NEVER AGAIN

BUT...

On hills above several cemeteries in Bosnia,
dug into earth upon which people had fallen
during their horrendous neighbour upon neighbour civil and international wars from 1992-1995,
I filmed handmade signs demanding, pleading ‘Never Again’.

But…

Recently a person dear to me died.
Again I recognised how at those moments of despair, emptiness,
standing on an edge of an emotional abyss
words fall into shadows
leaving none illuminated to honour the person,
none to provide solace for those in need,
with only simple inanities to mumble.

I, as many of us, may be partly traumatised by the nightmarish recognition
of what we as a species are capable of and are doing again.

For those of us who know of the European holocaust and now Ukraine,
who know of recent slaughters in Africa,
who know of the unacceptable separation of migrant families
at the Mexican-American border,
we may hope people would be able to remember history,
and to learn that these things must Never Again happen.

How do we come to the violence?
How do we forget so easily?
How do we explain to ourselves our un-caring?
How do we accept easy explanations?
And, in whose interest is it that we don’t remember, don’t know, don’t care?

*****

Thuggish, fanatical religion inspired death-wishing totalitarian rule over the many,
can trigger deep psychological harm. 
Those societies, as the one created by Hamas,
diminish the self-development of human beings.

When the British-Jewish philosopher, Isaiah Berlin asked,
“The purpose of life is life.
“Life has no universal purpose, only individual purposes –
happiness, justice, kindness, freedom, beauty, art, love, self-expression, pleasure, amusement.
All of these are purposes; a general purpose of life does not exist.”

For many young Palestinians who have suffered under the Hamas fanatics,
who have lived in poverty with limited opportunity to evolve and develop,
their seething mindless anger should not be a surprise.
An excuse, no, but facts to weigh-up,
even accepting that they have lost their moral compass
or perhaps they were never given one
or it was stolen by the religious thugs.

But…
This widespread agony so many are suffering
is from our inability to grasp the moral and political meaning of what we are capable of,
exposed in the random hideous actions of Hamas’ death-wish acolytes
and the carefully calculated Israeli revengeful offensive.   

*****
As I age,
what becomes clearer to me is that which survives me will be my words and pictures
and perhaps a memory of my love in those whom I loved.
The pictures and words are a struggle against oblivion.
That is egocentric and unimportant except to me.
The love is what made life worth living.

They are a consequence of my belief that our creativity,
our art and central to those, our humanity
must remind others that life is not simply this or that, but it’s complex.

A few nights ago, I heard a piece of beautiful music*, previously unknown to me
by the mid twentieth century German-Jewish composer Alfred Schnittke.
A musicologist described Schnittke as
"a composer concerned to depict the moral and spiritual struggles of contemporary man” (humankind).
To me this is a fitting description of how I think of what is behind my work,
and what others may wish to aspire to in their work in these bitter times.

This means we must offer a way for people to hold complex contradictions
in their hearts and minds.
To remind people that the Palestinian men who committed outrages
have themselves withstood years of social and economic oppression.
As I said above, this is neither an apology nor an excuse.
All too many politicians, journalists and intellectuals
have turned away from this harsh reality,
as though fate determined this oppressed Palestinian condition will be status-quo
until the proto-fascist Israeli right have driven all Palestinians from their homeland.

We need to remind people the universe of our minds is wide and deep
and filled with endless potential for good as well as evil.

Art has need of an audience as does the audience have need of art
to help them grasp a recognizable reality, to survive with souls intact,
to see in the beauty of art and its utter truthfulness in some strands of hope.

If artists can express their humanity,
our common but forgotten humanity,
may Always Again remind us to refuse the psychopaths access to power.

*****

*Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled With Grief
performed by the Kornos Quartet.

There is an award winning film of mine with the beautiful music of Bosnia called Stories of Sevdah, the Balkan Blues you can see for free, here.