puppet video

Bradley Manning

presently awaiting trial in solitary confinement in medieval conditions.

here is the video that he leaked.

I wasnt aware of this video until I received a link to the plight of Bradley Manning through moot today. Why wasnt this covered more seriously in the British press when it was first released?

Here is a recent news report on the conditions that Bradley is being kept in and the way in which his friends and colleagues are being harrassed when they try to visit him.

My immediate thought is that all this is happening on Obama´s watch. 
I followed another link at moot to the Guardian´s report on Bradley´s treatment which is even more shocking.
On the moot page about this are two pictures of Bradley - as he was and as he is now. 

I´ve just watched a video of an edition of a programme called 'Four Corners' (Australian ABC) entitled "The Forgotten Man:Bradley Manning". Towards the end of the second video is an interview with Daniel Ellsberg, himself a whistleblower during the Vietnam War, saying this about Bradley: 
 "In my case it was when I looked at the Pentagon Papers that I realised, late in the game, that the case for war in Vietnam was never legitimate.  . . .Then I began to see all that killing of Vietnamese as murder and murder, it seemed to me, was something that had to be stopped even if it put me in prison to do it. I would say that Bradley Manning has shown a willingness to give his life, his freedom,  . . . . . . for his country and you can't be more patriotic than that."

Abbot Stuart at Mucknell has this on his homepage at their website:

"Could it be that we have an image, a picture, however vague, of what it would be like to meet Christ, and when we don’t find that, we fail to recognise him – just as people failed to recognise Christ in the person of Jesus 2000 years ago?

On the whole the religious folk didn’t recognise Jesus as the Christ; it was the oddest selection of people who did, people discounted by the respectable Jews: shepherds –who had time to ponder and wonder, the Gentile ‘Wise Men’ –who gazed at the stars with open minds ~ people who had no preconceptions of the Christ. These were the ones who recognised him first, and then those who were mad or out-cast, like the lepers and the prostitutes, folk who were rejected, not wanted, by ‘society’ - people who were forced to wonder what life was all about.

In a sense they were starting with a clean slate in a way we can’t as far as ‘what we expect’ goes. We have been conditioned to assume we know what we are looking for, but both the New Testament and St Benedict suggest that Christ comes to us in the ordinariness of life, inviting us to embrace ‘life’ and whatever it brings with generosity, compassion and an open mind and heart."

It seems relevant tonight.

 

earlier I wrote:

In truth it never did.
and I do not quite know why I wrote this.

when the music flows, the music flows.
I can never know where, how or why.
I can only trust that it flows from you and back to you,
even though it may be by an indirect route.

poetry.
then can be no poetry without you.
poetry without you is no poetry at all
because you are the source of all poetry.
wherever there is beauty, there is you also,
albeit in disguise.


[suddenly, greece occurs to me.
the old, old dualism: greek v jew.
you as singularity.
you as diversity.]

I wrestled with all that, before I discovered you in the psalms:
before I came to understand you as singularity.
but in truth, I'm not sure that that itself isnt a disguise:
a means of approach that then needs to be shed as graven image.

allowing you to be you.
only possible through prayer.


the music can never be allowed to replace the prayer.
but I am a musician.
music needs to happen in me.
why?
not why but because.
because. because.
reasons are not always necessary or clear.


singularity diversity.
isnt this what the trinity is?


the truth is probably neither and both.

really, this blog is completely about my relationship with you.

and sustaining it.

this week has surely been the worst since I came to Iceland. . . . . 

starting over then. 

again, this feeling that my life with you is inseperable from my illness in some indefinable way;

that my journey to health has to start (and finish) with you.

If only I could really understand this consistently.

the voices of derision and irrelevance nag away day by day, 
sometimes overwhelmingly powerfully.
but the same could be said of my work:
this so often seems inadequate. 

really the one needs to feed into the other:
but so far attempts to do this flounder.
(it's not something that one can 'attempt' of course:
a matter of the heart only.)

this blog is also about my creative life.
at the moment it IS my creative life -
my music sparking into life only for briefest moments -
my work should help with this, and indeed it does at times.
certainly not consistently though. . . . . .
not in a way which can help me overcome the everpresent dualism.
(music v prayer)

reading through this again I realise that you ARE my creative life.
I have no creative life apart from you.
my music can now only spring from you and return to you.
In truth it never did.
But instead of freeing me it binds me because this too is a matter of faith.

is this something I have only just realised?
do I - even now - realise this?
will I ever really understand this?