It has become apparent that dogs can understand the world just as well upside down:
Researchers at the University of Lincoln have shown that pet dogs also exhibit "left gaze bias", but only when looking at human faces. No other animal has been known to display this behaviour before. says the New Scientist.
This is perhaps because we spend so much time lying down trying to work out if master is ready for walkies yet, or if we will be able to get our tummies rubbed. None the less, a talent is a talent, however it was acquired.
Best of all, it is a thing that shows how intelligent dogs are. Only humans have ‘left gaze bias’, and dogs only look at the right side of the human face, not other doggie faces, and dogs adapt their view to their postion, ie upside down or not. Monkeys, who are normally thought to be the brainy ones, can’t do this.
Monkeys are nasty selfish characters anyway and not at all qualified to be man’s best friend and help meet.
Clearly this indicates that the best kind of animal to have in the Doghouse is the canine. The ability to understand the world upside down is obviously necessary in this crazy day and age, when, like the Sufis of yor, we can truly say that the world is upside down, inside out, and the wrong way round.
So outa my way ‘Boxer’ McCain, Pit Bull Palin and co, it’s the Doghouse for us, and the doghouse for you!
VOTE GEORGE THE DOG ON ELECTION DAY.
Doggie fellows, don’t forget to pull your owners round to the poll booth.
naşir yanında jill üstünde saygın 29th, 2008 içinde şiir.
benim imam
gevrek ısı doğmak üstünde su,
harem- mavi lekeli- cam
kupür belgili tanımlık soluk numune
-in benim sinir kalp,
veering yuvarlak impassioned
trafik üstünde Taksim dördül,
sallamak yanında yaşlı şarkı içinde yeni yorum.
saçkıranlı- silâhlı men gülmek aynı derecede
onlar gözünü dikerek bakmak kusur bulan ve aç
vasıl Frenk sarışın. senin kaş
çalılık sen -e yargıçlık etmek bkz. judgment
ve bulmak o eksik.
I am a kadın -in a bin ard arda geliş,
almak –dan benim kıskanç ev
yanında işsiz bilseme. senin’ a adam
-in düş ve sert mahkumiyet.
I oturmak içinde belgili tanımlık dolmus düşsel
senin ateşten kıl cereyan
arkaya sen karşıdan karşıya belgili tanımlık ova.
benim dolmus kırılmak aşağı
ve I am muhafız ev
yanında a kar-capped adam
kim anlatmak Türk mihmandarlık.
başka muharrir gülümsemek ve güçlükle solumak
vasıl haram kitap, Jane çetin zor
ve hapishane tümce.
içinde benim us sen kaldırmak
senin savaş silahları üstünde belgili tanımlık minare
ve ses çıkaran seslenmek belgili tanımlık şafak:
‘dua bkz. be daha iyi –dan uyumak’.
ayaklanma kırmızı arkaya kule kütük parçası
belgili tanımlık günbatımı’ rüzgar azılı ani patlama
senin cüppe. içinde korkmak ve titrek
sen ayakta durmak sert,
ve I istemek -e doğru ayakta durmak yanında senin yan
(içinde senin kalp kadın milleti are değil haram,
benim imam) ve kaldırmak
belgili tanımlık bora -in değişmek,
şarkı hürriyet içine belgili tanımlık
zindan -in belgili tanımlık enterrored
aynı derecede onlar kavramak onların yara izi;
ve I, I was esmek burada
içine senin savaş silahları.
if you can make a better tranlation please add as comment
Hello fans, voters, countrymen………… I have some cool fans in America, here’s what Bill says:
This man should be our president," said Mr Clinton.
er, well Mr Clinton just to remind you, I’m a dog not a man, thank goodness, but I will try my best in the Doghouse. This man also approved of my fight to rule the pack:
Saint Al Gore, who sits on God’s right hand, yep he’ll be down in my back yard.
As you know, Al saved the world from the Apocalypse by making a movie about and despair. A true dog in every sense of the word.
One issue Saint Al campaigned on (or might do) is plastic bags for dog poo. A thorny issue. OK we dogs don’t want human puppies to be eating our doodoos but you have to think about those plastic bags, sitting there for 8,000 years full of shit. A bit like the Republican party.
Talking about parties, my old shaggy pal and I had a beautiful dance in Florida today. He held me tight and I held him back, it was like the old days. Hush don’t talk about that to Saint Al tho he doesn’t like that kind of time wastin’.
My bitch Michelle was glad when it ended.
‘I don’t like you keeping that kind of company, babe,’ she said with a growl.
‘That’s how we dogs are, hun,’ I told her.
An American woman quoted as saying that Obama is a Muslim, goes on to express her concern/fantasy that he will ‘give them all nuclear weapons’. What? All of them? Individually? And if you would like a nuclear weapon, would it be enough to convert to Islam?
I’m not fully convinced that Americans actually know what a Muslim is. Except the Muslim Americans of course, and they’re keeping quiet. Here’s someone who might start off the education for US citizens:
Like ‘Boxer’ McCain, only an actual Boxer, freedom fighter, humanitarian, greatest sportsman of the 20th century (official) and hero of the world, white and black alike. Now you can’t actually give a nuclear weapon to each and every Muslim, Miss America, you’s gonna have to rethink.
Well who would have seen that coming? Palin’s home electors in the Alaskan newspaper Anchorage Daily News have said they’re gonna vote Obama, Republican Colin Powell has come over from the dark side, along with many former Republican black voters. People who never voted before, young and old, black and white, they’re switching, and they’re switching in public, proudly.
A leading online newspaper asks, if Obama were Republican and McCain a Democrat, who would you vote for? At least among the media, the issue of Barack Obama’s colour has gone out of the window. Not only is he being compared in quite serious circles with Christ and Superman, but he is more realistically being compared to John F Kennedy.
Young, idealistic, making few promises they thought they couldn’t keep (including, strangely perhaps, the promise early in the Campaign that he would ‘stop the sea level rising’, presumably through finally signing the Kyoto protocol.) Obama makes people believe. In his closing speech in Canton , Ohio he said:
‘I ask of you what has been asked of Americans throughout our history. I ask you to believe, not just in my ability to bring about change, but in yours.’ They believe in him, and because of the way he speaks, they believe in themselves at the same time.
When Obama sombrely descended from his plane coming into Hawaii to see his very sick Grandmother, you thought the script was honestly being written by God Himself. The hope of America, the light at the end of the dark tunnel for the rest of the world, cared more than anything for his Grannie, the woman he said ‘poured everything she had into me’. Republicans who made snide remarks about publicity stunts were hushed by a shocked public. Obama, as his campaign draws to an end, has the confidence to be genuinely warm-hearted, and all America loves him for it.
Even the finance for the Obama campaign has something of the people about it. Anyone who wants to can log in to his website and make a donation. Unlike previous elections, and unlike the McCain campaign, people who have very little are donating small amounts, but millions of small donations make the richest Campaign in history, and Obama isn’t beholden to any big companies or sectors for it. his million dollar advert on prime TV this weekend is one of the benefits he can reap from the public’s generosity.
In his speech this week, the last full week of campaigning, Obama speaks of a family whose son is ill with a debilitating and incurable condition, who cannot get the proper treatment because their private health insurance turned down his case. The mother Robyn wrote,
"I ask only this of you — on the days where you feel so tired you can’t think of uttering another word to the people, think of us. When those who oppose you have you down, reach deep and fight back harder." This mother of a dying son believes that thinking of her suffering will be enough to encourage Obama. In other words, she believes that Obama really really cares about her family. That is his secret; people believe that he genuinely cares about them.
Compare this to the reaction to Sarah Palin’s admirable sentiments about supporting special needs children, where the reporter merely points out that while her words are pleasant, she actually opposes amendment 51, which would provide funding for the project.
‘We’re not outa the woods yet,’ as Palin might say, in her jokey ‘Alaska girl’ way. Thousands of black voters have allegedly been handed leaflets warning them that should they try to vote, they will be arrested for any loose legal ends, unpaid parking tickets and so on. In other areas, voters are expected to queue for over 4 hours, making it more difficult for women with families to vote, if they have to pick up children. As usual, voting is on a working day, so employers may make things difficult for staff hoping for time off to queue up. We saw these tactics and more in 2000, when the tragedy of losing Al Gore as president was not then fully realised.
Let’s say when we wake up on Wednesday, Barack Obama is president. We who watch anti-CIA conspiracy films all know that it isn’t the President who runs America. As well as potential assassins, there are plenty of enemies for Obama policies on health, education, green policies, pulling out of Iraq and so on. Even Obama’s running mate Joe Biden has warned there will be a testing period for the new president. Those of us who totally believe in all the CIA conspiracy movies (and we are legion) are not above worrying if a home-grown president-weakening crisis might be in the planning stage right now.
Obama could do with a bit of luck if and when he becomes President. We hope that the relief the world will feel at the end of the Bush era will encourage certain ‘rogue’ elements to make him a peace offering, to help him onto a firm footing. Steps towards appeasement with the US in Iran, in Palestine, and in Pakistan would help enormously.
We are hoping Obama will turn out to be a world leader we can all trust, but we should remember that, although he may be the first ever national leader apart from Obafemi Awolowo who knows what it is like to live in a little African village, it is the United States of America he will be President of, and his first allegiance is with his own people over there.
Hi fans and voters! Welcome to my latest post on my race to the Doghouse.
Several new problems have arisen, and they are all to do with the humans who look after us dogs OR NOT as the case may be. some of these humans claim to be Christians, but of the fundementalist variety. They manage to say sentences where the first part of the sentenc contradicts the second half. You would never catch a dog doing that. in fact, to tell the truth (as we Doghouse candidates always do) you would never catch a dog at all ha ha.
One of the sentences is this one.
I don’t believe in abortion and I believe in guns.
My position is, if a puppy isn’t likely to have any life but a wretched sickly and short one, it’s best to ask the vet to put it down before the pain begins. I have seen little pups in pain and it is cruel to make them suffer.
Also I am against killing and shooting dogs just because they might be worrying sheep or running away down the street, yes even if they have stolen a bone or two. It is hard for a hungry dog to resist taking nice smelling food, and it is only left overs from bins anyway. The dogs who are running wild down the streets have been neglected by the above humans who didn’t want to put them down when they weren’t wanted in the first place, and then failed to socialise and train them properly. These people should have Tamagochis not dogs, but you know what? Their Tamagochis DIE don’t they?
Let’s have some compassion for our fellow dogs, and our pups even if they are going wrong and need retraining. Let’s even have sympathy for humans, even if they are not very good at rational thought. Homo sapiens????? Huh! More like Canus sapiens if you ask me.
For the humans who couldn’t see what was wrong with the first sentence, that is latin and doesn’t mean homosexual. Not that there’s anything worng with that, very natural doggie behaviour. Woof!
The other issue of the day, is the humans who say that i…
‘want to take a small tax hike from the extremely rich and SHARE it among those who really need it.’
Bearing in mind that these critics of mine are Christians, let’s just take a peek at Jesus’ view on this.
‘You should take everything you own, sell it all, and give the money to the poor. For it is easier for a camel to enter the eye of the needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’ (The Bible) (Jewish people that is The New Testament to you).
Now I am not asking you to sell everything and give the money to the poor, such as the dogs’ homes, but if you want to be a real Christian you have probably already done that. All I want to do is to take a little bit from really rich people, who would never notice anyway, and make sure poor people and babies have something to eat, and hospital care if they need it.
How can humans not want to abort pups, but refuse them hospital care for the birth? They really are a different species aren’t they?
For those scholars of great repute, many of whom read this page, so I hear (in my sleep), here is a nugget: the Eye of the Needle is a gate into Jerusalem old town. It was very narrow but also everyone forgot about it so it wasn’t guarded. While the great caravans of the rich would have to wait outside the Gates of Jerusalem until they were reopened at dawn, poor people on foot could just slip in along the narrow alley that was the Eye of the Needle. This is just one of Our Lord’s hilarious jokes.
This is the Eye of the Needle at Petra - yet another Christian joke ha ha
To anyone who hasn’t read the Good Book, it really has lots of laughs in it. My advice is to stop at the bit where he rides in on a donkey, as it gets sad after that and the jokes more or less stop. Well the trial is quite amusing and Jesus retains his wit (’Is it true that you are the son of God?’ ‘You said it! ‘ha ha ha).
Apparently the reason I want to get a bit of money for the little sick children is ‘pure Marxism’ and ’socialism’.
It’s hard for dogs (for whom caring about our pack is the highest honour) to grasp why some humans think it is shameful. But I will say YES I DO CARE for all the little babies and poor people of America and I WiLL HELP us to become a real society and LOVE ONE ANOTHER. Can we become good people and help each other? YES WE CAN!
If you are one of the fundementalist Christians and still are not convinced who you SHOULD be voting for, how about this incontrovertible fact: DOG is an anagram of GOD so there!
In the late 1970s I lived in Brixton, the poor area in South London which had ended up being home to many immigrants from the West Indies. Being first generation, largely working class uneducated young people, they had few contacts locally, and little idea how things worked. While the older men went to the workers’ pubs, especially ‘The George’ in Railton Road, where they were largely accepted by the white South Londoners, to play dominoes and billiards, drink English ‘bitter’ beer and talk about work. Their fat wives would stay home, watching TV and chatting with other wives about their low-paid jobs in cleaning and the like. Meanwhile their children, now young adults the same age as me, felt in between the culture of their parents and the vivid ‘punk-rock’ culture of their peers, who didn’t really fully accept them as part of their generation.
Meanwhile, the world of politics was in upheaval. The oil crash of the mid 1970s had left Britain economically vulnerable, and unemployment was high. The sense of bringing immigrants to work in a country short of workers no longer made sense, when there were too many workers but a shortage of skills. The people they still thought of as immigrants, because of the difference in colour, were however locally-born like themselves.
The IRA, the rebel movement of Ireland which was trying to make the government in London yield Northern Ireland to Eire, was at the peak of the mainland bombing campaign. I had witnessed several bomb attacks, and narrowly escaped an explosion in a cafe where I usually took breakfast of tea and bacon and eggs. A law called the ‘suss’ law had been brought in, ostensibly to enable the police to pick up anyone suspected of terrorism, but used in fact to take Irish and black people into the police station for some dubious interview techniques. Friends who had been arrested under ‘suss’ and taken in for the three days then permitted, reported beatings and mistreatment: being placed between tow mattresses and jumped on, having cigarettes stumped out on their bodies and so on. Later the infamously racist ‘Met’ police would be taken to task for its treatment of innocent citizens.
In the prison meanwhile, the notorious Brixton Prison just up the road, black prisoners sometimes disappeared for weeks at a time, without relatives being informed of their whereabouts. When immigrants were without families, and in a situation where there were no educated black lawyers or ‘friendly’ white lawyers, almost anything was permitted. The local secondary school was known for its institutional racism, and alienated young black boys within a year of their going there. Invariably, these lads would leave school without any qualifications, and often semi-literate.
Eventually some boys managed to get through and go on to college to do ‘A’ levels, bearing God only knows what insults and physical bullying to get through. A team of black lawyers appeared on Railton Road, and the disappearances from the prison ceased after the first enquiry, along with the torture and the unjustified arrests.
In Jamaica, the ‘homeland’ of the parents, meanwhile, Bob Marley and the Wailers were taking the world by storm, encouraging black youth to sort their lives out with the Rasta religion, and to stand up for themselves in an unjust society. Smoking ‘ganja’ , growing their hair into long dreadlocks and playing reggae music was behaviour the hard-working parents thoroughly disapproved of, of course, not least because it got their kids into even greater trouble with the police, this time justified as marijuana was illegal in the UK. This time, the young people were proud of getting arrested; it was for their cause, the right to be Jamaican.
In 1978 the rock Against Racism march walked through Brixton, with Brockwell Park full of beautiful music including The Clash, and black and white youths singing and dancing together. The march was protected from the new neo-Nazi racist groups by the Metropolitan police. What a turnabout! Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister, and John Major, one day to succeed her, led Lambeth council.
Local residents of the beautiful spacious Victorian terraced houses, which gave themselves perfectly to the Jamaican habit of standing outside, chatting and smoking, were to be sold off. Tenant families were unceremoniously sent packing, and those who refused to go mysteriously received firebombs through the front windows, blamed on the neo-Nazi National Front movement, but possibly from a more official source. Tanks from the nearby Chelsea barracks frequently were rolled down the narrow residential streets, intimidating the families and children. One by one, the families agreed to move into the vile concrete prefabricated council flats opposite the police station. The culture of Jamaican London broke down.The gambling houses, the dominoes pubs, the reggae discos, all closed down, and disenfranchised youth increasingly targeted by the right wing government, started to become the notorious gang culture we have today, with hard drugs, guns, and very little religious zeal.
Of course, on the other side of the tracks, the Access course was started in Brixton College which enabled young black people who had left the horrible school without qualifications to get into universities and training courses, and those who did well were able to move out of the slums and join their white peers in the eighties boom. Their children in turn have something like equality today. Gradually, they are moving out of London and becoming part of the landscape. Improved anti-racist laws and sympathetic lawyers mean that racism has been largely kicked out of official life. The third and fourth generation of those original immigrants consider themselves part of British culture, and may visit the West Indies on holiday, like everyone else. True mixing is still new, however, and as I speak a local teacher here in the sticks has been suspended for ‘warning’ her class
‘Don’t be afraid, but the new kid in class is black!’ At least in this day and age, this kind of slur is taken seriously.
In the Hotel we call the Meridion in Abuja, I was introduced to a Very Important Person. This noble-looking gentleman told me that he was educated in the UK, in Loughborough University. I started to reply inanely that I hope he had been as welcomed in my country as I was in his, when the words choked in my mouth: what if he had not had such good experiences, but had met with hostility and racism?
True, it is different to be an African to a Jamaican, because it was the poorest and lowest- class Jamaicans who were taken on as workers , rather than rich middle-class people, but still any black person is likely to experience some racism at some point. Perhaps you will be served last in a shop queue, perhaps a taxi won’t stop for you, or a comment may be made about your white girlfriend. This man correctly interpreted my hesitation,
‘Yes,’ he said gallantly, ‘My reception in England was very warm.’ I was relieved.
Recent rumours that I am not a pedigree are completely untrue. However I must add, and this is very important, that if, as has been claimed, I were indeed a mongrel, this would not and should not have any bearing on my message, nor should it affect anyone’s interpretation fo my character. As I continue to reiterate, all dogs are equal, no matter what their breed.
It may be that pedigrees such as myself have the benefit of better educational opportunities, more time spent on grooming and eternally tempting morsels in the food department. However, there are also disadvantages. You have to remember that my owners are always working and have less and less time for walkies and playing as the credit crunch deepens.
Sometimes I watch the mongrels in the park with their ill-dressed anoracked poverty-stricken unemployed owners, sniffing each others’ bottoms and shitting all over the Sunday League football pitch, something I would never be allowed to do, and I envy them, yes I do. Though their owners are poor, they spend all the money they have left over from cigarettes on their dogs, who have lots of new toys to catch and fetch all the time.
Also where my owners are of course themselves well-trained, and ensure I am not the dominant one in the pack by a variety or ploys intended to humiliate me and put me in my place, the mongrels in the park are often with divorced middle-aged women who regard them as the ‘man of the house’ and they are allowed to dominate their packs and do whatever they like. They even get to eat chocolate biscuits, which my owners have read are bad for dogs so I only ever get any at Christmas from Grandma, who says she ‘can’t resist my big brown eyes’. Just imagine how spoiled I would be if my owners couldn’t read or afford to buy books!
To focus on policy, my main point for today is that dog fighting is wrong in nearly all circumstances, and this is a case where owners should take a firm stand.
Packs of dogs have been permitted to frolic in the park for too long, and many are traipsing home injured, sometimes all too often beyond the vets’ ability to help them. This is unacceptable. No-one is winning, nor are they ever likely to win. It is impossible to say what would even be gained by winning, since all we want to do in the first place is mess around in the park, and this endless fighting is ruining the very environment we want to keep for ourselves.
I therefore propose a complete withdrawal from the park fight area. Dog wardens will be sent out there to assist with the withdrawal, and any dogs found still fighting will be treated as strays and taken to the pound. My rival ‘Boxer’ says it would signal cowardly defeat to stop fighting and says that dogs must be left to run free, but I say ‘no!’ this is not freedom. Freedom is the right to play in the park, and not to live in the fear of going for walks there.
Also you must remember that whereas we dogs enjoy a good scrap, our bitches (with the exception of Pitbull Palin) are frightened of violence, and get upset when we come home scarred and beaten. It is also a very poor model of behaviour for our puppies,
At this time, it is right to stop fighting right now, even if it means leaving the playing field with our tails between our legs. When I am elected to the Doghouse, I will see to it that the fighting is stopped immediately.
Pavlov found that sensitive people tend to suffer from transmarginal inhibition sooner than less sensitive people, and he said that this type of person has an entirely different type of nervous system. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmarginal_inhibition This means they would tend to have a breakdown in times of stress, while others can tolerate traumatic situations better.
In the 1910s a student who had failed to get into art school was sent to the trenches, where he suffered terrible trauma as well as physical injuries from sustained gas attacks. Worst of all was his understanding that, had he been accepted into the school, he may have been excused from the front line, as had happened to others, notably the contemporary painter he considered to be his rival, Oscar Kokoschka.
Kokoschka, along with others in the artistic communities of Vienna, managed to get a lawyer from the Czech Republic to file an objection to his being drafted on the grounds that he was one of these sensitive types, and would suffer more than others from being made to fight.
Our young soldier felt that the reason this petition succeeded was that the art school community were all part of a pan-European group of Jewish intellectuals and artists, who all banded together.
The soldier eventually recovered from his war injury, and spent the rest of his life getting back at that group of intellectuals and privileged nepotists that had turned him down originally. He set about murdering everyone he considered to be involved, which was all the Jews of Europe. His name, you have guessed, is Adolf Hitler.
Kokoschka never went to war, and escaped the hand of his jealous admirer by fleeing to Britain in the 1940s. He went on to live long long after the death of Hitler, and is today considered one of Europe’s most important artists.
Moral of this story: do not sublimate your neuroses! You can only hurt people!
Moliere died in the arms of two nuns who he was sheltering, having collapsed on stage, with the king begging him to rest. Two priests refused him last rites. The Bishop who refused to let him be buried in hallowed ground died in the arms of his prostitute two years later. Good is bad, and bad is good.
There is a saying from the east that life is like the inverse of the rug, which shows the pattern among its cut threads and unclear patterns, and that reality is the other side of the rug, which we cannot see from here. Sometimes it seems that life is completely the wrong way round.
Bankers with huge bonuses have persuaded the G7 to re-establish the capitalist banking system, to return to where we were, to work out a way to continue the system which has failed. It isn’t that there is no alternative, or that time is not short, but that still they want to line their pockets in the short term, even though they have children whose futures they themselves are destroying. And we, the ragged-trousered philanthropists, still support them and vote for them, just so that we don’t have to work together. Out of the corner of our eye, we watch as our neighbour is sacrificed, and keep silent.
People who themselves are drenched in evil insist that I admit there is a god, thus determining their own damnation. Could it be that the world is really inside out? I would die like Moliere, in the arms of the good, and trust my soul to the universe.
Northern Europeans require a room of their own, that’s what you would think by our behaviour. After spending three weeks travelling, twelve of us stayed in a rented house on the outskirts of Bamako.
There were three bedrooms, the kitchen and a common room. The owner of the house slept on a sofa in the front room, while we split ourselves into groups and distributed ourselves through the other three rooms.
It was my first time in Africa, and the images from the past three weeks vied for attention in my mind, darting about and appearing in unexpected parts of my ideas and thoughts. It was 45 degrees, the heavy air cloying to my skin as Bamako waited for the rainy season, and the food, the water, the sounds, everything was so different.
Bamako is an incredibly busy town. It is considered to be ‘the most African of cities’ and the least altered by colonialisation or subsequent investment. In fact, it has been developed a lot in recent years, but behind every new road, behind the white-walled United Nations Building, are endless potholed dirt streets with ubiquitous markets. The world-famous rhythms and chants of Mali music floated round every corner, as I drank coconut milk out of pierced polythene bags sold by street traders. Battered old Peugeot cars threw themselves down the newly constructed highways, and passengers of the rusting crowded minibuses held their arms out to signal a stop by the pavements, on which motorbikes flew past, tearing down pedestrians who suddenly leapt to one side, a young man in Western clothing driving, and a young woman with braided hair and traditional dress on the pillion seat.
Returning to the crowded house, with relations now deteriorating into argument and each day someone buying a ticket back, ranting about the dreadfulness of the drinking water, the polluted torment of the steaming sauna city air, I felt the urgent need to weep. Not out of sadness or anything, just for the sake of it! The need to be by myself.
When I slinked into my room to sit alone, a panic ensued. The Africans living there were most upset, and the hysteria spread to the Europeans, even the woman with the new boyfriend, who hated the sight of me.
‘Are you sure you’re alright, Jill’ she asked, stroking my shoulder, ’You can talk to me, you know, we women must stick together.’
‘I just want to be alone’.
‘Are you ill,’ asked Yussouf, ‘Shall I sit with you? Shall I get my wife?’
‘I just want to be alone’.
What is it that makes us want to be alone? In the post war period of social provision of housing in the UK, the State stipulated that every child had the right to a room of their own, and council houses were provided with the correct number of rooms. I had my room, my brother had his, and my parents were in the main bedroom. My mother, I thought later when I married, didn’t get her own room.
The title of this week’s column is a lecture given by Virginia Woolf about women and fiction. I originally recalled it as ‘a room of my own’, which is how I’d remembered it. I had totally personalised it in my mind, and when I think about this I realise that I had taken it so personally because it is the basic truth of civilisation. Woolf left it in the third person because it isn’t just women who need a room of their own to write, to blossom, to contribute to their society, it is everyone.
Despite this idea that we should have ‘a room of one’s own’, we aren’t living in isolation. The room is needed for a person to have to space and the time to quietly reflect, to produce something perhaps which is distinct, new or put in a new way, which will benefit everyone. He or she comes out of this room with gifts, gifts of knowledge, understanding or of invention, gifts for us all.
It’s is noticeable that in areas which are developed, people tend to feel they have the right to privacy. It is reasonable to say you need some solitude to think things through, to work something out, to get a piece of work finished. People come home from work to ‘work on it in peace’.
Civilisation is perhaps defined as people living together, and development is the ability of civilisations to work as one, to co-operate, to put the resources of everyone together over a period of time in an agreed and general plan. The need for solitude is as if only by having the space to define oneself as an individual can one interact fully with one’s society, and contribute generously to the well-being of the nation as a whole. Only by being apart, can one come back together.
We teachers gave a show at the end of one of our week-long intensive English courses in Istanbul, Turkey, a country that likes to think of itself as being committed to development in the European style. The children put on a little show in English in their classes, and then received certificates saying they had completed the course.
Usually this is an opportunity to celebrate the achievement of the school and of all the children in the community. In this school, however, as soon as their own child had received their certificate, the parents left. This meant that the last class only had the children’s own parents watching in an almost empty hall. We were horrified at the lack of community spirit. The school teachers and managers were also ‘very disappointed in the parents’. That selfishness, the lack of celebrating the success of everyone in your community, is what differentiates developed and under-developed communities.
It is vital to understand that every individual is important, and the success and achievements of one person is the success of the whole community. Similarly, if a member of the community sequestrates funds from the community and runs off to Maitama with the packet under his arm, the community will not develop. Like the three musketeers, we must be in it with the spirit of ‘All for one and one for all.’ Respect the individual’s need for silence, show consideration of his or her own destiny and gifts, but also insist that each and every individual then dedicates those abilities to the community as a whole.
President Kennedy famously said in his inauguration speech, ‘Do not ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’ These are the interpretations of society, its rights and duties, that determine if a nation becomes developed, or remains in the barbarism of non-co-operation and stagnation.
And yet you say that, without inquiring into what is right and what is wrong, you will follow your parents orders; without attempting to determine what is correct and what is erroneous, you will obey the words of the sovereign. To a fool, such conduct may appear to be loyal and filial, but in the opinion of a wise person, there can be no greater disloyalty, no grreater departure from filial pity. — Nichiren Daishonin
