Beauty, the humilated and resistance

Beauty, the humiliated and resistance

&;#8230;there is beauty and there are the humiliated. Whatever
difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be
unfaithful either to the second or the first.
Albert Camus

Camus, being a poet, gave the statement a nice twist at the end. He
equalises the humiliated and beauty, beauty and the humiliated. Neither
is more important.

I read this quote in a book of conversations with Emeritus Professor
Zygmunt Bauman of the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw. Zygmunt Bauman
has influenced me a lot over the last couple of years in the social
research I've done for charities like St Vincent de Paul and Mission
Australia. The Camus' quote represents a summary of Bauman's concerns.
It 's his motto if you like. I've adopted it as my own.

The major influence Bauman has had on me has been his work on defining
poverty and the 'new poor'. What he has to say is clear, and in many
ways quite obvious. By stating things simply he draws attention to the
fact we, in contemporary western societies, often fail to see what is
in front of our noses.

In his book Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998) Bauman argues
that the phenomenon of poverty does not merely boil down to
material deprivation and bodily distress. Poverty, Bauman states, is
also a social and psychological condition:

Poverty means being excluded from whatever passes for normal life. This
results in loss of self- esteem. Poverty also means being cut off from
the chances of whatever passes in a given society for a happy life.
This results in resentment.

In the work I've been doing for the major charities I also add that
poverty has a spiritual dimension as well. The original inhabitants of
Australia have told us this for years.

If we accept that these are four, intertwining (interdependent) aspects
of poverty, maybe we can better design appropriate responses and work
with and walk beside those experiencing poverty. If we continue to
argue about poverty lines and who is or isn't poor and whether or
not
the gap between the rich and the poor is widening or not, then we will
continue to fail to change grinding reality. We'll be left handing out
welfare or, even worse, we'll punish the poor for being poor.

As a social researcher, I try not to be unfaithful to the poor, the
humiliated in our midst, those who have been left behind in the pursuit
of material enrichment. To keep faith with beauty, I read and write
poetry.

Resistance
Meet me under the plane tree at six
we'll exchange meanings
we'll contemplate the honey moon
we'll share a draught
and sleep in the shadow
cast by the forest of dreams

receivers have been rendered inoperable
chairs are fuel for bonfires
accounts are settled by post
laughter is our most effective weapon
love
our missile

*
Keep going cold
nerves coated with snow
shaking in the street
this ain't dancing

sometimes it's one thing

then something else
I'm anxious to avoid contradiction

she knows how to keep a certain distance
hidden behind walls
covered with quick accusations

all of a piece
has become her favoured saying
as fragmentation reaches limits

she hangs back beneath the awning
shading my desire

*
My operative failed to contact me
left the area without a word
maybe she's been arrested
by plain-clothed men
last I heard she'd been spotted
playing an ill-suited role
but the first thing they teach you in the service
is to forget

her face shows guilt easily
her eyes like billabongs after rain
her lips vibrate when she confesses
her hair tangles to touch
her name I won't betray

soldiers take down the rebels by night
take them down to the river
watch them drown

*
I look for the direction of my journey
and who will drive me there

behind me slumps the painter of rain
descending to his supernatural home

we are frozen
my instrument and I cannot sing

the Eiffel Tower's shadow crosses my path
shimmering

Resistance is important to me. I trace my interest with resistance back
to my early life in Manchester, England. When I was born there in 1953,
rationing had just come to an end and there were still many bomb
craters and ruins left over from the war. Most of my reading as a child
was the World War 2 stories that filled comics like Victor and
Valiant. Men (and occasionally women) dropped behind enemy lines to
carry out the bravest, most impossible acts.

When I was older Samuel Beckett became one of my favourite writers, not
only because Waiting for Godot is probably one of the best plays ever
written, but also he was a genuine resistant, the only survivor of a
cell in Paris that had started out with 80 members.

Less literary but just as important to me was a BBC drama called the
Secret Army. Secret Army was about a resistance group in Belgium
that smuggled Allied servicemen and women out of Nazi held territory.
It was gripping drama and, at the same time, it demonstrated how people
from widely different backgrounds and beliefs could work together in
common cause. The program didn't gloss over the
difficulties created by these differences, in fact the tensions within
the group were often the main focus of the story.

Recently I came across a book titled My Little Sister and Selected
Poems by Abba Kovner, an Israeli poet. Abba Kovner was born in 1918 and
lived in Vilna , Lithuania. In 1940-1941, when Vilna was the capital of
the Soviet Republic of Lithuania, Kovner was a member of the
underground organization. After the German occupation in June 1941,
Kovner hid with a few friends temporarily in a Dominican convent in
the

city suburb. After he returned to the ghetto and became aware of the
killing of thousands of Jews,

Kovner expressed the idea of revolt and began to build a Jewish force
to fight against the Nazis. On the night of December 31, 1941, Kovner
read before a meeting of delegates of all Jewish Youth Movements a
public announcement:

Hitler is plotting to destroy all European Jews. Lithuanians Jews will
be the first in line. Let us not be led like sheep to the
slaughterhouse. It is right, we are weak and without defense, but the
only answer to the enemy is resistance!

Eventually, as more and more Jews were taken from the ghetto to unknown
destinations, Kovner and his group began smuggling survivors out of the
ghetto through the sewers and into the forest. He
and his compatriots linked up with partisan groups and played an active
role in sabotaging the Nazi war effort.

Miraculously, Kovner and his future wife, who had also been one of the
resistants in Vilna, survived. He became active in organising
Jewish
refugees wanting to make the journey to Palestine. Kovner himself left
Europe, but the boat was seized by the British authorities. He was
arrested and thrown into a Cairo jail as a potential terrorist. He was
transferred to a Jerusalem jail making the journey from Cairo
handcuffed in a military command car. He was freed from the jail by the
Jewish underground and lived in Israel till his death in 1987.
Kovner is a resistant. He was also, as I noted earlier, a poet. Here's
an extract from one of his poems.

The Scientists are Wrong
They're wrong, the scientists. The universe
wasn't created
billions of years ago.
The universe is created every day.

The scientists are wrong to claim
the universe was created from one primordial substance.

The world is created every day
from various substances with nothing in
common.
Only the relative proportion of their masses,
like the elements of sorrow and hope,
make them companions
and curbstones. I'm sorry

I have to get up, in all modesty, and disagree
with what is so sure and recognized by experts:
that there's no speed faster than the speed of
light,
when I and my lighted flesh
just noticed something else right here -
whose speed is even greater than the speed of
light
and which also returns,
though not in a straight line, because of the
curve of the universe
or because of the innocence of God.

Theodor Adorno famously asked the question; is poetry possible after
Auschwitz? Abba Kovner and other poet survivors like Paul Celan and
Nelly Sachs to name just three, answer yes. In their poetry they
resist
the fall into stammering nihilism, stay faithful to beauty, and remain
as one with the humiliated.

Perhaps we all should aim to be faithful to the humiliated and beauty,
beauty and the humiliated. Perhaps we should set ourselves against the
forces that rule our daily lives. Perhaps we should speak with
and
for those who are cut out from a meaningful life, those who are
impoverished and discarded. Then, perhaps, we can resist the
colonisation of our souls.

Saviour

The whiteness of light blinds
but only because we're unused
to the glaring, he said

the greyness of each day binds
but only because we're unused
to resistance. he said

and these were his final words
he lay half between sleep and waking
waiting for an end

I mopped his brow
he shed my tears
the rooster crowed at dawn