[xmca] Fwd: Harold Pinter's Nobel 2005 Nobel Lecture

From: Phil Chappell (philchappell@mac.com)
Date: Fri Dec 09 2005 - 04:07:58 PST


Apologies for cross-posting, but this looks like it might interest
many here.

Phil

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Mustafa Hussain <mustafa.hussain@GET2NET.DK>
> Date: 9 December 2005 2:28:44 AM
> To: CRITICS-L@NIC.SURFNET.NL
> Subject: Harold Pinter's Nobel 2005 Nobel Lecture
> Reply-To: Mustafa Hussain <mustafa.hussain@GET2NET.DK>
>
> Dear All,
>
> Something to be read in the coming holidays season - the Nobel
> lecture by the laurate Harold Pinter at the ceremony in Stockholm
>
> Best Wishes for the Season,
> Mustafa Hussain
> Copenhagen
> ...Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture
> into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on
> the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in
> power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power
> it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in
> ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What
> surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Harold Pinter - Nobel Lecture
> Art, Truth & Politics
> http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html
>
> In 1958 I wrote the following:
>
> 'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is
> unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not
> necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'
>
> I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply
> to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand
> by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is
> true? What is false?
>
> Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the
> search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the
> endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble
> upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an
> image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often
> without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that
> there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic
> art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from
> each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each
> other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the
> truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers
> and is lost.
>
> I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor
> can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what
> happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.
>
> Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The
> given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two
> examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my
> head, followed by an image, followed by me.
>
> The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The
> Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first
> line of Old Times is 'Dark.'
>
> In each case I had no further information.
>
> In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of
> scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he
> suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the
> person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the
> questioner either, for that matter.
>
> 'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a
> woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found
> myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a
> very slow fade, through shadow into light.
>
> I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.
>
> In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark
> room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa
> reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and
> that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed
> a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later
> to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want
> to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name
> of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog
> cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since
> B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were
> father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not
> seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no
> mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our
> beginnings never know our ends.
>
> 'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become
> Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with
> drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about?
> But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become
> Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.
>
> It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to
> that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful,
> uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an
> unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a
> sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist
> him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define.
> You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a
> never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide
> and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and
> blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility
> of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change,
> manipulate or distort.
>
> So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a
> quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under
> you, the author, at any time.
>
> But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It
> cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced,
> right there, on the spot.
>
> Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems.
> Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is
> essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air.
> The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own
> taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach
> them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of
> perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but
> nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This
> does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to
> none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which
> is its proper function.
>
> In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of
> options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally
> focussing on an act of subjugation.
>
> Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It
> remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get
> some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become
> easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up.
> This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in
> Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go
> on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated
> over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.
>
> Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place
> under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the
> waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding
> nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only
> shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a
> drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed
> to belong only to others.
>
> But as they died, she must die too.
>
> Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into
> any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the
> evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power
> and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is
> essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in
> ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What
> surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
>
> As every single person here knows, the justification for the
> invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly
> dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could
> be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We
> were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq
> had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the
> atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that
> this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened
> the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not
> true.
>
> The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with
> how the United States understands its role in the world and how it
> chooses to embody it.
>
> But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the
> recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the
> end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to
> subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny,
> which is all that time will allow here.
>
> Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout
> Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic
> brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of
> independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
>
> But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period
> have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let
> alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I
> believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable
> bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a
> certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United
> States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had
> concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.
>
> Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America
> 's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has
> described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means
> that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb
> on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of
> the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the
> gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to
> death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the
> great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the
> camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace
> in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.
>
> The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to
> offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in
> the world, both then and now.
>
> I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late
> 1980s.
>
> The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more
> money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of
> Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of
> Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a
> Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz
> (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself).
> Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north
> of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a
> cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra
> force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school,
> the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and
> teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They
> behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw
> its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'
>
> Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible
> and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in
> diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some
> gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war,
> innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We
> stared at him. He did not flinch.
>
> Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.
>
> Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the
> victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one
> among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further
> atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is
> your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder
> and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'
>
> Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented
> support your assertions,' he said.
>
> As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my
> plays. I did not reply.
>
> I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the
> following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our
> Founding Fathers.'
>
> The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in
> Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the
> Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular
> revolution.
>
> The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of
> arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of
> contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and
> civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic
> society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of
> poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over
> 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools
> were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy
> in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was
> established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced
> by a third. Polio was eradicated.
>
> The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist
> subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example
> was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of
> social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the
> standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and
> national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same
> questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time
> fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.
> I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us.
> President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian
> dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by
> the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was
> in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government.
> There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic
> or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in
> Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two
> Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were
> actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States
> had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala
> in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been
> victims of successive military dictatorships.
>
> Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously
> murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989
> by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning ,
> Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was
> assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people
> died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed
> a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief
> immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they
> dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty,
> disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.
>
> The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government.
> It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless
> economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit
> of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken
> once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health
> and free education were over. Big business returned with a
> vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.
>
> But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America .
> It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it
> is as if it never happened.
>
> The United States supported and in many cases engendered every
> right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the
> Second World War. I refer to Indonesia , Greece, Uruguay , Brazil ,
> Paraguay, Haiti , Turkey , the Philippines, Guatemala , El
> Salvador , and, of course, Chile . The horror the United States
> inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be
> forgiven.
>
> Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these
> countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases
> attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take
> place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you
> wouldn't know it.
>
> It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was
> happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no
> interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic,
> constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually
> talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised
> a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading
> as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly
> successful act of hypnosis.
>
> I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest
> show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may
> be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own
> and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen
> to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the
> American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people
> it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people
> and I ask the American people to trust their president in the
> action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'
>
> It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to
> keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a
> truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think.
> Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your
> intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable.
> This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below
> the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the
> vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
>
> The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict.
> It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It
> puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply
> doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or
> critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It
> also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead,
> the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
>
> What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any?
> What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely
> employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with
> our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts
> of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of
> people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal
> representation or due process, technically detained forever. This
> totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the
> Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought
> about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal
> outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to
> be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the
> inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them?
> They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been
> consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never
> return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed,
> including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding
> procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your
> nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What
> has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What
> has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not?
> Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in
> Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us
> or against us. So Blair shuts up.
>
> The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state
> terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of
> international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action
> inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of
> the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to
> consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle
> East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications
> having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable
> assertion of military force responsible for the death and
> mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
>
> We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium,
> innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to
> the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the
> Middle East'.
>
> How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be
> described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred
> thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is
> just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International
> Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not
> ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if
> any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in
> the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony
> Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for
> prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're
> interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
>
> Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place
> death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were
> killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency
> began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist.
> They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't
> do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.
>
> Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front
> page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a
> little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days
> later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of
> another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown
> up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms
> back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't
> holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child,
> nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your
> shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.
>
> The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported
> to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of
> harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of
> their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different
> kinds of graves.
>
> Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a
> Few Things':
>
> And one morning all that was burning,
> one morning the bonfires
> leapt out of the earth
> devouring human beings
> and from then on fire,
> gunpowder from then on,
> and from then on blood.
> Bandits with planes and Moors,
> bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
> bandits with black friars spattering blessings
> came through the sky to kill children
> and the blood of children ran through the streets
> without fuss, like children's blood.
>
> Jackals that the jackals would despise
> stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
> vipers that the vipers would abominate.
>
> Face to face with you I have seen the blood
> of Spain tower like a tide
> to drown you in one wave
> of pride and knives.
>
> Treacherous
> generals:
> see my dead house,
> look at broken Spain :
> from every house burning metal flows
> instead of flowers
> from every socket of Spain
> Spain emerges
> and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
> and from every crime bullets are born
> which will one day find
> the bull's eye of your hearts.
>
> And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
> speak of dreams and leaves
> and the great volcanoes of his native land.
>
> Come and see the blood in the streets.
> Come and see
> the blood in the streets.
> Come and see the blood
> in the streets!*
>
> Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am
> in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I
> quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read
> such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.
>
> I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank
> about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its
> official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum
> dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum
> dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all
> attendant resources.
>
> The United States now occupies 702 military installations
> throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable
> exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got
> there but they are there all right.
>
> The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear
> warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be
> launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of
> nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever
> cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile,
> Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You?
> Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that
> this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of
> nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political
> philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a
> permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.
>
> Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States
> itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their
> government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent
> political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which
> we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
>
> I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech
> writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose
> the following short address which he can make on television to the
> nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning,
> sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile,
> curiously attractive, a man's man.
>
> 'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin
> Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except
> he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We
> don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God.
> I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a
> freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give
> compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We
> are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a
> barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral
> authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't
> you forget it.'
>
> A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We
> don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is
> stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the
> winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a
> limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in
> which case of course you have constructed your own protection and,
> it could be argued, become a politician.
>
> I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall
> now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.
>
> Where was the dead body found?
> Who found the dead body?
> Was the dead body dead when found?
> How was the dead body found?
>
> Who was the dead body?
>
> Who was the father or daughter or brother
> Or uncle or sister or mother or son
> Of the dead and abandoned body?
>
> Was the body dead when abandoned?
> Was the body abandoned?
> By whom had it been abandoned?
>
> Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
>
> What made you declare the dead body dead?
> Did you declare the dead body dead?
> How well did you know the dead body?
> How did you know the dead body was dead?
>
> Did you wash the dead body
> Did you close both its eyes
> Did you bury the body
> Did you leave it abandoned
> Did you kiss the dead body
>
> When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is
> accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are
> actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But
> sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other
> side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
>
> I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching,
> unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to
> define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial
> obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
>
> If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we
> have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the
> dignity of man.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
>
> * Extract from "I'm Explaining a Few Things" translated by
> Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by
> Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House
> Group Limited.
>
>

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