Refaat Alareer (23 September 1979 – 7 December 2023)
NOTE: Refaat Alareer was a native of Gaza City who from 2007 taught world literature, comparative literature, and both fiction and non-fiction creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. He had an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London and a PhD in English Literature at the Universiti Putra in Malaysia. He was one of a group of Palestinian poets who wrote in the English language. He was killed at home, together with his family, in an Israeli bombing raid on 7 December. The University in which he worked has been completely destroyed.
For me this is an extraordinary example of a poet bearing witness, acting as a voice for his culture in the most extreme conditions – yet retaining a light touch and a certain gentleness even when doing so.
Extract from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (1), exploring the notion of ‘concrete science’. The idea comes from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who is quoted as saying that “there are two distinct modes of scientific thought … two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and imagination: the other at a remove from it”. ‘Concrete science’ is the first. The specific focus, in this part of the book, is on the development of Early Neolithic societies in lowland parts of the Fertile Crescent, especially along the valleys of the Jordan and Euphrates rivers.
Graeber and Wengrow write: “It’s important to recall that most of humanity’s greatest scientific discoveries – the invention of farming, pottery, weaving, metallurgy, systems of maritime navigation, monumental architecture, the classification and indeed domestication of plants and animals. and so on” come out of ‘concrete science’. But what does such a science actually look like, in the archaeological record? “The answer lies precisely in its ‘concreteness’. Invention in one domain finds echoes and analogies across a whole range of others, which might otherwise seem completely unrelated”.
“We can see this clearly in early Neolithic cereal cultivation. Recall that flood-retreat farming required people to establish durable settlements in mud-based environments, like swamps and lake margins. Doing so meant becoming intimate with the properties of soils and clays, carefully observing their fertility under different conditions, but also experimenting with them as tectonic materials, or even as vehicles of abstract thought. As well as supporting new forms of cultivation, soil and clay – mixed with wheat and chaff – became basic materials of construction: essential in building the first permanent houses; used to make ovens, furniture and insulation – almost everything, in fact, except pottery, a later invention in this part of the world.
“But clay was also used, in the same times and places, to (literally) model relationships of utterly different kinds, between men and women, people and animals. People started using its plastic qualities to figure out mental problems, making small geometric tokens that many see as direct precursors to later systems of mathematical notation. Archaeologists find these tiny numerical devices in direct association with figurines of herd animals and full-bodied women: the kind of miniatures that stimulate so much speculation about Neolithic spirituality, and which find later echoes in myths about the demiurgic, life-giving properties of clay. As we’ll soon see, earth and clay even come to redefine relationships between the living and the dead.
“Seen this way, the ‘origins of farming’ start to look less like and economic transition and more like a media revolution, which was also a social revolution, encompassing everything from horticulture to architecture, mathematics to thermodynamics, and from religion to the remodelling of gender roles. And while we can’t know who exactly was doing what in this brave new world, it’s abundantly clear that women’s work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What’s more, it was all carried out in ways that made radical inequality an extremely unlikely outcome”.
(1) David Graeber and David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Penguin Books, 2022 (First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane in 2021)
NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. As an activist, he also helped to make Occupy Wall Street (2011) an era-defining moment. He died on 2 September 2020. David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at University College London. He conducts fieldwork in Africa and the Middle East and is the author of What Makes Civilisation? Following David Graeber’s death shortly after the text of The Dawn of Everything was completed, David Wengrow has overseen its publication.
Recently I’ve been unwell and housebound, hardly even watching the world go by. But there came a day when I could go out again, a day that was blessed with sun. It seemed bright and new. I was almost blinded by its luminous presence on a white tree-patterned wall. I had entered late fall, a season with both autumnal and winter features.
The sun shone on trees in Gloucester City Park which retained some of their foliage, but in an end-of-season way that signals austere changes to come. Leaves showed a fragile, lingering beauty, prior to their necessary descent.
The Brunswick Gardens, sitting under a clear blue sky, were home to trees where the leaves had already fallen, leaving the branches as patterns of quiescent arboreal bones. The leaves were on the lawn. Other, managed, flora continued to flourish.
In visual and tactile ways, after an indoor confinement, the neighbourhood was full of reward for me. But I felt cold, and it was indeed the coldest it’s been for many many months. I could not stay out for long. But I had encountered a moment in the year, of interbeing, of living presence – where the wheel is visibly and palpably turning. I was glad to be there, however briefly, available for a nurturing and healing experience.
Highly recommended. Unseen Beings: How We Forgot the World Is More Than Human (1) is about the many beings we humans have actively ‘unseen’ and the consequences of our human-centric lens. Author Erik Jampa Andersson describes his book as a diagnostic exploration of the roots of the climate crisis, itself an extreme consequence of a much wider malaise. Whereas the common view of ‘saving the planet’ tends to be one of ‘guarding the storehouse’, a better focus would be on ‘supporting the welfare of living beings’.
Andersson has a background in Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan medicine. In the manner of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths, and of his medical training, he divides his book into four parts: Diagnosis, Causes and Conditions, Prognosis, Treatment.
Diagnosis concerns “our ecological disease”. Andersson reminds us of what the climate crisis is, how far it has been allowed to go, and the “fanciful stories” with which we have soothed our fears: “full of human exceptionalism, divine protection, techno-fixes and post-apocalyptic salvation”. For Andersson, the foundational root cause is “the sundering of human and non-human beings, and our perceptual separation from ‘Nature’. He refers to “the poison of anthropocentricity”. He reviews the evidence for plant and fungal sentience and awareness as well as that of the animal kingdom. He concludes that Nature is not a place, but “a tightly knit community of interconnected beings, some seen, many unseen, all engaged in their own affairs and with their own experience of reality”. He describes this relational approach to the living world as “what most scholars now call ‘animism’ … neither a religion nor a system of belief, but a paradigm of more-than-human relationship”. He sees this stance toward the world as “our natural state”.
Causes and Conditions A mini-ice age some 13,000 years ago interrupted an early agricultural period in some places and prompted a series of innovations. The domestication of the horse was especially significant. Andersson sees a move away from our ‘natural state’ beginning at this time. But it is not fully evident to us until the age of written philosophy and scripture. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle declare a hierarchy of sentience from plants up to animals and then humans at the top, uniquely endowed with a rational soul. In the Hebrew book of Genesis, God gives dominion over the Earth and its animals to man for his use. In the Western Christianity of the 13th century CE, Thomas Aquinas says that Christians have no duty of charity to non-humans because they are resources, not persons. In the 17th century CE, early in the West European led colonial era, Descartes holds public vivisections of dogs and other animals declaring that they are soulless automata and that their apparent distress is meaningless. In the mid 19th century CE, Darwin restores other beings as our ancestors and cousins, but but without much sense of kinship or empathy.
Prognosis Here Andersson introduces two concepts from Tibetan medicine: ‘provocation’ and ‘spirit illness’. The provocation of other sentient beings is a health risk. He discusses the origins of the recent Covid-19 pandemic in these terms, as human become ever more invasive of our remaining wild spaces. In cases of deforestation, pollution, and any disruption of air, water, soil and trees, there is a price to pay for the wounding of other spirits, whether seen by the eye, seen through a microscope and normally unseen but recognised by tradition. (‘Supernatural’ is an unhelpful word here – everyone is part of nature). In Tibetan tradition, the cultivation of a clear mind is highly prized and works within human psychology, but not for disruptive events like these. There is a need to make amends. Rituals are held in sensitive and damaged places. The damage caused in these circumstances and the resultant chronic collective disease can only be addressed by learning how to care for eachother, non-human beings and the planet itself.
Treatment Using the Buddhist 8-fold path as a structure, Andersson recommends ‘cultivating care’ over a system of rules and regulations aimed at a ‘sustainability’ which tries to restore the old status quo. We cultivate care of the Earth, one another and non-human beings. Hence: 1 right view is a return to our ‘natural state’, as described under Diagnosis; 2 right intention describes commitment to a path of rewilding and regeneration; 3 right speech is the use of “life-affirming language” (e.g. using ‘they’ as an alternative to ‘it’ for non-human beings); 4 right action is causing as little harm as possible to other beings; 5 right livelihood means adopting principles of authentic sustainability and non-exploitation; 6 right diligence is based on “the durability of the heart-felt ethic; 7 right mindfulness means “paying attention to nature’s vitality”; 8 right concentration involves imaging a new future with “authentic myth-making”.
Concerning 8 above, Andersson has been profoundly moved by the work of J. R. R. Tolkien from his later childhood onwards. As a result, he developed a high valuation of authentic myth-making and enchantment. In this realm, the non-human is essential. Tolkien had his own life-changing moment of enchantment when, as a student, he first read the Old English words: Eala earendel engla beorhtast, ofer middangeard monnum sended. (Hail Earendel brightest of angels, above the middle-earth sent unto men). Of this evocation of Venus arising as the morning star, in the old language, Tolkien later wrote: “there was something very remote and strange and beautiful about these words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English”. For Andersson, authentic myth and authentic science work together in support of a redemptive animist vision. By contrast, the form of discourse to worry about is ‘fallacy’ – a complete dissociation from the truth. Andersson again quotes Tolkien: “if men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts and evidence) then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible) Fantasy will perish and become morbid delusion”. For Andersson, this too has become a symptom of our current ecological disease, making the need for honest and healthy communication all the more urgent.
For me, Andersson has made a valuable addition to a growing literature about the current crisis, whose most alarming symptom is climate breakdown. He goes to the root of the problem, offering a clear and coherent view about how to stand in the face of it. It is a well-researched, well-crafted and compassionate contribution to the genre.
(1) Erik Jampa Andersson Unseen Beings: How We Forgot the World is More Than Human Carlsbad, CA & New York City; London; Sydney; New Delhi: Hay House, 2023
I attach a links to conversations between the author and Andrew Harvey below. It adds considerably to what I can present in a review:
From the modern animist perspective of his Unseen Beings: How We Forgot the World Is More Than Human, Erik Jampa Andersson looks at what we owe to our canine friends.
“In our own evolution as a species, non-humans have often played crucial roles. Plants and animals weren’t always just our food and possessions – they were are mentors, companions, even our ancestors.
“There’s one non-human, in particular, whose profound impact on our human story warrants far more recognition … They were descended from the beasts of legend – formidable hunters who commanded vast swathes of land with ferocious might. In many of our myths and legends, they were immortalized as guardians of the underworld and crucial intermediaries between the human and non-human domains. Before we had ever tamed a horse, milked a cow, or sown a field of grain, we had befriended a dog.
“… It’s believed that humans and wolves were gradually drawn together during the perilously harsh conditions of the Last Glacial Maximum [20,000+ years ago: JN]. As our paths began to cross more and more frequently in our pursuit of mutual prey, what likely started as a timid sharing of spoils led to an unusual sense of kinship between the two predators. Wolves were drawn into the warmth of human encampments, and ultimately made themselves quite at home at the foot of our beds. They offered us vital protection, companionship, and a natural ‘security alarm’ in a wild and dangerous world, while we provided them with warmth, food, and evidently also emotional satisfaction.
“Studies of canine intelligence have repeatedly attested to dogs’ advanced capacity for memory, social cognition, inferential learning, and even comprehension (and possible use) of human language. But beyond their clear intelligence, what deserves significantly more attention is the very real impact dogs have had on our own evolutionary trajectory.
“Unlike predators who prefer to prey on weaker animals, wolves thrived as persistence hunters, successfully felling giant mammals by stalking them to exhaustion in well-organized packs. As territorial animals, they also went to the great trouble of staking out their own tribal domains, maintaining a distinctly pastoral lifestyle in complex social groups.
“Such practices were wholly foreign to early humans and other simians, but by the time our ancestors found their footing in the Eurasian wilderness, they had become rather formidable and territorial pack hunters themselves. Researchers suggest that these novel human behaviours were at least partially influenced by our burgeoning relationship with canines, who introduced us to their world, taught us their hunting tricks, and afforded us peace of mind by protecting our settlements against less amiable foes.
“The domestication of dogs was one of the key forces that led to the development of fully modern humans, impacting our relationship with one another and the world at large for many millennia to come”.
(1) Erik Jampa Andersson Unseen Beings: How We Forgot the World is More Than Human Carlsbad, CA & New York City; London; Sydney; New Delhi: Hay House, 2023
From: In Such Hard Times: the Poetry of Wei Ying-wu Red Pine (Translator) Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2009
Wei Ying-wu was a poet of the later 8th. century CE, as we count time. It was a period when the later-remembered-as-glorious T’ang dynasty had begun to unravel (a hesitant centre, Mongol incursions, Warlordism at home). Translator Red Pine says that “Wei lived his life wondering what went wrong”, giving a melancholy tinge to many of his poems. He was distantly related to the Imperial family, a scholar in both the Buddhist and Confucian traditions who spent many years as a state official without much enjoying it. This poem was written in 785 – in England, the time of the Venerable Bede and eight years before the Viking sack of the monastery at Lindisfarne.
In the background of this poem is a traditional story about a fisherman who traces peach petals upstream and discovers them coming from a hidden world where people live in peace. But after returning to his village to tell others, the fisherman is unable to find the way there again.
An old man, left handed like me, pauses over his writing. He is held in his concentration, and somewhat lost to the world. He faces away from the sky and the crescent moon. He relies on an interior candle to light him. But the moon sees and influences him anyway. None of the seven swords is drawn for martial combat. He wields a quill instead: the metaphorical sword of discrimination is an essential feature of thinking and writing, and sometimes it can bite. The number seven suggests a level of experience and resource, perhaps also a creative pleasure in his task. He’s been around a bit, taken a few knocks, and had his epiphanies as well. He perseveres on the journey, come what may.
The image comes from the first of a three card Druidcraft Tarot (1) reading. I did it on 26 October, early in the run up to Samhain and before the October moon was full. I had just completed a ritual that ended my formal contemplative inquiry within and beyond Druidry. I am still a Druid. I am still temperamentally inclined to contemplation and inquiry, both separately and together. There will be a great of deal continuity in my practice. But the structure of a dedicated project has quietly disintegrated, now redundant, and this needed a formal recognition. The image above reveals a constellation of consciousness, energy and activity that is now in the background. There, it has a continuing presence and influence – as a kind of internal ancestry. In the foreground, something new has the freedom to emerge.
The card below indicates how I stand now. Whereas I found it easy to identify with the Seven of Swords image, the Prince of Pentacles came as a shock. But the teaching behind the Tarot is that time runs differently in the psychic realms and doesn’t exist in the causal. Child and youthful parts of me still live. The young adult depicted here is at home and confident in the material world. He is not a compulsive warrior like some of his brothers but will take a stand when needed, using skilful means. He is an Earth defender. Health, home and material security matter to him and in these domains he leans toward practicality and realism about the world he is living in. He turns towards this world, not away from it, and does not position himself as above the battle. He is a counterweight to some of the spiritual movements I have explored in my inquiry, which would think of him as ‘unevolved’. He has, however, been an active presence over my last couple of years of relocation and now steps forward to reclaim an acknowledged space in my life.
The third card of the triad is the Six of Wands, and traditionally indicates what may be emerging. The sixes are all auspicious, suggestive of balance, union, and integration. In the active energised fire element, it suggests success, through the image of a landowner and his servants returning home after a successful outing with his hawk. The card seems to ask me what I understand by success at this time in my life, and how much I value it. What motivates and energises me to be successful by my current criteria? What skills, resources and help might I need to achieve successful outcomes? What role might magic play?
I notice, here and now, an unfamiliarity with this way of approaching life. I have thought of myself as too old, with no worldly ambition and nothing I need to prove. This card may be challenging me to review those understandings. Have I lapsed into limiting self-caricature? Have I overdone retirement? Asking those questions I find that I do still have energy and resources, and that I am also concerned about overestimating them. Balance and proportion matter, and I do not want to be consumed or over-taxed by a new project. Nonetheless, this reading opens up space and potential for new active ventures in the world. This reading, overall, has facilitated a significant Samhain shift in my sense of possible futures. For this is a season of not only endings, but of beginnings too.
(1) Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druidcraft Tarot: Use the Magic of Wicca and Druidry to Guide Your Life London: Connections, 2004 (Illustrated by Will Worthington)
My wife Elaine and I went there early on Sunday evening, 22 October. It was my first visit, her second. She was very happy to repeat the experience. The picture above depicts entry to the building, and a brief walk towards what became a full immersion. The light effects and imagery were accompanied by a soaring and joyful music. The ancient building was packed with people sharing this experience. I was pleased to be held in such a celebratory space.
As I understood, or rather felt it at the time, the two images immediately below seem to show time and materiality coming into existence in an act of creation that speeds almost out of control. Certainly, for me, the rapidly changing sequence of images demonstrated a tremendous movement, power and energy. It looked, in those moments, more like sheer cosmic exuberance and play, than any kind of plan.
The installation as a whole had still spaces as well. It took advantage of the cathedral’s medieval architecture, where light and their colour could enhance its majestic serenity.
I also noticed the skill with which the installation incorporated medieval iconography, though I confess that it went past me in something of a blur. There was so much going on, and I found that I could not concentrate on individual images, or even identify them, as much as I would have liked. Then I let go, and surrendered to the experience as a gestalt.
Even the nooks and corners of the building that were largely left alone were washed in the magic of the light. I valued being briefly able to focus on them, their very plainess bringing something to the experience.
Finally, below, I show the tree of life, as light. It is an icon about which so many traditions have had so much to say, for such a long time. Certainly, it acted as a spiritual anchor for me, in that space: a comfort to a practising Druid. I loved the almost delicate fecundity of the portrayal. Gratitude to the Cathedral for enabling this installation, and to Projection Art Gallery for providing it.
I was moved and inspired by Philip Carr-Gomm’s recent Peacemaking podcast on his Tea with a Druid. In the first five minutes he checks in with his live viewers, as is his custom, and finds a theme of anxiety and distress about world events. He speaks of the need for ‘islands of sanity’ – enclosures of calm and peace. He introduces the hope that the people gathered together by the podcast itself can become one. A guided meditation later in the podcast does the job. The gathering becomes an enclosure of calm and peace in real time. It still worked for me well after the event. Such is the magic of Druidry.
Before the meditation, Philip explains the role of Druids, ancient and modern, as peacemakers. The ancient Druids were exempted from military service and had a pan-Celtic authority. A Roman author depicts Druids as walking between warring tribes, urging calm and asking the fighters to put down their weapons: they were “shaming Mars before the Muses”. The God of war and destruction had to bow down before the Goddesses of creativity and inspiration. The Druids of that time were also lawmakers and judges. In Ireland, St. Patrick valued their Brehon Laws so highly that they were written down and continued in force. Peacemaking, peacekeeping and jurisprudence worked together.
In modern Druidry, Philip emphasises the attention given to peace in ritual, where the intention is to begin and end in peace both inward and outward. Our Druid prayer asks for justice, because where there is justice in the world there is also peace. Justice isn’t about killing. It’s about peace: right action, right speech, right thought, right behaviour. We trust the power of prayer and of consciousness directed by love. Sitting in meditation or prayer influences the people involved, and creates a field of consciousness and energy which acts as a patch of calm and peace in bad psychic weather.
I recommend readers to watch the video and, if you are willing, enter into its meditative space. I also include The Modron Prayer (Modron being the Ancient Mother) in this post, as a way of ending it:
“Deep within the still centre of our being,
May we find peace.
Silently, within the quiet of the Grove,
May we share peace.
Powerfully, within the greater circle of humankind,
6.15 pm, 6 October 2023. The experience has gone. The images remain. At a surface level, I can use them to trigger memories of my early evening walk. Chiefly, I remember being surprised at how early the twilight was. I hadn’t caught up with the year and was almost shocked. I have caught up now, nearly a week later, as the darkening process speeds up and we approach Samhain. In today’s world, my country will experience a dramatic boost on 29 October as our clocks ‘fall back’. The 6.15 of one day will become the 5.15 of the next.
Looking at the images more deeply, really looking, and giving them time, I can let them nourish me. I connect with their liminal beauty. Both images present me with land, water, sky, and hints of the fiery sun. But they do so in different ways.
In the image above, I am mostly drawn to the energy of water. The variation in shade emphasises movement and different ripple effects. Land, trees, and artifacts are all in silhouette, but the water has light and shade. It is the water that feels most alive. There is variation in the clouds too, with their patterned layers and subtle access to sunlight just above the trees. But they are not as mobile as the water. The sunlight itself seems very subdued. It’s still there, though very much in the background.This is not yet a night sky.
In the image below the water is strong too, but my eyes are drawn above to the clouds, which here are more dramatic. The residual power of waning sunlight is very clearly present. For me, there’s a sense of the tree tops yearning upwards as they reach for the gifts of the sun whilst it still retains a presence. Although I am contemplating images and not immersed in the landscape I have a strong sense of living presence in a field of living presence. In this state I feel a conceivably irrational confidence in life and the world.. A fragile kind of faith, that my heart cannot resist.
Contemplative Inquiry 