of the recent Crewe and Nantwich by-election, and he enquired “are these boys are on a tea break?” My brother incidentally was then in his early twenties. In 1972 I clearly identified myself as a Socialist. This position was not so much an ideological standpoint as the stuff of life itself. Given my life experience at the time no other position was possible. However if there was one single influence outside of my life experience that influenced my politics that influence was George Orwell. The moral force and clarity of vision of Orwell’s writing represented a touchstone against which it was possible to test one’s developing political thought. In particular he laid bare th...

Whilst serving in the Imperial police in Burma George Orwell witnessed a hanging. His account of the event represents one of the best arguments against the death penalty I have ever read and whenever the subjected is mooted I think of this short essay.* I see that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a major figure in al-Qaida and one of the men behind the 9/11 attacks in New York, has stated that he would welcome being martyred and wants to be sentenced to death. Should his wish be granted? Like all good liberals I have always been opposed to the death penalty. The purposeful judicial extinction of a human life has always struck me as being inherently disgusting, an act that degrades all associated with it and which demeans the society that sanctions it. However I have long been aware of possessing certain ambivalence when it comes to the perpetrators of war crimes. When looking at the Nuremberg trials for I can find no equivalent feelings of disgust. When faced with the sheer enormity of the hol...