Salsa, Salsa, how I Love to Salsa!

I used to go to dance classes when I was little, to ballet and to tap, so I’ve always enjoyed the experience of dance and movement. But I only discovered Salsa, my ultimate dance passion, when I visited Cuba for the first time. It was in Havana, in a bar in old Havana, that I took my first tentative steps. I was so enthralled that I signed up for lessons when I came back to England. I’m really good now.

It’s the sexiest dance ever, for more so, in my view, than tango, which is exciting but too formalised for my taste. It’s difficult to explain in words just how vibrant salsa is, and how sensous! To dance properly the body has to become super-supple; think with your body; think with your instincts, move and vibrate, as the music moves and vibrates. I spin, I kick, I shimmy, and I roll; my body turns to liquid. Even writing about it turns me on!

God is Dead

I read again the story of the hermit in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His life is based upon God's presence. Every action he performs is in praise of the deity. If God is dead then the hermit is dancing in a void, under the illusion that he has an audience. The saint, it might be said, has lost his witness, the only thing that hitherto gave life meaning. But it is far more significant than that; for when God died "...sinners died with him." They died as sinners because their acts no longer conferred any such identity.

Let me put this another way: with the death of God the world has lost its moral centre, the pole from which all meaning was derived. There are no more Saints just as there are no more Sinners. There are only questions, always questions. For Karl Jaspers, taking up Nietzsche's baton, the death of God is a historical situation through which humanity must pass on towards new forms of meaning. Nobody can escape the death of God, atheist or believer. And therein lies the most delicious of ironies!

Inside the Medieval mind; sex, misogyny and passion

I was going over my old notes and came across some from last year, drawn from an article in one of my history periodicals. There’s some really interesting stuff on sex, guilt and sublimation, the sort of thing that Freud would have loved!

Sex, of course is a fairly constant part of the human experience, and people at the time could be just as direct and earthy in the way in which the experience was described as they are today. One only has to read Chaucer and Boccaccio to appreciate that. And who shall plough my little field? :))

Even so Medieval pleasures were tempered by the heavy burden of guilt, placed on the simple act of pleasure by the church. In the eleventh century priests were recommended to ask their parishioners if they had ever committed “….fornication with your step-mother, your sister-in-law, your son’s fiancée, your mother? Have you ever made a device in the shape of a penis and tied it…” And on and on and on.

This combined, of course, with a deep-seated misogyny, with Eve perceived as the author of original sin. In an early church story a heavy doom is placed upon women; “The curse of God pronounced on your sex weighs still upon the world. You are guilty-you must bear its hardships. You are the Devil’s gateway.”

It’s not just that Eve is guilty; all women are guilty. The same process of transference and perpetuation is to be found elsewhere, most specifically in the perception of the Jews as ‘Christ Killers.’ Anti-Semitism thus makes its way through this conduit into the modern age.

Naturally enough this disapproval of sex and sexuality resulted inevitably in forms of erotic sublimation. Purity was praised and magnified through the cult of the Virgin. But the young women who entered nunneries could find themselves emotionally in a place where devotion and sexual passion were not that far removed, one from the other. Consider the words of Angela of Foligno, a Medieval mystic: "As I stood by the Cross I was filled with such fire I took off my clothes and offered him all of myself.” Yes, she did. :))

Demeter, Opium and Winter

Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the Greek goddess of fertility, was obliged to stay in Underworld for part of the year as the wife of the god, Hades, after she ate six pomegranate seeds. To forget her grief, Demeter went into hibernation, bringing on the winter. To aid her sleep she ate poppies. The poppy plant then became one of her symbols, often depicted alongside corn. So, it might be said, winter is a sleep induced by the power of opium. :)

The Wandering Jew

I’m completely fascinated by the story of the Wandering Jew, the man who allegedly mocked Christ on his way to the Crucifixion. He was promptly cursed, doomed to wander the earth, without rest, until the Second Coming.

The legend is most likely of ancient provenance, but it first written reference dates to the thirteenth century, to Flores Historiarum, the chronicle of Roger of Wendover, an English monk. In this he is said to have been a shoemaker by the name of Cartaphilus.

The story first made it into popular consciousness at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the publication of a pamphlet in German. From Germany the legend spread rapidly across Europe, though the Jew in question is now known as Ahaserus. The pamphlet quotes Matthew Chapter sixteen, verse twenty-eight, which many have taken to be the source of all that followed;

Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.

Wander he did, over the whole of Europe and beyond. There were reports of sightings as late as the nineteenth century. Seemingly he even made it to Salt Lake City in 1868. Perhaps he is now a Latter Day Saint? :))

Duck Soup

This affair gets more ridiculous by the day. Among the latest revelations I note that a Tory MP claimed for a ‘Duck House’ that he could float in his pond. Yes, a Duck House! As far as I am concerned Westminster, our present Parliament, is an Augean Stable of corruption, turpitude and filth. Oh, where are you Hercules? These people, the Members of Parliament, are supposed to be the best and brightest. I find it difficult to conceive of the worst! I can just imagine how this is playing across the rest of the world, you know, that place firth of these shores that ‘did corruption’ when we did not! At least the appalling Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House, is going, a man who was never, ever fit for such high office, a man that Charles Moore described, with his usual cutting wit, as being ‘thick as mince and tatties.’ Martin is just a particularly acute symptom, not the disease; that goes deeper; yes, it does. Enough, enough, enough!

Thoughts on Valkyrie

I went to see Valkyrie earlier this year. It’s good. Tom Cruise is passable as Claus von Stauffenberg, whatever reservations some people may have had about him taking on the part. It’s good also that some of the people in the German Resistance attain a wider recognition.

But I rather suspect that a new myth is about to emerge, that a government of ‘decent men’ could conceivably have brought the war to an end in 1944 thereby saving many lives. Would the government of 'decent men', one wonders, have included Artur Nebe, executed for his part in the July Plot, who in 1941 had commanded Einsatzgruppe B during the invasion of the Soviet Union?

It was once written that the SS were the 'Alibi of a Nation'. Well, by that measure, the German Resistance has become the 'Conscience of a Nation', proof that there were good Germans who were prepared to act in desperate circumstances.

Now, I should preface what follows by a simple statement that there were people in the resistance who are indeed worthy of admiration, people who opposed Hitler and Nazism from the very outset; people like Sophie Scholl. But there were still others who became 'resisters of occasion', people, in other words, who wanted the Reich, even if they-by 1944, anyway-did not want Hitler.

What I mean by this is that the conservative elites, especially those in the army and the diplomatic service, wanted to preserve the pre-war borders, Hitler's 'peaceful' conquests, before the country was overrun. It's as well to remember that the action of 1944 was to be based on a military coup, dominated, for the most part, by the resisters of occasion. The chief aim was to kill Hitler: the second aim was to stop Stalin.

So, are we to assume then that the Allies would have left a strong Germany under the control of a Prussian elite, dominating of a good bit of central Europe after years of bloodshed? It does not seem very likely. Just imagine, moreover, how the Soviets would have reacted to a coup, controlled by a military clique, and supported by the western Allies. It would look like a deliberate attempt to deny them the victory and keep them out of central Europe; it would look, in other words, like a new version of the 'Hess Plan' of 1941.

The suggestion that Stalin, whose army was approaching the Vistula, having fought through devastated Russian territory, would somehow have halted his advance because of the 'decent men' is, to be quite frank, a ludicrous conjecture. I cannot conceive of any circumstances in which the Red Army would have halted, not even if the western powers threatened war. And I am sure some people will be aware that an alliance between Britain, the United States and Germany against Russia was one of the fantasies that kept Hitler going in his last days, and why he insisted on the need to maintain a bridgehead in Courland.

Let's look at the issue from a slightly different dimension; let's assume that Hitler was killed, and the opposition took control, and Germany avoided total defeat and occupation, what then would have happened? Why, another myth would have been conveniently nurtured, another 'stab in the back' legend to comfort coming generations of right-wing extremists. Even at the height of the war there is plenty of evidence that Hitler remained popular with ordinary Germans. His sudden removal is likely to have created a sense of loss and betrayal, in much the same fashion as the flight of the Kaiser in 1918. Germany had to be defeated and seen to be defeated. It's as simple, and as brutal, as that.