TLS: The future's not what it was

by Barry Dainton
Review of THE LABYRINTH OF TIME. By Michael Lockwood. 405pp. Oxford University Press.

We all know from the nursery rhyme how the loss of a nail can lead to the loss of an entire kingdom (via the intervening losses of shoe, horse, rider and battle), so it's not too difficult to appreciate how a small alteration to the remote past could cause a cascade of changes which would lead to the creation of a very different present - perhaps a better present, if the right alterations were made. Nor is it difficult to see how time-travel technology might be of use to future governments: if a policy decision turns out to have catastrophic consequences, the damage can be reversed by sending a "Don't do it!" message back in time. This plot device is employed in Orson Scott Card's novel Pastwatch, where a group of time travellers deliberately set out to alter history in a way which is guaranteed to erase their own timeline. The twist is that they do so with the explicit permission of the millions of people they will be annihilating: faced with global environmental catastrophe, the inhabitants of this post-apocalyptic society nobly opt to sacrifice themselves in order to give humankind a second chance. Could travelling to the past really pose a threat to the present? Probably not.
For a start there is the problem of self-defeating causal loops. If the changes you inflict on the past produce a future in which you no longer exist, how can you go back and inflict the changes in the first place? But alterations which aren't self- defeating are problematic too. Last night I cut my finger while chopping an onion; the pain wasn't severe, but I certainly felt it. Now consider: once this particular experience has come into existence, can anything make it so that it never happened in the first place? As soon as any event occurs it is part of the sum total of everything that ever happens, and once an event has this status how can it lose it? Consider again Scott Card's scenario: can billions of people live out their lives and also not live out their lives? Although some philosophers have held that reality can harbour contradictions, it is difficult to believe that this is one of them. On reflection, the idea that the past can be changed in even the smallest of ways looks dubious.
Should we conclude that time travel is impossible? No, but we must accept that if people successfully travel back in time, the past won't be in the least bit changed by their so doing. Hence the arrival of the time tourists and all their actions (and all the consequences of their actions) must already be part of history before they set off. Rather than picturing the past happening twice over -once without any time travellers, once with -we should picture it as happening just once, with any time travellers already in situ.
Recognizing the inviolability of the past solves one problem but it leads to others. What is to prevent a time traveller doing something they know didn't happen? Suppose you travel back to 1968 on an afternoon when you know you participate in a particular Parisian demonstration: you've seen the pictures in the history books which prove the fact. What's to stop you spending the whole afternoon wandering along the banks of the Seine instead? What's to stop you getting back in your machine and travelling to another historical epoch? In one sense nothing at all. You aren't confined to a prison cell or bound and gagged - to all outward appearances you are as free to act as you choose as anybody else.
But if we assume history cannot be changed and that the history books are accurate, then irrespective of what you try to do, you will end up doing just what the history books say: some chain of events (one that you cannot as yet foresee) will lead to you being where you're supposed to be. Why does this fortuitous chain of events take place? Because it did; that's just how history worked itself out.
You may feel perfectly free as you contemplate ways in which you might escape your destiny, but this is an illusion. Your immediate future (like our past) is set in stone.
That we find it perturbing to think that our actions could be constrained in this sort of way is (in part) due to how we normally think of time itself. If asked to characterize the differences between the past, present and future many of us would say something like this: "Although there is a fact of the matter as to what happened in the past, the past isn't real in the same way as the present: things are only really alive in the present -though of course things are only present for an instant before becoming past as time marches on. As for the future, it doesn't exist at all, and what it will bring is as yet not settled". Our futures may be open in this way, but travellers into the past must accustom themselves to the fact that their immediate futures are not.
But if this conception of time explains why the predicament of time travellers seems so strange, it also makes it hard to understand how backward time travel could be possible at all. How could someone arrive in the present from the future if the future doesn't exist? Non-existent people can't build time machines, nor can they step out of them!
Happily for would-be travellers all is still not lost. The view of time just outlined is often called the "tensed conception" - since it assumes that there are significant differences between the past, present and future. Its main competitor is the "tenseless conception". As the label suggests, on this view there are no significant differences between past, present and future. For tenseless theorists all events are equally real, irrespective of when they occur. It follows that the present time is in no way privileged: all times and events are present as and when they occur, just as any place is "here" for a person who happens to be located there. The tenseless conception may not correspond with the common-sense picture of time, but if the future is real, the notion that people might set out from there with the intention of arriving in the past is no longer problematic. Time travel seems to require tenseless time. For reasons that will emerge, the possibility or otherwise of time travel plays a prominent role in Michael Lockwood's The Labyrinth of Time. Lockwood's main aim is to assess the competing merits of the tensed and tenseless conceptions. Philosophers who favour the tenseless view often do so because they think the tensed view can be shown to be incoherent. Lockwood, however, finding these arguments to be flawed, swiftly moves on to more promising territory: the implications for the nature of time of contemporary physics.
In broad brush strokes the story runs as follows. The doctrine that only presently occurring events are fully real is put under severe pressure by Einstein's special theory of relativity. Common sense suggests that the present is a fleeting phenomenon but not a localized one: if one's current experiences are present, so too are all the other events that are happening at the same time, irrespective of where they are located. The special theory does not dispense with this notion of simultaneity, but it does relativize it: people who are in motion with respect to one another will legitimately reach different verdicts on which events are present. Obviously, if simultaneity is relative in this way, the tensed theorists' contention that the present is a universe-wide frontier separating a real past from an unreal future is in serious trouble.
Since the only remotely obvious way of making sense of the situation is to hold that all events are real, it is not surprising to find that Einstein himself favoured the tenseless conception. So much for the special theory, but how do things stand from the vantage point of Einstein's general theory of relativity? According to the latter, gravitational effects are due to mass-induced distortions in the spacetime continuum, rather than the action-at-a-distance force posited by Newton. One might well think that if space and time can be contorted by the presence of matter (the more matter the greater the contortions), then the tensed theorists' universe-wide tide of becoming is in even worse trouble than previously. But it is not quite that straightforward.
Surprisingly, it turns out that it is possible to define a universal "now" in cosmological models permitted by general relativity. The definition proceeds via three-dimensional surfaces of "mean constant curvature" (which Lockwood explains very clearly). However, this putative present is only available in spacetimes that are "globally hyperbolic". Simplifying somewhat, these are spacetimes which don't include closed time-like curves, i.e. paths through spacetime which, if followed, would lead one back in time. Hence the importance of time travel. Does general relativity permit such journeys? It does. Closed time-like curves can be found in rotating black holes. Potentially of more use to the would-be time traveller, the equations also permit wormholes -in effect, tunnel-like short cuts through space and time. It is hard to see how the future could be anything other than real if it can be connected to the present by a tunnel.
So if we take relativity as our guide to the universe we need to face up to the possibility that the tenseless conception is true. While some tenseless theorists play down the implications of this for how we should think of ourselves and our lives, Lockwood does the opposite. I think he is right to do so.
To focus on just one issue: most of us take it for granted that, as we deliberate about what to do next, what we will do is not yet settled. If the openness of the future is an illusion, this assumption is untenable: our lives are embedded in the unchangeable past of a future that is as real as the present.
Hence it could easily be that we are all in a position analogous to that of a traveller to the past labouring under the delusion that they are free to do as they like. The only difference is that, since we don't have access to the relevant historical records, we are not in a position even to try to rewrite history.
This is on the assumption that general relativity is true. Einstein tried to reconcile the general theory with quantum mechanics but failed, and we are still looking for a viable quantum theory of gravity. Intriguingly, from the picture Lockwood paints, some of the leading candidates for such a theory may offer a few glimmers of hope to the tensed theorists. String theories are formulated against a backdrop of a flat spacetime, albeit of the special-relativistic variety, and there are approaches falling under the "canonical quantum gravity" rubric which construe the universe as succession of three-dimensional momentary spaces.
(Unfortunately talk of "succession" here needs to be taken with a large dose of salt: the canonical approach faces the difficulty that time doesn't feature at all in its equations, and there is no consensus as to how it can be retrieved.)
Rather than dwell on these highly speculative matters I will close with a brief mention of the best-confirmed part of contemporary physics: quantum theory. Readers familiar with Lockwood's previous work will be aware that he favours a version of the "many-worlds" interpretation. Quantum theory says that any given physical system can evolve in any number of ways from any given point in time, and the Schrodinger equation assigns specific probabilities to these various possibilities; what this equation does not do is tell us which possibility will be realized. The standard (Copenhagen) doctrine is that a system only comes to be in a definite state when it is observed. But there are obvious problems. How is it that observing a system has such profound consequences? What condition is the system in prior to its being observed? (Hence the notorious problem of Schrodinger's cat, which seems condemned to be both alive and dead before anyone peers into its box.) The many-worlds interpretation sidesteps these difficulties by holding that all the possibilities licensed by Schrodinger's equation are realized, albeit in different branches of reality. We are accustomed to objects being in different conditions at different times; if we accept the many-worlds interpretation, we need to accept that a single object can be in different conditions at a time. As a way of making sense of this, Lockwood suggests that the familiar twosome of time and space needs to be extended to a threesome of time, space and (what he calls) actuality. This additional dimension houses all the multitude of branches of the universe, each of which has its own space and time.
The many-worlds interpretation is by no means the only game in town, but it is taken seriously by physicists -especially those working in cosmology. It also has implications which go beyond its ontological profligacy. Would-be travellers through time needn't abandon all hope of changing the past. You can travel back and murder your grandfather -or at least, you can travel to another branch of actuality at a time when your grandfather lives, and where (thanks to your actions) you will never be born. But while the multiverse offers new freedoms to time-travellers, deleting entire strands of history is not one of them. You may be able to travel back and prevent a disastrous policy decision being made in one branch of actuality, but the suffering that this policy produced in the branch you abandon will remain.
Also, although Lockwood doesn't dwell on this, there are implications for our freedom here too. We normally assume that the ability freely to choose between two courses of action goes hand in hand with the ability to pursue one of these courses and not the other. This assumption is menaced by the many-worlds view.
Let us suppose that after some deliberation you end up choosing to get up rather than stay in bed. In another branch of actuality you end up choosing to stay in bed.
How can this be? Because your decisions are the outcome of micro-physical processes in your brain, and these processes can (and do) unfold in indefinitely many different ways from any given point in time.
Under the combination of tenseless time and classical physics only a single course of action is a real possibility for us, despite appearances to the contrary. The implications of the many-worlds view are very different but just as disturbing: the many courses of action which seem to be possible for us really are possible (probably), but many are also actualized in one or more of the vast number of branches making up our tree-shaped lives. We are thus deluded if we think we have the option of not pursuing many of the possibilities open to us. It could easily be that we are condemned to pursuing all the courses of action we ever consider pursuing. If so, the implications are evident: no longer must we think of ourselves as saints or sinners (or something in between), we are all saints and sinners (and everything in between). I expect most of us will think this more of a burden than a boon, and, given the choice, would opt for linear rather than branching lives. Alas, the nature of time is one thing that is certainly beyond our control.

Just Read: Never Let Me Go

Just finished reading a book by Kazuo Ishiguro "Never Let Me Go". I was reluctant to read a new book by somebody who was so uniformly praised, without reading his earlier work first. As with stock, prior results are never a guarantee of future performance. But in every Dublin bookstore that I visited, and I visited quite a few, there were always these slim paperbacks with people buying them right in front of me. The popularity of a book is usually another red flag for me, ever since the armies of fans of Da Vinci code and Harry Potter's adventures made book industry hungry for their next BIG thing.
I read the whole book in one sitting (albeit a long sitting - that's what transatlantic flights are so good for, one flight = one medium size novel). Though written in a voice of a 31 yo woman, and, therefore, a conscious attempt to replicate a specific intonation, style and mindset I was still impressed by the authorial mastery and assuredness of the delivery. Carefully crafted, brilliantly calculated revealing of the necessary information, a somewhat of a mystery plot - all that aside, the book still evoked in me a very profound empathy with its protagonists.
Amazing! Highly recommended.

The Cliffs of Moher

Last day in Dublin

The cows in Doolin

After a great lunch at the local pub, we had a chance to stretch our legs and enjoy a close up view of a herd of cows and a bull with a ring through his nose. The black cow, probably in heat, was trying to get away from the ever persistent bull. Probably, in despair she stopped and started urinating. The bull with his nose right up her butt could not but start drinking the glimmering liquid. The picture captures his completely surprised expression. The cow then proceded to walk away as if nothing happened.

TLS: No man's lands

Modern myths of the Cyclops
by Edith Hall

For two centuries the Odyssey has played a vital role in introducing children to the Greek and Roman classics, through the numerous retellings that have appeared since Charles Lamb's The Adventures of Ulysses (1808). It was in Lamb's version, read by countless Victorian schoolboys, that James Joyce first encountered the hero destined to underlie Ulysses (1922), the paradigmatic Modernist novel. But Lamb had altered the structure of the Odyssey so as to upgrade the incident with Polyphemus the Cyclops, making it the centrepiece of his first chapter. Lamb seems instinctively to have recognized how appealing children would find the tale of a clever little man telling a man-eating giant that his name is "Nobody", getting him drunk, poking out his single eye with a red-hot pole, hitching a ride on the underbelly of a sheep, and evading the boulders the giant hurls angrily after his ship. Lamb's vivid adaptation partly explains the robust cultural presence Polyphemus has enjoyed ever since, from Shelley's 1819 version of Euripides' Cyclops (a dramatization, with added satyrs, of the Homeric narrative) to the popular computer game God of War. In One Hundred Great Books in Haiku (2005), David Bader has recently condensed the Odyssey into just these seventeen syllables: "Aegean forecast / -storms, chance of one-eyed giants, / delays expected".
Indeed, Lamb described the Cyclops much more pejoratively than Homer had, as an "uncouth monster", with a "brutal body", and "a brutish mind"; he also dictated the story's meaning for his juvenile readership by adding that it provided "manifest proof how far manly wisdom excels brutish force". Lamb was taking his cue from an ancient intuition that Odysseus' travels somehow symbolized colonial expansion. Odysseus' sons by Circe traditionally founded important cities in Central Italy, and the Etruscans painted scenes from Odysseus' wanderings on the walls of their tombs, as if to assert a cultural ancestry leading back to Greece.
Whoever paid for the spectacular marine picnic resort in the entrance to a cave at Sperlonga, where the blinding of the Cyclops was reconstructed on a monumental scale, was buying into the myth of Odysseus' role as colonizer of the west of Italy, emblematic of the Roman domination of the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian Seas. By 1400, Dante's Ulysses could recall how his ships passed through the very Pillars of Hercules, where like a prefigurative Columbus he exhorted his crew onwards across the Atlantic; at the same time, rumours spread of the deformed giants that peopled the new worlds, informed by medieval versions of the compendium of monstrous cannibalistic races, including Cyclopes, in Pliny's Natural History.
Once the Odyssey became associated with the era of European imperialism, and Odysseus identified as the archetypal Western colonist, the Cyclops' future in the antiracist and postcolonial discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries became unavoidable; furthermore, the battle between Odysseus and Polyphemus can be read as a metaphor for the contemporary debate over the desirability of allowing the Greek and Latin classics, which so long provided the ideological justifications for now obsolete empires, to retain their high status in the literary canon at all. For, as W. Arens controversially demonstrated in The Man-Eating Myth (1979), reports of cannibalism the world over have been greatly exaggerated. Allegations of human flesh-eating are a standard trope in the xenophobic polemic of nearly every culture and era: the missionaries in Africa may have feared that they might end up in an indigenous casserole, but some natives were equally convinced that the white invader wanted to eat them. Columbus's first letter had discussed reports of the man-eating Caribbean people of Caniba, who were to prove so important in the invention of Shakespeare's Caliban in The Tempest, the New World savage just ripe for subjugation. Columbus also noted how native peoples could not handle alcohol, a key element in the presentation of the Cyclops in the Odyssey and the literature of colonial encounters between Europeans and their subjects everywhere.
By the time that John Locke wrote the second of his Two Treatises of Government
(1689), the mercantile West needed examples of situations in which disrespect of political authority is legitimate: Locke selected Ulysses' defiance of the Cyclops' right to govern his own island. In the Beagle diaries, Darwin recalled Captain Cook's description of the Cyclopes-like New Zealand natives who throw stones at approaching ships, shouting "come on shore and we will kill you and eat you all!". And, by the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the myth of Odysseus' subjugation of the Cyclops was deemed essential reading for everyone living under Britannia's Rule. In the Royal Readers, six standard schoolbooks read all over the Empire, the exemplary tales included accounts of the Vikings, Napoleon, the Roman Empire, the Conquest of Ireland, and Odysseus outwitting the Cyclops.
Yet Immanuel Kant had at least opened up a new possibility of redefining the monocularity of the Cyclops as narrow-mindedness. Kant captured this distinction in his contrast between "Cyclopean thinking" -views that are only formed through narrow experience -and common or public sense. For Kant, it was possible to be an erudite Cyclops who knew a good deal about philology or mathematics. But without the enlarged public perspective produced by engagement with other viewpoints, the learned Cyclops fails to think philosophically, as a member of a living community.
Closely related to the narrow cognition of the Kantian Cyclops is the widespread association of the one-eyed giant with the Orwellian Big Brother and his sinister, electronic Eye of surveillance: the most familiar example is Stanley Kubrick's intelligent computer HAL in his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). But there had long before been self-appointed surveillance agents of the most sinister kind: the leaders of local Ku Klux Klan groups have always been entitled "Grand" or "Exalted Cyclopses". The twelfth chapter of Joyce's Ulysses is perhaps the first text to be critical in its identification of Cyclopean monocularity with ethnic tunnel vision: in Barney Kiernan's Dublin pub the belligerent Cyclops, an obsessive Fenian anti-Semite, baits the Jewish hero Leopold Bloom mercilessly.
Likewise, in the classic Odyssey-inspired novel of Black America, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), the autocratic white leader of the tyrannical "brotherhood" (a disguise for the post-war Communist Party of the USA), has only one functioning eye. In Derek Walcott's stage version of the Odyssey, the Cyclops is another totalitarian tyrant who will brook neither dissent nor laughter in his grey police state. The Cyclops' monocular, racist vision actually sees "nobody" at all.
During the aftermath of 9/11, with its masterminds still at large, Salman Rushdie, in the New York Times, memorably compared the USA to a "blind giant, flailing uselessly about: like, in fact, the blinded Cyclops Polyphemus of Homeric myth, who was only one-eyed to begin with, who had that eye put out by Ulysses and his fugitive companions, and who was reduced to roaring in impotent rage and hurling boulders in the general direction of Ulysses' taunting voice".
Rushdie contemplates how the episode might reflect Osama bin Laden's own fantasy construction of the global order: "Polyphemus, after all, is a sort of evil superpower, a stupid creature of great, brute force who respects no laws or gods and devours human flesh, whereas Ulysses is crafty, devious, slippery, uncatchable and dangerous". The USA, as run by George W. Bush, thus risks presenting itself to the rest of the world as the stupid, hideous, blundering giant outwitted by a smaller, clever hero.
(It must be borne in mind that the North American press has countered this image by pointing out that Bin Laden's notorious lieutenant Mullah Mohammed Omar is one-eyed and currently resides in a cave -"the Cyclops of al-Qaeda".) The Cyclops has become not only a totemic but a contested figure, as Penelope in the Odyssey has become for feminists. Postcolonial theorists read Polyphemus once again as the colonized subject, but now it is as a victim, the earliest and most influential example of the analytic categories that swayed the minds of Columbus and his successors. The Stupid Monster who became Big Brother has now turned into a Victim of Racist Oppression.
This was partly a result of the post-Freudian reappraisal of Odysseus. He first became a problematic, repressive and violent figure when the Polish dramatist Stanislaw Wyspianski wrote his tragedy Return of Odysseus (Powrot Odysa) in 1907.
In philosophy, the major assault on Odyssean heroism came in 1944 with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialektik der Aufklarung, which traced the genealogy of the dark underbelly of Western science and reason to the Odyssey.
They argued that Odyssean rationality, already bound to identity, inevitably tramples on singularity and difference. Their Cyclops, in his ideal pastoral existence, becomes the model for the evolving line of stupid adversaries of the Christian era leading to Shylock and Mephistopheles. They recognize that Odysseus abuses his intellectual powers with Polyphemus -that he trespasses with all the arrogance of a colonial master, thus creating a situation which can only result in bloodshed.
The "Dialectic of Enlightenment" means that Odysseus cannot assert his superiority without dialectically beginning to behave even worse than his supposed inferior.
Closely allied with the Frankfurt School reading is the proposition that the Cyclops' single eye is a marker of radical difference. This argument, which owes much to anticolonial readings of Polyphemus' close relation Caliban in The Tempest, has been taken furthest by Sylvia Wynter, Professor Emerita at Stanford University.
Wynter suggests that the Cyclops defines racial Otherness, within the repertoire of images encoded in Western culture, on the level of magical realism. She offers a counter-mythology to lineages previously proposed by other black writers. These include Orlando Patterson in The Children of Sisyphus (1964), in which the notion of being condemned to rolling stones uphill symbolizes the experience of extreme poverty in Jamaica; Wole Soyinka, who has pitted the African "Herculean" burden-carrying archetype against the Odyssean Dr Livingstone archetype; and the numerous writers who have followed Ralph Ellison in defining black experiences through Odyssean questnarratives.
Wynter claims that it is impossible to square the contradiction between, on the one hand, Odysseus' relationship with white colonization and, on the other, black writers' desire to identify their own quest for freedom with Odysseus' pursuit of his goals. For Wynter, if you side with Odysseus against the Cyclops, you inevitably end up conspiring in the binary oppositions that have figured people of African descent as Other.
There have been attempts to address this contradiction. Historians of popular culture have suggested that the mutant X-Men, invented by Marvel Comics in
1963, were a covert or unconscious response to the Civil Rights crisis, since their physical alterity leads them to face state-sponsored prejudice and lynchings.
Their leader, Scott Summers, is known as "Cyclops" on account of the visor he must wear to protect his powerful eyes. Cyclops' parents are enslaved; the mutants' patron, Professor X, has been identified with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In Sea Grapes (1976), Derek Walcott grappled with the contradiction by suggesting that the Cyclops was actually involved in creating the epic Odyssey.
The feature of the Cyclops which is here given primacy is the blindness he shares with Homer: "the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough / from whose groundswell the great hexameters come / to the conclusion of exhausted surf".
In Walcott's Omeros, too, Odysseus is fleetingly linked with the clever European persecutor of the black children of the Caribbean, themselves associated with the Cyclops' flock, in stories "we recited as children lifted with the rock / of Polyphemus".
But the anti-racist Cyclops can be traced back much further, to a passage in Aime Cesaire's prose poem Return to My Native Land (1939). A Martiniquan intellectual, Cesaire trained as a teacher of Latin and Greek at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and the poem relates his quest for identity in Paris and back home. In one episode the author-narrator, a black man who has become an Odyssean victor-figure in Paris, encounters on a tram another, enormous black man, whose eye socket has been hollowed out by Poverty.
The Cyclops, as part of classical culture, may originally have become popular because he provided, on the level of fantasy, a justification of empire. But in the twentieth century, he began to flourish because of something quite antithetical -the liberation of colonized, oppressed, exploited and threatened peoples. Polyphemus and his struggle with Odysseus have had such wholly conflicting reverberations in recent times that they can be read as a symbolic paradigm of the struggle over the classical canon. Their showdown metaphorically represents both the conflicting views about the contents of the canon suitable for a postcolonial age, and the ways in which those contents should be read: it is still not even clear to all members of the Classics academy that contemplating the widest and most up-to-date range of responses to the ancient Greek and Roman classical authors is the surest method of ensuring their continued vigour in the third millennium. Both in and beyond Classics, there are still defenders of elite culture who insist that the Odyssey, as an ancient Greek masterpiece, is somehow as inherently superior to most non- European literature as Odysseus was to his monstrous victims; on the other hand, some black critics see no possibility that Odysseus, as proto-colonizer, robber, and assailant of Polyphemus, can be recuperated as a hero by anyone sensitive to the history of racism. Is there any way through this impasse? How can enjoying the "Western Classics" be compatible with opposition to Western imperialism and cultural or racial oppression?
More than twenty years ago, Norman Austin published an article showing how both Odysseus and Polyphemus are peculiarly irresponsible and childlike: Odysseus wants lots of gifts like a child in the Christmas holidays; Polyphemus is a playground bully asserting the rights of the king of the castle; they bicker and brag. Unlike most of Odysseus' adventures, this one offers no grown-up erotic interest or even palace coup: two men-boys slug it out to the point of death and mutilation over a few dairy products. Austin's Kleinian analysis proposes that the Cyclops' cavernous dairy symbolizes the womb and the breast, and that this episode encodes extreme regression and infantile sibling rivalry.
In the postcolonial global village, the notion of squabbles between brothers under the skin can perhaps help the survival of all cultures, indigenous, Western, pre-Christian pagan, and non-Western alike. The myths represented in the Odyssey belong to everyone and no one. Narrow-mindedness, childishness and sibling rivalry know no ethnic boundaries.
A second possible answer to the problem presented to the global village by the colonial values that have previously been attached to the classical canon is to look at other myth systems. The Cyclops-like ancient Armenian hero Turk'Angeleay who has forebears as early as Mesopotamian myth, was celebrated precisely because he fought off aggressive brigands and looters who sailed too close to his country's coastline by tossing huge boulders at them. He represents, it has been argued, an Anatolian mirror-image of Greek heroism.
Moreover, the Odyssey represents just a single cultural expression -however influential it has been -of a far more ancient set of stories shared by cultures wherever Homo sapiens has travelled. The type of the Cyclops figure is manifested in a wide range of myths and folk tales that have been recorded the world over. One etymological explanation of Polyphemus' name is that it means "speaking many languages" or "spoken of in many languages": mythical large shepherds have always transcended cultures quite as much as mythical clever travellers. Yet the single most important response to the problem faced by the modern world as it attempts to disentangle the Western classics from the terrible legacy of empire must come from the new strategies being developed in the work of contemporary "transcultural" writers.
The Cyclops story certainly appeals to Wilson Harris, born in Guyana (then called British Guiana) in 1921. His parents combined Amerindian, African and European blood, and he refuses both to be ethnically categorized and to be forced into a choice between rejecting and embracing the values that literary traditions of any kind have historically embodied. In a recent visionary novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), Harris fuses the Odyssey with the pre-Columbian Aztec figure of Quetzalcoatl in order to ask whether humans can find spiritual ways to transcend their tragic history of mutual barbarism through stressing the threads that connect, rather than divide, their imaginative lives. For Harris, the labile figure of the Cyclops sometimes represents the innocence of the peoples massacred by the conquistadors, but at others the blindness of societies that are still today imprisoned by what should have become long outdated hostilities.
Similarly, the Maori poet Robert Sullivan draws his ancestry both from the very Nga Puhi people of New Zealand's North Island of whom Darwin was so terrified, but also from Galway in western Ireland. Sullivan has imbued with intense Odyssean resonances a collection of poems about Maori seafaring, Star Waka
(1999; a "waka" is a canoe). These offer the reader a jumble of voices that explore the contradictions within the indigenous New Zealanders' relationship with the Western canon. One voice is able to acknowledge the bravery of the poor European settlers who sailed to New Zealand "over the edge of the world / into Hades / the infernal Greek and Latin-ness of many headed creatures".
Another angrily derides Odysseus for depriving him of his rightful place in the poem and subjecting the Maoris to the curious stare of anthropologists instead of respecting the brilliance of Maori stellar cosmogony. And yet, to be heard within this complicated polyphony is another calmer, more reflective voice offering a message about culture and its now inevitable globalization that seems both resigned and yet more hopeful and forward-looking:
Do not mind the settler.
I observe the rules of this mythology (see how he did not place a star or ocean or a waka in his pageantry). I am Odysseus, summoned to these pages by extraordinary claims of the narrator. I run through all narratives.
This is an adapted version of a lecture given as one of the Darwin College lecture series (2006), which will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year as Survival, edited by Emily Shuckburgh.

Freud Lives!

by Slavoj Zizek

In recent years, it’s often been said that psychoanalysis is dead. New advances in the brain sciences have finally put it where it belongs, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers in the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist searches for hidden meaning. As Todd Dufresne put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all the fundamentals – with the exception of Marx, some would add. The Black Book of Communism was followed last year by the Black Book of Psychoanalysis, which listed all the theoretical mistakes and instances of clinical fraud perpetrated by Freud and his followers. In this way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and psychoanalysis is now there for all to see.

A century ago, Freud included psychoanalysis as one of what he described as the three ‘narcissistic illnesses’. First, Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth moves around the Sun, thereby depriving humans of their central place in the universe. Then Darwin demonstrated that we are the product of evolution, thereby depriving us of our privileged place among living beings. Finally, by making clear the predominant role of the unconscious in psychic processes, Freud showed that the ego is not master even in its own house. Today, scientific breakthroughs seem to bring further humiliation: the mind is merely a machine for data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy merely a ‘user’s illusion’. In comparison, the conclusions of psychoanalysis seem rather conservative.

Is psychoanalysis outdated? It certainly appears to be. It is outdated scientifically, in that the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of the human mind has superseded the Freudian model; it is outdated in the psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is losing ground to drug treatment and behavioural therapy; and it is outdated in society more broadly, where the notion of social norms which repress the individual’s sexual drives doesn’t hold up in the face of today’s hedonism. But we should not be too hasty. Perhaps we should instead insist that the time of psychoanalysis has only just arrived.

One of the consistent themes of today’s conservative cultural critique is that, in our permissive era, children lack firm limits and prohibitions. This frustrates them, driving them from one excess to another. Only a firm boundary set up by some symbolic authority can guarantee stability and satisfaction – the satisfaction that comes of violating the prohibition. In order to make clear the way negation functions in the unconscious, Freud cited the comment one of his patients made after recounting a dream about an unknown woman: ‘Whoever this woman in my dream is, I know she is not my mother.’ A clear proof, for Freud, that the woman was his mother. What better way to characterise the typical patient of today than to imagine his reaction to the same dream: ‘Whoever this woman in my dream is, I’m sure she has something to do with my mother!’

Traditionally, psychoanalysis has been expected to enable the patient to overcome the obstacles preventing his or her access to normal sexual satisfaction: if you are not able to get it, visit an analyst and he will help you to lose your inhibitions. Now that we are bombarded from all sides by the injunction to ‘Enjoy!’, psychoanalysis should perhaps be regarded differently, as the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy: not ‘not allowed to enjoy’, but relieved of the pressure to enjoy.

Nowhere is this paradoxical change in the role of psychoanalytic interpretation clearer than in the case of dreams. The conventional understanding of Freud’s theory of dreams is that a dream is the phantasmic realisation of some censored unconscious desire, which is as a rule of a sexual nature. At the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud provides a detailed interpretation of his own dream about ‘Irma’s injection’. The interpretation is surprisingly reminiscent of an old Soviet joke: ‘Did Rabinovitch win a new car on the state lottery?’ ‘In principle, yes, he did. Only it was not a car but a bicycle, it was not new but old, and he did not win it, it was stolen from him!’ Is a dream the manifestation of the dreamer’s unconscious sexual desire? In principle, yes. Yet in the dream Freud chose to demonstrate his theory of dreams, his desire is neither sexual nor unconscious, and, moreover, it’s not his own.

The dream begins with a conversation between Freud and his patient Irma about the failure of her treatment because of an infection caused by an injection. In the course of the conversation, Freud approaches her and looks deep into her mouth. He is confronted with the unpleasant sight of scabs and curly structures like nasal bones. At this point, the horror suddenly changes to comedy. Three doctors, friends of Freud, among them one called Otto, appear and begin to enumerate, in ridiculous pseudo-professional jargon, possible (and mutually exclusive) causes of Irma’s infection. If anyone had been to blame, it transpires in the dream, it is Otto, because he gave Irma the injection: ‘Injections ought not to be made so thoughtlessly,’ the doctors conclude, ‘and probably the syringe had not been clean.’ So, the ‘latent thought’ articulated in the dream is neither sexual nor unconscious, but Freud’s fully conscious wish to absolve himself of responsibility for the failure of Irma’s treatment. How does this fit with the thesis that dreams manifest unconscious sexual desires?

A crucial refinement is necessary here. The unconscious desire which animates the dream is not merely the dream’s latent thought, which is translated into its explicit content, but another unconscious wish, which inscribes itself in the dream through the Traumarbeit (‘dream-work’), the process whereby the latent thought is distorted into the dream’s explicit form. Here lies the paradox of the dream-work: we want to get rid of a pressing, disturbing thought of which we are fully conscious, so we distort it, translating it into the hieroglyph of the dream. However, it is through this distortion that another, much more fundamental desire encodes itself in the dream, and this desire is unconscious and sexual.

What is the ultimate meaning of Freud’s dream? In his own analysis, Freud focuses on the dream-thought, on his ‘superficial’ wish to be blameless in his treatment of Irma. However, in the details of his interpretation there are hints of deeper motivations. The dream-encounter with Irma reminds Freud of several other women. The oral examination recalls another patient, a governess, who had appeared a ‘picture of youthful beauty’ until he looked into her mouth. Irma’s position by a window reminds him of a meeting with an ‘intimate woman friend’ of Irma’s of whom he ‘had a very high opinion’; thinking about her now, Freud has ‘every reason to suppose that this other lady, too, was a hysteric’. The scabs and nasal bones remind him of his own use of cocaine to reduce nasal swelling, and of a female patient who, following his example, had developed an ‘extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane’. His consultation with one of the doctors brings to mind an occasion on which Freud’s treatment of a woman patient gave rise to a ‘severe toxic state’, to which she subsequently ‘succumbed’; the patient had the same name as his eldest daughter, Mathilde. The unconscious desire of the dream is Freud’s wish to be the ‘primordial father’ who possesses all the women Irma embodies in the dream.

However, the dream presents a further enigma: whose desire does it manifest? Recent commentaries clearly establish that the true motivation behind the dream was Freud’s desire to absolve Fliess, his close friend and collaborator, of responsibility and guilt. It was Fliess who botched Irma’s nose operation, and the dream’s desire is not to exculpate Freud himself, but his friend, who was, at this point, Freud’s ‘subject supposed to know’, the object of his transference. The dream dramatises his wish to show that Fliess wasn’t responsible for the medical failure, that he wasn’t lacking in knowledge. The dream does manifest Freud’s desire – but only insofar as his desire is already the Other’s (Fliess’s) desire.

Why do we dream? Freud’s answer is deceptively simple: the ultimate function of the dream is to enable the dreamer to stay asleep. This is usually interpreted as bearing on the kinds of dream we have when some external disturbance – noise, for example – threatens to wake us. In such a situation, the sleeper immediately begins to imagine a situation which incorporates this external stimulus and thereby is able to continue sleeping for a while longer; when the external stimulus becomes too strong, he finally wakes up. Are things really so straightforward? In another famous example from The Interpretation of Dreams, an exhausted father, whose young son has just died, falls asleep and dreams that the child is standing by his bed in flames, whispering the horrifying reproach: ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ Soon afterwards, the father wakes to discover that a fallen candle has set fire to his dead son’s shroud. He had smelled the smoke while asleep, and incorporated the image of his burning son into his dream to prolong his sleep. Had the father woken up because the external stimulus became too strong to be contained within the dream-scenario? Or was it the obverse, that the father constructed the dream in order to prolong his sleep, but what he encountered in the dream was much more unbearable even than external reality, so that he woke up to escape into that reality.

In both dreams, there is a traumatic encounter (the sight of Irma’s throat, the vision of the burning son); but in the second dream, the dreamer wakes at this point, while in the first, the horror gives way to the arrival of the doctors. The parallel offers us the key to understanding Freud’s theory of dreams. Just as the father’s awakening from the second dream has the same function as the sudden change of tone in the first, so our ordinary reality enables us to evade an encounter with true trauma.

Adorno said that the Nazi motto ‘Deutschland, erwache!’ actually meant its opposite: if you responded to this call, you could continue to sleep and dream (i.e. to avoid engagement with the real of social antagonism). In the first stanza of Primo Levi’s poem ‘Reveille’ the concentration camp survivor recalls being in the camp, asleep, dreaming intense dreams about returning home, eating, telling his relatives his story, when, suddenly, he is woken up by the Polish kapo’s command ‘Wstawac!’ (‘Get up!’). In the second stanza, he is at home after the war, well fed, having told his story to his family, when, suddenly, he imagines hearing again the shout, ‘Wstawac!’ The reversal of the relationship between dream and reality from the first stanza to the second is crucial. Their content is formally the same – the pleasant domestic scene is interrupted by the injunction ‘Get up!’ – but in the first, the dream is cruelly interrupted by the wake-up call, while in the second, reality is interrupted by the imagined command. We might imagine the second example from The Interpretation of Dreams as belonging to the Holocaust survivor who, unable to save his son from the crematorium, is haunted afterwards by his reproach: ‘Vater, siehst du nicht dass ich verbrenne?’

In our ‘society of the spectacle’, in which what we experience as everyday reality more and more takes the form of the lie made real, Freud’s insights show their true value. Consider the interactive computer games some of us play compulsively, games which enable a neurotic weakling to adopt the screen persona of a macho aggressor, beating up other men and violently enjoying women. It’s all too easy to assume that this weakling takes refuge in cyberspace in order to escape from a dull, impotent reality. But perhaps the games are more telling than that. What if, in playing them, I articulate the perverse core of my personality which, because of ethico-social constraints, I am not able to act out in real life? Isn’t my virtual persona in a way ‘more real than reality’? Isn’t it precisely because I am aware that this is ‘just a game’ that in it I can do what I would never be able to in the real world? In this precise sense, as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded. Therein resides the ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.

Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and a (Lacanian) psychoanalyst, is international director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Birkbeck. The Parallax View, his latest attempt to rehabilitate dialectical materialism, comes out in April 2006.

Super Vision

Take a look at the promised lenses that will make your eyesight to be better than 20/10! PixelOptics in Roanoke, VA is developing SuperVision, eyewear that uses thousands of transparent liquid crystals to focus light far more precisely.
Visit their web site

Image of the Day

First, the Great Wall of China, then the Berlin Wall, now the not-so-great Israeli Wall.

NYT: Dancing zikr in Grozny

GROZNY, Russia - Three circles of barefoot men, one ring inside another, sway to the cadence of chant. The men stamp in time as they sway, and grunt from the abdomen and throat, filling the room with a primal sound. One voice rises over the rest, singing variants of the names of God. The men stop, face right and walk counterclockwise, slowly at first, then fast. As they gain speed they begin to hop on their outside feet and draw closer. The three circles merge into a spinning ball.

The ball stops. It opens back up. The stamping resumes, softly at first, then louder. Many of the men are entranced. The air around them hums. The wooden floor shakes. The men turn left and accelerate the other way. This is a zikr, the mystical Sufi dance of the Caucasus and a ritual near the center of Chechen Islam. Here inside Chechnya, where Russia has spent six years trying to contain the second Chechen war since the Soviet Union collapsed, traditional forms of religious expression are returning to public life. It is a revival laden with meaning, and with implications that are unclear.

The Kremlin has worried for generations about Islam's influence in the Caucasus, long attacking local Sufi traditions and, in the 1990's, attacking the role of small numbers of foreign Wahhabis, proponents of an austere Arabian interpretation of Islam whom Moscow often accuses of encouraging terrorist attacks. But Chechnya's Sufi brotherhoods have never been vanquished -- not by repression, bans or exile by the czars or Stalin, and not by the Kremlin of late.

Now they are reclaiming a place in public life. What makes the resurgence so unusual is that Sufi practices have become an element of policy for pro-Russian Chechens. Zikr ceremonies are embraced by the kadyrovsky, the Kremlin-backed Chechen force that is assuming much of the administration of this shattered land. Post-Soviet Russia tried to make zikr celebrations a symbol of Chechen aggression, portraying zikr as the dance and trance of the rebels, the ritual of the untamed. Now zikr is performed by the men the Kremlin is counting on to keep Chechnya in check.

The occasion for ceremony on this day was the blessing of the foundation of a mosque that will be named for Akhmad Kadyrov, the Russian-backed Chechen president who was assassinated in 2004. The mosque, whose foundation rests on the grounds of the former headquarters of the Communist Party's regional committee, is meant to replace older associations. Not only is it an implicit rebuke of Communism, it is situated beside the ruins of another, much smaller mosque that was being constructed by the separatists in the 1990's.

Its scale and grandeur are intended as public statement. At a cost of $20 million, it will be a sprawling complex, with room for a religious school and a residence for the mufti, said Amradin Adilgeriyev, an adviser to Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya's pro-Kremlin premier and son of the slain president. The mosque will hold 10,000 worshipers, making it the largest in the republic. Its minarets will rise 179 feet in the air. It will speak not just of faith, but of power. And so on this day the men dance. And dance. Tassels on their skullcaps bounce and swing. Sweat darkens their shirts. They are perhaps 90 in men in all, mostly young. They look strong. But zikr is demanding. As some of them tire, they step aside. Others take their place. Their stamping can be heard two blocks away. The entrance to the construction site is controlled by gunmen who make sure that none of the separatists enters with a bomb. Other young men boil brick-sized chunks of beef in caldrons of garlic broth, stirring the meat with a wooden slab.

Zikr has several forms. This form traces its origins to Kunta-Haji Kishiyev, a shepherd who traveled the Middle East in the 19th century, then returned to Chechnya and found converts to Sufism. Initially his followers pledged peace, but in time many joined the resistance to Russia, and their leader was exiled. They fought on, becoming a reservoir of Chechen traditionalism and rebellious spirit. In 1991, when Chechnya declared independence from Russia, the Kunta-Haji brotherhoods, long underground, fought again. Sebastian Smith, who covered the Chechen wars and wrote ''Allah's Mountains: Politics and War in the Russian Caucasus,'' noted that they became a source of rebel resolve.

At one zikr ceremony he observed, the men were dancing, he wrote, until a Russian bomber screamed low overhead, buzzing the village. Mr. Smith watched their reaction. ''No one even looks up,'' he wrote. ''The whooping grows louder.'' The Sufis resisted the influx of Wahhabis who came to fight Russia beside them, but whose version of Islam aligned more closely with that of the Afghan Taliban. Mr. Kadyrov said in an interview that he hoped to help restore Chechen Sufi traditions as part of an effort to preserve Chechen culture. He has reopened the roads to Ertan, a village in the mountains, where Kunta-Haji Kishiyev's mother is buried. Her grave is a shrine and a place for pilgrimages, which for years were not made. This spring the roads to Ertan are crowded with walkers, who visit the grave to circle it and pray.

Still, efforts to incorporate Sufi brotherhoods into a government closely identified with the Kremlin contain contradictions. Some see manipulation on Mr. Kadyrov's part, noting that Chechen self-identity has never been suppressed, even by some of the most repressive forces the world has ever known. Whether Mr. Kadyrov can control the forces he taps into is unknown. The zikrists dance on this day with state approval. But for whom? ''Kadyrov wants to show that he is a supporter of Chechen traditional Islam,'' said Aslan Doukaev, a native of Chechnya who is director of the North Caucasus service of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty. ''But Sufis always wanted Chechen independence, and that signal is being sent here too.''

My favorite animals

NYT Typo

It is not every day that a foreigner like me can catch a typo in the New York Times, both in print and on its web site. Consider this caption published in the article "100 Years in the Back Door, Out the Front" that appeared on May 21, 2006:


1919 Early last century, Texans brought in tens of thousands of Mexicans to pick its cotton each year. Then it invited them to leave.

Oh well, all too human, like the rest of us.

NYT: Soprano's Tale, Obsession, Love and Death

For nine years Birgit Nilsson was harassed by Nell Theobald, a former model shown in 1966 with the lion that mauled her moments after the photograph was taken.

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

It began operatically enough in the summer of 1968 at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, the Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson later recalled. The morning of each performance, a large bouquet of dark red roses was waiting at her door. There was a card with the signature "L. Black" and a few lines that seemed to come from a book. "I think I have a great admirer," Ms. Nilsson remembered telling a friend at the time.
But it was no idyll, she came to find. It was the overture to a multilayered nightmare stemming from a fan's obsession. The bitter consequences would come to haunt Ms. Nilsson, the greatest Wagnerian soprano of her era, who died last Christmas at 87 and is to be memorialized on Tuesday evening in a Metropolitan Opera Guild tribute at Alice Tully Hall. "These people can be dangerous," Edgar Vincent, Ms. Nilsson's longtime publicist, said recently. "Opera is, after all, an emotional art form." Mr. Vincent recalled that the episode drove the famously witty and jocular star to "almost losing her temper."
Ms. Nilsson revealed some of the story in an autobiography published in Swedish in 1995 and in German in 1997. (She was holding out for an English translation to her liking and finally approved one that Baskerville Publishing of Fort Worth hopes to bring out next year.) She left out salient details but included enough clues so that the tangled tale can now be unraveled. "There are all kinds of fans, and most are wonderful," Ms. Nilsson said in a 1997 telephone interview from her home in Sweden, while reluctantly confirming unpublished aspects of the story.
Her friend, having looked at the notes sent with the roses, had an intuition about "L. Black." "So who is he?" Ms. Nilsson asked. "Not 'he,' " the friend said. "She." It was indeed a she: a young American beauty from New York whom Ms. Nilsson later described as a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, taller and with dark hair but with the same "perfect figure." Ms. Nilsson called her "Miss N."
"Her name doesn't matter," she said in the interview. "I was very scared. She found out everything about me. She followed me for nine years." The lines in the notes, it emerged, had come from a 1936 novel, "Of Lena Geyer," by Marcia Davenport, a biographer of Mozart and daughter of the renowned American soprano and early recording artist Alma Gluck. The book is a fictional biography of a Bohemian prodigy who sings her way to the pinnacle of the opera world under the tutelage of Lilli Lehmann and the baton of Gustav Mahler in the early 1900's.
In the story Lena is wooed by a mysterious admirer who sends yellow roses before each performance, along with a card signed "E. deH." It doesn't escape Lena's aristocratic French lover that a young woman in black has been sitting in the front row wherever Lena sings. Uncovering her identity — Elsie deHaven, a mousy American blueblood — he instantly suspects her of an erotic attraction for Lena.
Elsie has indeed been smitten by Lena since hearing her sing Wagner's "Tannhäuser" in Paris. She comes to shadow Lena until they meet one day in a London shop. Lena, who has also recognized Elsie from her front-row perch, invites her to supper.
Elsie is overcome to tears, and Lena comforts her with an embrace. "I felt as if I should die for love of her," Elsie confides. Although Elsie decides that "no human love could touch Lena Geyer," she becomes her lifelong companion, attendant and talisman, even through Lena's late marriage to a wealthy and devoted patron. Was her own admirer a would-be Elsie, Ms. Nilsson wondered? If so, her identity remained elusive. After Bayreuth, red roses and cards signed "L. Black" greeted her at every performance around the United States, Ms. Nilsson said. At the Met one night, a strikingly attractive young woman came into her dressing room with Terry McEwan, a Decca recording executive. He didn't really know her, he said, but she had bombarded him with letters and calls begging to meet Ms. Nilsson.
When Ms. Nilsson flew to Vienna not long afterward, she said, the same woman was on the plane. And when she flew on to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize gala, the woman was in the seat next to her. They finally talked. The woman said she was a model in New York working on a TV soap opera — leaving out some crucial details. But she loved grand opera and dreamed of becoming a singer. She said she would be staying at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, where, as it happened, Ms. Nilsson was also booked.
The woman talked her way into the Nobel gala. And at the hotel she gave Ms. Nilsson's name as a reference after her checks bounced. Ms. Nilsson said the woman caught up with her again in Munich, begging to be her friend. Ms. Nilsson was firm, she said: she picked her own friends and did not want to be shadowed anymore.
It was the last time they would speak, but hardly the end of the matter. The woman continued to send flowers and show up at hotels where Ms. Nilsson was staying, sometimes taking the room next door. She also continued to turn up in the first row of the singer's performances, on the arms of different escorts and always dressed, like Elsie deHaven, in black.
Then, in 1971, Ms. Nilsson came across a newspaper article about a model who had settled a big lawsuit. It was her nemesis, and the story was astonishing. Now for the first time, three years after the first roses in Bayreuth, Ms. Nilsson knew her tormenter's name. She never released it, but she did not have to. How many models have been mauled by a lion in Columbus Circle?
The woman, research would show, was Nell Theobald, a model, actress and dancer from Atlanta. In April 1966, at the 11th International Automobile Show at the New York Coliseum, she was posing at the BMW exhibit with a 225-pound, 2-year-old lion named Ludwig when, apparently angered by its handler's proddings, it lunged at her, sinking its teeth in her thigh and holding on until the handler pried open its jaws.
Ms. Theobald, then 21, underwent surgery to save her leg and recovered. She sued the animal agency, the public relations firm, the automaker and the coliseum for $3 million. Five years later a jury awarded her $500,000, which was halved by a judge as excessive.
Now, Ms. Nilsson found, her stalker could follow her in style, and more brazenly than ever. Her possessions started disappearing from her hotel rooms: photos, dresses, jewelry, even underwear. In 1973 she and her husband, Bertil Nilsson, had just landed in Perth, Australia, when a plane from Hawaii disgorged Miss N. In Fiji, a woman in native costume in the hotel restaurant turned out to be Miss N. On the flight home Miss N. was occupying Ms. Nilsson's favorite seat: left aisle, first row.
Then events took a dark turn. In Vienna in 1977 Ms. Nilsson returned from singing "Tristan und Isolde" to find a thick envelope from Miss N., who was staying in the same hotel. It was a letter of farewell, ending with Isolde's final lament: "Death. Both of us dead." She asked for her ashes to be strewn over Ms. Nilsson's garden in Sweden. Hotel workers broke down her door and found her unconscious from tranquilizers. She was revived in a hospital. But not long afterward, in the early hours of Aug. 19, 1977, in the Skyway Motel in Astoria, Queens, Ms. Theobald ended her sad quest. The night before, according to the New York medical examiner, she had been robbed near Lincoln Center, losing her purse and jewelry. It may all have been too much for her.
Ms. Nilsson got the news from a clipping sent by a friend. She never understood the fixation, she reflected. Had Miss N. so yearned to be her that she had erased the line between fantasy and reality? Was it a cry for help? We may never know. She left no traceable family.
"In another time," Ms. Nilsson concluded, "it surely would have been made into an opera."

Homelessness in China

New formula...

Image of the Day

Белорусский след в Кот-д'Ивуар **fr

Le 6 novembre 2004, deux avions Sukhoi pilotés par des mercenaires biélorusses attaquaient un camp de l' «opération Licorne», provoquant la mort de 9 soldats français. Dix-huit mois plus tard, l'enquête judiciaire révèle que la France a peut-être laissé filer les auteurs du raid.
Au cœur de la Côte d'Ivoire, les brumes de Bouaké se dissipent lentement, laissant dans leur sillage un profond sentiment de malaise. On le découvre aujourd'hui: le drame de l'attaque aérienne sur le lycée Descartes, qui fit 10 morts, dont 9 soldats français, le 6 novembre 2004, a été suivi d'un incroyable fiasco. La traque des auteurs présumés - deux pilotes biélorusses au service des forces armées ivoiriennes (Fanci) - a été pour le moins bâclée.
A deux reprises, les autorités françaises ont été en mesure de leur demander des comptes. Or les pilotes ont sans doute regagné leur pays, sans être inquiétés. Plusieurs témoignages indiquent même que Paris a choisi de les laisser fuir. «Tant d'inertie des autorités militaires et politiques françaises est incompréhensible», tonne Me Jean Balan, l'avocat de 24 parties civiles, veuves des tués de Bouaké ou soldats blessés. Il vient de déposer une requête afin que la justice entende le chef d'état-major des armées, Henri Bentégeat, la ministre de la Défense, Michèle Alliot-Marie, et le Premier ministre, Dominique de Villepin, à l'époque ministre de l'Intérieur.

read more here

Miami!!! Ay, caramba!

As you may have known I have spent four days "down there" (not "there", but in Florida!) - and for the first time in Miami, which I think deserves a short weekend all on its own. So I may fly there some early Sat morning, stay the night in one of those fancy Art Deco hotels to come home on Sunday night. In the meantime enjoy some of the pics...

S'ouvrir au plaisir sexuel **fr

La gynécologue Danièle Flaumenbaum explique le rôle central des mères pour que leurs filles apprennent à vivre pleinement leur sexualité. Plus de trente ans après Mai 1968 et la libéralisation de l'avortement, les femmes, dans leur majorité, continuent de vivre difficilement leur sexualité. Pourquoi le plaisir, voire le désir, sont-ils si peu souvent au rendez-vous de la rencontre amoureuse ? Qu'elles aient 20, 30, 40 ou 60 ans, comment les femmes construisent-elles cette part essentielle de leur intimité ? Gynécologue et acupunctrice, Danièle Flaumenbaum propose, dans Femme désirée, femme désirante (Ed. Payot, 234 p., 17 euros), des réponses singulières et troublantes. Au croisement de la psychanalyse et de la médecine chinoise, elle affirme le rôle central que les mères ont à jouer pour apprendre à leurs filles à vivre pleinement leur sexualité.
" 95 fois sur 100, la femme s'emmerde en baisant ", chantait Brassens dans les années 1960. Aujourd'hui, bien que l'épanouissement sexuel fasse partie des moeurs, voire de la norme, ce chiffre, écrivez-vous, resterait supérieur à... 80 % ?
Il s'agit de ma statistique propre, établie sur la base de ma clientèle, en Occident, en France, à Paris... Mais j'exerce depuis trente ans, et je le confirme : tout au long de ma pratique, la majorité des femmes qui m'ont consultée souffraient de ne pas vivre leur sexualité comme elles le souhaitaient. Le droit au plaisir est socialement acquis, l'évidence que la sexualité fait partie de leur vie aussi, mais, de la théorie à la pratique, cela ne suit pas. Les femmes ne sont toujours pas préparées à savoir vivre leur sexualité. L'évolution positive, c'est qu'elles venaient autrefois me consulter avec des symptômes, et qu'elles viennent désormais, de plus en plus, avec des questions.

Depuis trente ans, les travaux de la neurophysiologie ne cessent de démontrer que le clitoris est la principale zone érogène de la femme. Or, selon vous, le lieu central de la jouissance féminine serait... l'utérus ?
La jouissance clitoridienne est une chose, celle que procure l'utérus en est une autre. Si la pensée occidentale insiste peu sur le rôle de l'utérus dans le plaisir féminin, la médecine taoïste, en revanche, lui accorde une grande importance. Les Chinois de la Chine ancienne, pour qui la sexualité est nécessaire à l'entretien de la vie, à l'épanouissement de l'esprit et à la prévention des maladies, ont décrit les trajets de l'énergie sexuelle. Selon la sexualité taoïste, l'utérus est le " chaudron alchimique ", la caisse de résonance dans laquelle se rencontrent et s'unissent les forces masculines et féminines. Mais il faut pour cela que le corps de la femme accepte véritablement de s'ouvrir, ce qui est rarement le cas. Chez la plupart d'entre elles, les énergies se bloquent au fond du vagin, parfois même en y provoquant de vives douleurs.

S'ouvrir à l'homme qu'on aime : pourquoi est-ce si difficile ? Parce que nos mères ne nous l'ont pas appris ! Les petites filles ne peuvent rêver de devenir " maman " que si leur mère est heureuse de l'être. De la même façon, elles doivent pouvoir grandir en sachant que la sexualité qu'elles vivront quand elles seront grandes leur donnera du plaisir et des forces. Ce qui est loin d'être toujours le cas.

Grâce à ma mère, j'ai été promise à devenir une mère heureuse pouvant exercer un métier indépendant, mais pas à devenir une femme sexuée. Le sexe, sa magie, sa force, n'avaient pas d'existence dans ma famille : cela ne faisait pas partie de ce qu'on avait à me transmettre. Or, aujourd'hui encore, la plupart des mères perpétuent ce schéma. Elles ont le souci d'aider leurs filles à devenir des femmes pensantes et autonomes, mais elles n'ont pas intégré le rôle qu'elles avaient à jouer pour les aider à devenir des femmes sexuées. N'ayant pas reçu elles-mêmes cet héritage, le plaisir érotique n'a aucune place dans leur discours. On est ainsi passé de l'interdit au déni de la difficulté.

Et, pour dépasser cette difficulté, que devraient-elles faire ? L'idéal, c'est d'avoir des parents qui vivent pleinement leur sexualité, de grandir en sentant que cela fait partie de la vie. Je le vérifie tous les jours : des femmes qui ont eu une mère, voire une grand-mère, pour qui il était normal de vivre sa sexualité n'ont pas de problèmes sur ce plan. Le simple fait de grandir dans le même espace qu'une mère qui a du plaisir à faire l'amour et à être mère suffit à assurer la transmission. Et quand ce n'est pas le cas, une mère doit savoir se dire à elle-même, et dire à sa fille, qu'elle lui souhaite de vivre sa sexualité avec plus de bonheur qu'elle n'en a eu elle-même. Dès l'enfance, une mère doit instruire sa fille du fait que plus tard elle aura du plaisir à accueillir l'homme qu'elle aime dans son sexe.

Et le rôle des hommes, dans tout ça ?Même s'il existe des initiateurs, même si l'homme aimé - et aimant - peut aider sa partenaire à s'ouvrir à lui, ce n'est pas à lui de construire la femme. Ce n'est pas à lui de la " porter ", car elle risque alors de l'aimer comme elle aimerait une mère, et cet amour-là n'est pas sexué. De plus, les hommes ont leurs propres difficultés : eux aussi, souvent, sont restés coincés dans les modèles de leur père ou de leur grand-père, dans une sexualité clivée entre " la maman et la putain " qui ne facilite pas toujours leur épanouissement. Cela ne veut pas dire qu'en tant que pères ils n'ont aucun rôle à jouer dans la construction sexuelle de leurs filles : pour pleinement savoir qu'on est une femme, il faut aussi le découvrir dans le regard d'un homme, et en premier lieu dans celui d'un père.

Dans le plaisir sexuel, quelle importance accordez-vous à l'orgasme ? L'orgasme, c'est une acmé, issue de la résonance des forces sexuelles mises en jeu. Même s'il est espéré, l'idée n'est surtout pas de le rechercher à tout prix - d'autant moins que cette " obligation de résultats ", chez la femme, suffit souvent à l'empêcher. L'important, c'est de rechercher l'accord qui, éventuellement, permettra qu'il advienne. Dans la rencontre amoureuse et charnelle, ce n'est pas l'orgasme qui préside à une sexualité enrichissante et satisfaisante, c'est le désir. Et le plaisir, c'est la réalisation du désir.

Propos recueillis par Catherine Vincent

The Price of Oil

Take a good look at this picture. This was a real human being. Behind him there are corpses of others. They were trying to steal oil from a pipeline in Nigeria when an explosion carbonized them all.

Images of the Day

A field in Germany; voting in Haiti; volcano in Indonesia; protester in Vienna

Images of the Day

Images of the Day

Full Text of the Iran Letter to US Prez

For some reason, I could not find the full text of the letter that the president of Iran has sent to George Bush - here it is. Just for the record. It is a letter of one religious demagogue to another one, so it contains little reason, but it is an important document since these two fanatics may destroy us all.

Mr. George Bush, President of the United States of America
For sometime now I have been thinking, how one can justify the undeniable contradictions that exist in the international arena -- which are being constantly debated, specially in political forums and amongst university students.
Many questions remain unanswered. These have prompted me to discuss some of the contradictions and questions, in the hopes that it might bring about an opportunity to redress them.
Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ (PBUH), the great Messenger of God,
Feel obliged to respect human rights,
Present liberalism as a civilization model,
Announce one's opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and WMDs,
Make "War and Terror" his slogan, And finally,
Work towards the establishment of a unified international community – a community which Christ and the virtuous of the Earth will one day govern,
But at the same time, Have countries attacked; The lives, reputations and possessions of people destroyed and on the slight chance of the … of a … criminals in a village city, or convoy for example the entire village, city or convey set ablaze. Or because of the possibility of the existence of WMDs in one country, it is occupied, around one hundred thousand people killed, its water sources, agriculture and industry destroyed, close to 180,000 foreign troops put on the ground, sanctity of private homes of citizens broken, and the country pushed back perhaps fifty years. At what price? Hundreds of billions of dollars spent from the treasury of one country and certain other countries and tens of thousands of young men and women – as occupation troops – put in harms way, taken away from family and love ones, their hands stained with the blood of others, subjected to so much psychological pressure that everyday some commit suicide ant those returning home suffer depression, become sickly and grapple with all sorts of aliments; while some are killed and their bodies handed of their families.
On the pretext of the existence of WMDs, this great tragedy came to engulf both the peoples of the occupied and the occupying country. Later it was revealed that no WMDs existed to begin with. Of course Saddam was a murderous dictator. But the war was not waged to topple him, the announced goal of the war was to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction. He was toppled along the way towards another goal, nevertheless the people of the region are happy about it. I point out that throughout the many years of the … war on Iran Saddam was supported by the West.
Mr. President,
You might know that I am a teacher. My students ask me how can theses actions be reconciled with the values outlined at the beginning of this letter and duty to the tradition of Jesus Christ (PBUH), the Messenger of peace and forgiveness.
There are prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that have not been tried, have no legal representation, their families cannot see them and are obviously kept in a strange land outside their own country. There is no international monitoring of their conditions and fate. No one knows whether they are prisoners, POWs, accused or criminals.
European investigators have confirmed the existence of secret prisons in Europe too. I could not correlate the abduction of a person, and him or her being kept in secret prisons, with the provisions of any judicial system. For that matter, I fail to understand how such actions correspond to the values outlined in the beginning of this letter, i.e. the teachings of Jesus Christ (PBUH), human rights and liberal values.
Young people, university students and ordinary people have many questions about the phenomenon of Israel. I am sure you are familiar with some of them.
Throughout history many countries have been occupied, but I think the establishment of a new country with a new people, is a new phenomenon that is exclusive to our times.
Students are saying that sixty years ago such a country did no exist. They show old documents and globes and say try as we have, we have not been able to find a country named Israel. I tell them to study the history of WWI and II. One of my students told me that during WWII, which more than tens of millions of people perished in, news about the war, was quickly disseminated by the warring parties. Each touted their victories and the most recent battlefront defeat of the other party. After the war, they claimed that six million Jews had been killed. Six million people that were surely related to at least two million families.
Again let us assume that these events are true. Does that logically translate into the establishment of the state of Israel in the Middle East or support for such a state? How can this phenomenon be rationalized or explained?
Mr. President,
I am sure you know how – and at what cost – Israel was established:
- Many thousands were killed in the process.
- Millions of indigenous people were made refugees.
- Hundred of thousands of hectares of farmland, olive plantations, towns and villages were destroyed.
This tragedy is not exclusive to the time of establishment; unfortunately it has been ongoing for sixty years now. A regime has been established which does not show mercy even to kids, destroys houses while the occupants are still in them, announces beforehand its list and plans to assassinate Palestinian figures and keeps thousands of Palestinians in prison. Such a phenomenon is unique – or at the very least extremely rare – in recent memory.
Another big question asked by people is why is this regime being supported?
Is support for this regime in line with the teachings of Jesus Christ (PBUH) or Moses (PBUH) or liberal values? Or are we to understand that allowing the original inhabitants of these lands – inside and outside Palestine – whether they are Christian, Muslim or Jew, to determine their fate, runs contrary to principles of democracy, human rights and the teachings of prophets? If not, why is there so much opposition to a referendum?
The newly elected Palestinian administration recently took office. All independent observes have confirmed that this government represents the electorate. Unbelievingly, they have put the elected government under pressure and have advised it to recognize the Israeli regime, abandon the struggle and follow the programs of the previous government.
If the current Palestinian government had run on the above platform, would the Palestinian people have voted for it? Again, can such position taken in opposition to the Palestinian government be reconciled with the values outlined earlier? The people are also saying "why are all UNSC resolutions in condemnation of Israel vetoed?"
Mr. President,
As you are well aware, I live amongst the people and am in constant contact with them -- many people from around the Middle East manage to contact me as well. They dot not have faith in these dubious policies either. There is evidence that the people of the region are becoming increasingly angry with such policies.
It is not my intention to pose to many questions, but I need to refer to other points as well.
Why is it that any technological and scientific achievement reached in the Middle East regions is translated into and portrayed as a threat to the Zionist regime? Is not scientific R&D one of the basic rights of nations?
You are familiar with history. Aside from the Middle Ages, in what other point in history has scientific and technical progress been a crime? Can the possibility of scientific achievements being utilized for military purposes be reason enough to oppose science and technology altogether? If such a supposition is true, then all scientific disciplines, including physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, engineering, etc. must be opposed.
Lies were told in the Iraqi matter. What was the result? I have no doubt that telling lies is reprehensible in any culture, and you do not like to be lied to.
Mr. President,
Don't Latin Americans have the right to ask, why their elected governments are being opposed and coup leaders supported? Or, why must they constantly be threatened and live in fear?
The people of Africa are hardworking, creative and talented. They can play an important and valuable role in providing for the needs of humanity and contribute to its material and spiritual progress. Poverty and hardship in large parts of Africa are preventing this from happening. Don't they have the right to ask why their enormous wealth – including minerals – is being looted, despite the fact that they need it more than others? Again, do such actions correspond to the teachings of Christ and the tenets of human rights?
The brave and faithful people of Iran too have many questions and grievances, including: the coup d'etat of 1953 and the subsequent toppling of the legal government of the day, opposition to the Islamic revolution, transformation of an Embassy into a headquarters supporting, the activities of those opposing the Islamic Republic (many thousands of pages of documents corroborates this claim), support for Saddam in the war waged against Iran, the shooting down of the Iranian passenger plane, freezing the assets of the Iranian nation, increasing threats, anger and displeasure vis-à-vis the scientific and nuclear progress of the Iranian nation (just when all Iranians are jubilant and collaborating their country's progress), and many other grievances that I will not refer to in this letter.
Mr. President,
September Eleven was a horrendous incident. The killing of innocents is deplorable and appalling in any part of the world. Our government immediately declared its disgust with the perpetrators and offered its condolences to the bereaved and expressed its sympathies.
All governments have a duty to protect the lives, property and good standing of their citizens. Reportedly your government employs extensive security, protection and intelligence systems – and even hunts its opponents abroad. September eleven was not a simple operation. Could it be planned and executed without coordination with intelligence and security services – or their extensive infiltration? Of course this is just an educated guess. Why have the various aspects of the attacks been kept secret? Why are we not told who botched their responsibilities? And, why aren't those responsible and the guilty parties identified and put on trial?
All governments have a duty to provide security and peace of mind for their citizens. For some years now, the people of your country and neighbors of world trouble spots do not have peace of mind. After 9.11, instead of healing and tending to the emotional wounds of the survivors and the American people – who had been immensely traumatized by the attacks – some Western media only intensified the climates of fear and insecurity – some constantly talked about the possibility of new terror attacks and kept the people in fear. Is that service to the American people? Is it possible to calculate the damages incurred from fear and panic?
American citizen lived in constant fear of fresh attacks that could come at any moment and in any place. They felt insecure in the streets, in their place of work and at home. Who would be happy with this situation? Why was the media, instead of conveying a feeling of security and providing peace of mind, giving rise to a feeling of insecurity?
Some believe that the hype paved the way – and was the justification – for an attack on Afghanistan. Again I need to refer to the role of media.
In media charters, correct dissemination of information and honest reporting of a story are established tenets. I express my deep regret about the disregard shown by certain Western media for these principles. The main pretext for an attack on Iraq was the existence of WMDs. This was repeated incessantly – for the public to, finally, believe – and the ground set for an attack on Iraq. Will the truth not be lost in a contrive and deceptive climate? Again, if the truth is allowed to be lost, how can that be reconciled with the earlier mentioned values? Is the truth known to the Almighty lost as well?
Mr. President,
In countries around the world, citizens provide for the expenses of governments so that their governments in turn are able to serve them. The question here is "what has the hundreds of billions of dollars, spent every year to pay for the Iraqi campaign, produced for the citizens?"
As your Excellency is aware, in some states of your country, people are living in poverty. Many thousands are homeless and unemployment is a huge problem. Of course these problems exist – to a larger or lesser extent – in other countries as well. With these conditions in mind, can the gargantuan expenses of the campaign – paid from the public treasury – be explained and be consistent with the aforementioned principles?
What has been said, are some of the grievances of the people around the world, in our region and in your country. But my main contention – which I am hoping you will agree to some of it – is:
Those in power have specific time in office, and do not rule indefinitely, but their names will be recorded in history and will be constantly judged in the immediate and distant futures.
The people will scrutinize our presidencies. Did we manage to bring peace, security and prosperity for the people or insecurity and unemployment? Did we intend to establish justice, or just supported especial interest groups, and by forcing many people to live in poverty and hardship, made a few people rich and powerful – thus trading the approval of the people and the Almighty with theirs'? Did we defend the rights of the underprivileged or ignore them?
Did we defend the rights of all people around the world or imposed wars on them, interfered illegally in their affairs, established hellish prisons and incarcerated some of them? Did we bring the world peace and security or raised the specter of intimidation and threats? Did we tell the truth to our nation and others around the world or presented an inverted version of it? Were we on the side of people or the occupiers and oppressors? Did our administration set out to promote rational behavior, logic, ethics, peace, fulfilling obligations, justice, service to the people, prosperity, progress and respect for human dignity or the force of guns.
Intimidation, insecurity, disregard for the people, delaying the progress and excellence of other nations, and trample on people's rights? And finally, they will judge us on whether we remained true to our oath of office – to serve the people, which is our main task, and the traditions of the prophets – or not?
Mr. President,
How much longer can the world tolerate this situation? Where will this trend lead the world to? How long must the people of the world pay for the incorrect decisions of some rulers? How much longer will the specter of insecurity – raised from the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction – hunt the people of the world?
How much longer will the blood of the innocent men, women and children be spilled on the streets, and people's houses destroyed over their heads?
Are you pleased with the current condition of the world? Do you think present policies can continue?
If billions of dollars spent on security, military campaigns and troop movement were instead spent on investment and assistance for poor countries, promotion of health, combating different diseases, education and improvement of mental and physical fitness, assistance to the victims of natural disasters, creation of employment opportunities and production, development projects and poverty alleviation, establishment of peace, mediation between disputing states and distinguishing the flames of racial, ethnic and other conflicts were would the world be today? Would not your government, and people be justifiably proud?
Would not your administration's political and economic standing have been stronger? And I am most sorry to say, would there have been an ever increasing global hatred of the American governments?
Mr. President, it is not my intention to distress anyone. If prophet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Joseph or Jesus Christ (PBUH) were with us today, how would they have judged such behavior? Will we be given a role to play in the promised world, where justice will become universal and Jesus Christ (PBUH) will be present? Will they even accept us?
My basic question is this: Is there no better way to interact with the rest of the world? Today there are hundreds of millions of Christians, hundreds of millions of Moslems and millions of people who follow the teachings of Moses (PBUH). All divine religions share and respect on word and that is "monotheism" or belief in a single God and no other in the world. The holy Koran stresses this common word and calls on an followers of divine religions and says: [3.64] Say: O followers of the Book! Come to an equitable proposition between us and you that we shall not serve any but Allah and (that) we shall not associate aught. With Him and (that) some of us shall not take others for lords besides Allah, but if they turn back, then say: Bear witness that we are Muslims. (The Family of Imran).
Mr. President,
According to divine verses, we have all been called upon to worship one God and follow the teachings of divine prophets.
"To worship a God which is above all powers in the world and can do all He pleases." "The Lord which knows that which is hidden and visible, the past and the future, knows what goes on in the Hearts of His servants and records their deeds."
"The Lord who is the possessor of the heavens and the earth and all universe is His court" "planning for the universe is done by His hands, and gives His servants the glad tidings of mercy and forgiveness of sins". "He is the companion of the oppressed and the enemy of oppressors". "He is the Compassionate, the Merciful". "He is the recourse of the faithful and guides them towards the light from darkness". "He is witness to the actions of His servants", "He calls on servants to be faithful and do good deeds, and asks them to stay on the path of righteousness and remain steadfast". "Calls on servants to heed His prophets and He is a witness to their deeds." "A bad ending belongs only to those who have chosen the life of this world and disobey Him and oppress His servants". And "A good and eternal paradise belong to those servants who fear His majesty and do not follow their lascivious selves."
We believe a return to the teachings of the divine prophets is the only road leading to salvations. I have been told that Your Excellency follows the teachings of Jesus (PBUH), and believes in the divine promise of the rule of the righteous on Earth. We also believe that Jesus Christ (PBUH) was one of the great prophets of the Almighty. He has been repeatedly praised in the Koran. Jesus (PBUH) has been quoted in Koran as well; [19,36] And surely Allah is my Lord and your Lord, therefore serves Him; this is the right path, Marium.
Service to and obedience of the Almighty is the credo of all divine messengers.
The God of all people in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, the Pacific and the rest of the world is one. He is the Almighty who wants to guide and give dignity to all His servants. He has given greatness to Humans.
We again read in the Holy Book: "The Almighty God sent His prophets with miracles and clear signs to guide the people and show them divine signs and purity them from sins and pollutions. And He sent the Book and the balance so that the people display justice and avoid the rebellious."
All of the above verses can be seen, one way or the other, in the Good Book as well. Divine prophets have promised:
The day will come when all humans will congregate before the court of the Almighty, so that their deeds are examined. The good will be directed towards Haven and evildoers will meet divine retribution. I trust both of us believe in such a day, but it will not be easy to calculate the actions of rulers, because we must be answerable to our nations and all others whose lives have been directly or indirectly effected by our actions. All prophets, speak of peace and tranquility for man – based on monotheism, justice and respect for human dignity.
Do you not think that if all of us come to believe in and abide by these principles, that is, monotheism, worship of God, justice, respect for the dignity of man, belief in the Last Day, we can overcome the present problems of the world – that are the result of disobedience to the Almighty and the teachings of prophets – and improve our performance? Do you not think that belief in these principles promotes and guarantees peace, friendship and justice? Do you not think that the aforementioned written or unwritten principles are universally respected? Will you not accept this invitation? That is, a genuine return to the teachings of prophets, to monotheism and justice, to preserve human dignity and obedience to the Almighty and His prophets?
Mr. President,
History tells us that repressive and cruel governments do not survive. God has entrusted The fate of man to them. The Almighty has not left the universe and humanity to their own devices. Many things have happened contrary to the wishes and plans of governments. These tell us that there is a higher power at work and all events are determined by Him. Can one deny the signs of change in the world today? Is this situation of the world today comparable to that of ten years ago? Changes happen fast and come at a furious pace.
The people of the world are not happy with the status quo and pay little heed to the promises and comments made by a number of influential world leaders. Many people around the world feel insecure and oppose the spreading of insecurity and war and do not approve of and accept dubious policies. The people are protesting the increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots and the rich and poor countries.
The people are disgusted with increasing corruption. The people of many countries are angry about the attacks on their cultural foundations and the disintegration of families. They are equally dismayed with the fading of care and compassion.
The people of the world have no faith in international organizations, because their rights are not advocated by these organizations. Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. We increasingly see that people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point – that is the Almighty God. Undoubtedly through faith in God and the teachings of the prophets, the people will conquer their problems. My question for you is: "Do you not want to join them?"
Mr. President,
Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things. Vasalam Ala Man Ataba'al hoda
Mahmood Ahmadi-Najad
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
(Source: Le Monde)