SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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How to Lose a War
The Spokesman, 90
Christopher
Hampton – Three Poems
PROLOGUE
TO WAR
‘The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.’
Tony
Blair, Labour Party Conference Speech, 2nd October 2001
This
is what transcendence does to us.
It
brings about the triumph of the cloaked,
the
invisible, the unaccountable,
over
that which can be brought to book.
Things
driven by the god-obsessed
and
their so-called godless enemies
sweep
aside the human context
even
as the hidden hand of profit does.
Now,
with the moral order of the West
assuming
beneficent control of the just
against
the absolutes of Islam,
the
politics of transcendence float above
the
brutal politics of hatred and death.
And
how are we to treat this high-altitude
language
of the liberal conscience pitting
compassion
against force, and telling us,
even
as the bombers move in on Kabul,
‘the
values we believe in should shine through
whatever
we do in Afghanistan.’
THE
IMPERATIVES OF PROMISE
So
take it up again. What waits in silence
through
the tragedies of history, in the broken mists,
beyond
the doorstep, out below the planets,
where
the questions beckon, is the key: the word-game.
Play
it cool, play deep, play hard, make patterns
count
in the thrust of dispute and disjunction;
bring
together what in a century of betrayals
pulls
apart – these broken imperatives of promise
that
have driven millions to crisis and despair.
It’s
not an option. There are words that cross the frontiers
of
hope and failure, to challenge the violence
that
isolates and make it possible to act
against
the operators of the killer-systems
we
have helped to put in place. And what they start from
is
refusal, stubbornness of quest, insistence
on
the fundamentals of distinction by which
fuses
are lit that might begin to bring back light
to
a darkened and damaged universe.
ROSA
LUXEMBURG AT WRONKE
October
1916 until July 1917
To
be free to think and dream
as
she walks the rain
in
Madam Kautsky’s cloak.
To
feel as much at home
with
the green of her plants
as
ever she’d been on the battlefield
of
European politics.
The
world was there with her of course –
that
murderous world
she’d
walked the tightrope of
through
all the jugglings of expediency,
up
to the edge with the SPD
and
its war-credit sell-out.
Listen!
When I get back
there’ll
be no more meetings,
clandestine
or otherwise!
I’ll
take my stand
in
the thick of the action
where
the wind roars in the ears.
I’ve
had enough of talking.
What
we need’s commitment,
getting
at the roots, making things new!
Now
though it’s back to my plants!
Christopher Hampton is the author of The Ideology of the Text and editor of:
A
These
poems are from his latest collection, Border
Crossings
