Blue skies, snow on
the ground, back in Beijing. Up early,
meditation, gym, coffee, smoothie; got the old routine back. Steel rails there to hold on to once again
and order your day with.
The Stones, live at Madison Square Garden from 1969, “Stray
Cat Blues” was the first tune on mix as I kicked it off with my familiar old
stair master. There’s another tune that
I’ve heard since I was twelve or so, probably a few hundred times, in as many
different contexts. I never tire of
hearing Keith’s grinding rhythm work on that tune, or Mick Taylors soaring
solos with their perfectly timed pull off hammers that I can visualize how to
do but can’t really approximate. And it
has always been a lewd, compromised theme, wherein the other Mick paints a
convincing scene of paid sex with two teenage girls.
My older daughter turned thirteen last week. The second verse of the song was, perhaps for
the first time, truly repulsive this morning, wherein Mick Jagger croons: “I
can see that you’re just thirteen years old.
I don’t want no I.D.” No way to
equivocate or hold it up to the light any longer. It’s just a vile thing to be triumphant
about. Then, irony added to insult
when, at the end when 18,000 or so people explode, cheering. "Pedofile Blues!" And had I been there, (alright, I was three,)
I would have been one of them.
Thoughts turn to hapless Dylan Farrow and hapless Mia Farrow
and hapless Woody Allen. The Nicholas Kirstof
blog post and the Woody rebuttal I finally read today. Case and counter case made to the court of
public opinion. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/woody-allen-speaks-out.html For better or worse, we all rely on the rule
of law, to make it through our day.
Injustice is real and in theory it is brave to fight against it. Certainly we pride ourselves on being able to
广开言路[1]. But
the village square is a rough place to seek redress.
Thoughts to turn Bauchi northern Nigeria, where the Time’s
described the hapless men in the jail house, charged with homosexual crimes who
will be flogged in punishment. This,
although the courthouse was surrounded by residents who insisted the proper punishment was stoning to death, under Sharia Law and who took to throwing what they
could in frustration that it was 'only' a whippng. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/world/africa/nigeria-uses-law-and-whip-to-sanitize-gays.html?ref=world It wasn’t long ago that England forced the
sterilization of its key code breaker in World War II, for the same
crimes. How quickly public opinion in a
certain swath of the modern world, can shift on such matters.
Thoughts move across the continent to Kenya where Isak
Dinesen (a.k.a. Karen Blixen) had her farm “at the foot of the Ngong
Hills.” I finished “Out of Africa” the
other morning and loved it. There’s a bit
of mob justice that she reckons with the hapless Kikuyu squatter boy who
accidently shoots another child. And, in
her rendering it is not a moral question, but merely a matter of remuneration
for the loss the other family suffered. The innocence of the boy she has already decided.
The tale is a fascinating contrast of opposites. Many things you might fault the English for,
but she is Danish. Many things you might
fault as a male prerogative, to sagaciously adjudicate a native trial or kill
one and then another lion, but then, she’s a woman. Many things you might fault in association
with the greed of a business, but then, her business fails.
More elementally, she writes beautifully of a time and a
sense of ethics both European and I presume East African, that is long gone. They speak to me as a collection of views
into that world, which in a way is not dissimilar, perhaps, to what I am trying
to do with this blog, posting something every day about a life in China, for
one year.
“The plan which I had formed in
the beginning to give in to all minor matters so as to keep what was of vital
importance to me, had turned out to be a failure. I had consented to give away my possessions
one by one, as a kind of ransom for my own life, but by the time that I had
nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all, for fate to get rid
of.
There was a full moon in those
day, it shone into the bare room and laid the pattern of the windows on the
floor. I thought that the moon might be
looking in an wondering how long I meant to stay on, in a place from which
everything else had gone. ‘Oh no,’ said
the moon, ‘time means very little to me.’
P. 322 Penguin Modern Classics
And one of the great joys of finishing a book is that you
get to start another one. Now, another
remembrance of lost time, by a man who lived in the next generation after Karen
Blixen, and shared quite a few turns of that moon on the earth with her,
certainly, Patrick Leigh Fermor “A Time
of Gifts.” The praise for the man and
his writing and his heroic life, is so unequivocally I dig in
expecting each paragraph to sparkle.
Another collection of views into a place and time, in this instance, prewar continental
Europe, that was probably quite routine as it was lived and precious now, for
having been captured.
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