November 14, 2020

The monks and the soup

By Ken · Posted in Human spirit, Life, People

By Dave Trott

There’s an old Chinese folk tale about two monks.

They come to a poor village to beg for food, but no-one has any to spare, each family barely has enough to feed themselves.

So the monks say they’ll feed the entire village by making a huge pot of Stone Soup.

Then they start searching for the perfect stone.

Eventually they find it: large, smooth, round, flat, evenly coloured.

They bring it back to the village and ask to borrow a large pot, they fill it with water.

As it boils, they taste it, it needs a little salt.

Someone brings salt.

The monks say it’s good, but it would be better for a few herbs.

Someone else brings herbs.

The monks sip again, they say it’s getting there, it just needs a little rice.

Someone brings some rice.

The monks say it’s nearly done, it just needs a little meat.

Someone brings some meat.

The preparation goes on like this until everyone in the village has contributed something.

Eventually, the monks say it’s perfect.

They throw the stone away, and the monks and the villagers enjoy the delicious soup.

Now, of course, we all know what’s happened.

The stone had no more taste than any other stone.

The stone was only an excuse to get everyone to add the ingredients for a soup.

But without noticing, the villagers went from only having a tiny bit of food each, to having enough delicious soup to feed everyone.

It’s a simple folk-tale, but actually, it’s a story about diversity.

How an intangible idea can mix separate elements together to make something better.

The creative motto used to be: ‘The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.’

Nowadays we’d simply say 1+1=3.

Keeping things separate means that’s all we get, but putting them together means a new thing happens.

In cinema, it’s generally accepted that Sergei Eisenstein was first to recognize this.

Every art-school film class starts with Battleship Potemkin: the Cossacks on the steps.

On its own, a soldier’s boots are just that. A pram is just that. A woman’s face is just that.

But edit them together and the mix creates a terrifying massacre.

The mix is what inspired French Nouvelle Vague cinema, which inspired Martin Scorsese.

That’s what we should learn, to mix things together.

If strategy, creative, and media stay in their silos, then we’ll only get separate thinking.

But the most exciting work I’ve ever been part of is when we work together.

We won creative awards where the ‘creativity’ didn’t come from the creative department.

Because we had diversity of thinking.

But diversity doesn’t just mean strategy and media having an opinion on creative.

It also means creative having an opinion on strategy and media.

Obviously, we need diversity of race, gender, age, class, religion, etc.

Because once we get past that, we can hire the best brains and ignore the package.

That’s the great thing about Stone Soup, the essential ingredient is the stone.

But the stone doesn’t add anything to the soup, it’s just an idea.

What the stone represents is what Buddhists call ‘mind’.

The mind itself is nothing, it doesn’t even exist in the physical world.But, that’s the power of an intangible idea: as Buddha said, ‘All there is, is mind.’

Dave Trott is a creative director and author, an advertising man of some renown. According to Wikipedia Stone Soup is a European folk tale in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as axe soup, button soup, nail soup, and wood soup. How a good story travels!

December 19, 2016

It’s a holocaust and it’s happening now.

By Ken · Posted in Conflict, Drama, Human spirit, People

Could this be a message of change for 2017? A friend in Saudi Arabia sent me a link to it. It is neither hopeful nor inspirational, unless you do something with it. Please forward. If enough people want it to be, 2017 can be the year when our political leaders stop standing by watching and wringing their hands and take action to stop this and similar horrors around the world.

’Don’t ask me who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. I don’t know. And frankly it doesn’t matter… Who is marching to stop this?‘

May 19, 2016

What a party!

By Ken · Posted in Human spirit, People · Tagged 70th birthday, birthday, celebration, friends, Friendship, hope, life

By Mary Helms

We celebrated Cheryl’s 60th birthday in Paris, more than 20 of us, surprising her at an intimate gala at George V. What a party!

So some of us had amazing memories as we gathered at a neighbor’s home to surprise her for her 70th. There were new friends added, lovely food catered, and the best of wines. A true feeling of anticipation and festivity as we waited for Cheryl to arrive! The rain added to the excitement as we wondered when she would show up!

And show up she did, her recent discovered Parkinson’s trembling. We trembled with her, four of us who had strokes since the Paris party and the spirits of Ann and Bill and Jack whose laughter was a bright memory. And just before the cake was cut, the rainbow came, double and complete, horizon to horizon! And we trembled once more, all of us. What a party!

May 9, 2016

Damn you all to hell

By Ken · Posted in Enterprise, Human spirit, Laughter, People · Tagged Brilliant letter writing

This story also comes from the excellent Letters of Note website,

In July of 2012, in an admirable attempt to secure him as a guest on his Nerdist Podcast, Chris Hardwick sent a beautiful 1934 Smith Corona to noted typewriter collector Tom Hanks and popped the question. Within days, Hanks responded with the charming letter seen below, typed on the Corona.

Unsurprisingly, the anecdote-filled podcast that resulted is wonderful. It can be heard here. And here’s the text of that splendid letter.

Dear Chris, Ashley, and all the diabolical genuies at Nerdist Industries.

Just who do you think you are to try to bribe me into an appearance on your ‘thing’ with this gift of the most fantastic Corona Silent typewriter made in 1934?

You are out of your minds if you think… that I… wow, this thing has great action… and this deep crimson color… Wait! I’m not so shallow as to… and it types nearly silently…

Oh, OKAY!

I will have my people contact yours and work out some kind of interview process…

Damn you all to hell,

(Signed, ‘Tom Hanks’)

Broken sandals, worth one more repair.

By Ken · Posted in Education, Enterprise, People, Travel

by Ken Burnett

This story sets out to answer every potential donor’s question about whether charities are really doing any good. I’ve included it because it shows even my broken shoes have a story to tell.
I took my broken sandals to the shoe-mender across the road from my London flat. ‘These are unusual,’ he observed as I handed them over. ‘They’re from Ghana’, I told him. ‘ I bought them from a street vendor in Accra for less than two pounds but they are the most comfortable shoes ever, leather throughout. Though, not stitched or glued very strongly.’ I saw that he’d noticed their earlier mends. ‘Yes, I responded to his query, one repair was done in Bangalore, India, the other in Kathmandu, Nepal.’  

‘They’re expertly done’, he said with respect. ‘How do you get to travel to such a lot of exotic places?’ I explained that, at the time, I was a member of the international board of trustees of ActionAid, the poverty fighting development charity. Each year at least two of our board meetings were hosted in different programme countries, so I got the chance to go somewhere far-flung and interesting. He looked at me incredulously, then a bit askance.  

‘That sounds like quite a game’, he said. ‘These charities seem to have no end of fun spending their donors’ money organising meetings all over the place.’ 

It’s a natural criticism, not an unreasonable observation. Sometimes, it’s best to leave people with their preconceptions. But I know this guy, so I was happy to enlighten him.  

‘You know,’ I said, ‘one of the biggest problems to overcome when fighting poverty is the often low standards of leadership and governance in developing countries. It’s a major cause of grief in many developed economies too, as we’ve all seen recently. But many poor countries lack the culture, capacity and traditions of good self-management. These are particularly essential characteristics in non-government organisations that are campaigning for human rights and lasting social change. So in ActionAid we’re investing in building governance capacity in all our countries worldwide.’  

‘It’s a huge task,’ I continued, ‘one that can’t be done on the cheap. Relative to other perhaps more tangible investments, such as delivering food aid, building schools, digging wells and such like, the outlay is small. But the effects are likely to be much deeper and longer lasting. Our aim is to create strong, competent, well-run, self-sustaining, independent national boards that are capable of determining their own local and national priorities within ActionAid’s broad strategy, Rights to end poverty. ’

ActionAid works in getting on for 50 countries around the world, from Afghanistan and Brazil to Zambia and Zimbabwe. In 2003 it was the first major international charity to shift its international headquarters from a base in the affluent North – London, to a capital in the global South – Johannesburg. Its chair of trustees when I was on the board was a Ugandan woman; its chief executive was an agriculturalist from Nepal. Seated around its top governance table you’d find representatives from national boards that ActionAid has created and is supporting in Malawi, Guatemala, India, Sierra Leone, Greece, Ghana, Denmark, USA, Australia, Uganda, Kenya, the UK and others. ActionAid’s international governance system enjoys all the colours of the rainbow and all the flavours of a Nepalese street market. Though it started in the UK, British trustees are determinedly and deliberately thin on the ground. At our most recent meeting there were more Indians and Brazilians than Brits.  

Experience to date seems to indicate that ActionAid’s board does its job rather better now too. In many countries the new ActionAid boards have been able to secure top brains and experienced campaigners for change of a quality that would have been hard to find and attract if we’d only been fishing in British local waters. These new, developing trustees include many academics, politicians, business leaders, legal specialists and opinion formers.  

But diversity brings better decisions by definition. In each country ActionAid’s new leaders know where the poverty is and what’s causing it, because they come from it and see it in their daily lives. It also brings credibility and acceptance too, as individual national ActionAids around the world are increasingly seen wherever they work as self-regulating independent members of a southern-led international family, not as agents of British or American influence. In today’s volatile international environment, this makes a huge difference.  

But will this move increase the impact that ActionAid’s donors will have on reducing poverty? Without doubt, it will. ActionAid’s response to poverty includes not just the traditional pillars of rights to education, health, land, food, water, livelihood, reproductive and women’s rights but also the right to sound democratic governance at all levels. By building exemplary boards at the country level ActionAid is sending a strong, consistent message to the people and political leaders of each country where it works – a message that proclaims the importance of sound, just and equitable governance. And will train new generations to recognise what good governance is, and does. 

Will this really help make poverty history? Not immediately, perhaps. Rather, as I endeavoured to explain to my friend the cobbler, it requires persistence and substantial investment, starting now. But as my shoe purchase and their repairs showed, value for money in these countries is often of a different order of magnitude than we’d find closer to home. Building better governance is a large and important step on the right path. And the evidence already shows it is working.

This article first appeared in 2008 when Ken was a member of the international board of the charity ActionAid, a role he relished for 13 years.

May 8, 2016

We tell true stories, mostly. And all the better for it.

By Ken · Posted in Conflict, Drama, Human spirit, Life, People, Prose · Tagged Fiction, News

by John Carey

What follows is an extract from John Carey’s introduction to The Faber Book of Reportage, 1987. Here he explains the distinction we have to think of between writing truth and writing fiction. When Carey refers to reportage he does so in the broad sense, meaning live, on-the-spot news journalism.

…if we ask what took the place of reportage in the ages before it was made available to its millions of consumers, the likeliest answer seems to be religion.

Not, of course, that we should assume pre-communication age man was deeply religious, in the main. There is plenty of evidence to suggest he was not. But religion was the permanent backdrop to his existence, as reportage is for his modern counterpart. Reportage supplies modern man with a constant and reassuring sense of events going on beyond his immediate horizon (reassuring even, or particularly, when the events themselves are terrible, since they then contrast more comfortingly with the reader’s supposed safety). Reportage provides modern man, too, with a release from his trivial routines, and a habitual daily illusion of communication with a reality greater than himself. In all these ways religion suggests itself as the likeliest substitute pre-modern man could have found for reportage, at any rate in the West.

When we view reportage as the natural successor to religion, it helps us to understand why it should be so profoundly taken up with the subject of death. Death, in its various forms of murder, massacre, accident, natural catastrophe, warfare, and so on, is the subject to which reportage naturally gravitates, and one difficulty, in compiling an anthology of this kind, is to stop it becoming just a string of slaughters. Religion has traditionally been mankind’s answer to death, allowing him to believe in various kinds of permanency which make his own extinction more tolerable, or even banish his fear of it altogether. The Christian belief in personal immortality is an obvious and extreme example of this. Reportage, taking religion’s place, endlessly feeds its reader with accounts of the deaths of other people, and therefore places him continually in the position of a survivor – one who has escaped the violent and terrible ends which, it graphically apprises him, others have come to. In this way reportage, like religion, gives the individual a comforting sense of his own immortality.

If reportage performs these social functions it clearly has a social value comparable to that which religion once had. Its ‘cultural’ value, on the other hand, has generally been considered negligible with certain favoured exceptions such as Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, which are allowed to be literature because their authors also wrote respectable literary hooks. The question of whether reportage is ‘literature’ is not in itself interesting or even meaningful. ‘Literature’, we now realise, is not an objectively ascertainable category to which certain works naturally belong, but rather a term used by institutions and establishments and other culture-controlling groups to dignify those texts to which, for whatever reasons, they wish to attach value. The question worth asking therefore is not whether reportage is literature, hut why intellectuals and literary institutions have generally been so keen to deny it that status.

Resentment of the masses, who are regarded as reportage’s audience, is plainly a factor in the development of this prejudice. The terms used to express it are often social in their implications. ‘High’ culture is distinguished from the ‘vulgarity’ said to characterize reportage. But the disparagement of reportage also reflects a wish to promote the imaginary above the real. Works of imagination are, it is maintained, inherently superior, and have a spiritual value absent from ‘journalism’. The creative artist is in touch with truths higher than the actual, which give him exclusive entry into the soul of man.

Such convictions seem to represent a residue of magical thinking. The recourse to images of ascent which their adherents manifest, the emphasis on purity, the recoil from earthly contamination, and the tendency towards a belief in inspiration, all belong to the traditional ambience of priesthoods and mystery cults. Those who hold such views about literature are likely, also, to resent critical attempts to relate authors’ works to their lives. The biographical approach, it is argued, debases literature by tying it to mere reality: we should release texts from their authors, and contemplate them pure and disembodied, or at any rate only in the company of other equally pure and disembodied texts.

The superstitions that lie behind such dictates are interesting as primitive cultural vestiges, but it would be wrong to grant them serious attention as arguments. The advantages of reportage over imaginative literature, are, on the other hand, clear. Imaginative literature habitually depends for its effect on a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in audience or reader, and this necessarily entails an element of game or collusion or self-deception. Reportage, by contrast, lays claim directly to the power of the real, which imaginative literature can approach only through make-believe.

It would be foolish, of course, to belittle imaginative literature on this score. The fact that it is not real – that its griefs, loves and deaths are all a pretence, is one reason why it can sustain us. It is a dream from which we can awake when we wish, and so it gives us, among the obstinate urgencies of real life, a precious illusion of freedom. It allows us to use for pleasure passions and sympathies (anger, fear, pity, etc.), which in normal circumstances would arise only in situations of pain or distress. In this way it frees and extends our emotional life. It seems probable that much – or most – reportage is read as if it were fiction by a majority of its readers. Its panics and disasters do not affect them as real, but as belonging to a shadow world distinct from their own concerns, and without their pressing actuality. Because of this, reportage has been able to take the place of imaginative literature in the lives of most people. They read newspapers rather than books, and newspapers which might just as well be fictional.

However enjoyable this is, it represents, of course, a flight from the real, as does imaginative literature, and good reportage is designed to make that flight impossible. It exiles us from fiction into the sharp terrain of truth. All the great realistic novelists of the nineteenth century – Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Zola – drew on the techniques of reportage, and even built eye-witness accounts and newspaper stories into their fictions, so as to give them heightened realism. But the goal they struggled towards always lay beyond their reach. They could produce, at best, only imitation reportage, lacking the absolutely vital ingredient of reportage, which is the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened.

When we read (to choose the most glaring example) accounts of the Holocaust by survivors and onlookers, some of which I have included in this book, we cannot comfort ourselves (as we can when distressed by accounts of suffering in realistic novels) by reminding ourselves that they are, after all, just stories. The facts presumed demand our recognition, and require us to respond, though we do not know how to. We read the details – the Jews by the mass grave waiting to be shot; the father comforting his son and pointing to the sky; the grandmother amusing the baby – and we are possessed by our own inadequacy, by a ridiculous desire to help, by pity which is unappeasable and useless.

Or not quite useless, perhaps. For at this level (so one would like to hope) reportage may change its readers, may educate their sympathies, may extend – in both directions – their ideas about what it is to be a human being, may limit their capacity for the inhuman. These gains have traditionally been claimed for imaginative literature. Bur since reportage, unlike literature, lifts the screen from reality, its lessons are – and ought to be – more telling; and since it reaches millions untouched by literature, it has an incalculably greater potential.

April 12, 2015

The collection: it’s never to late to do something wonderful.

By Ken · Posted in Fundraising, Human spirit, People · Tagged Challenge

It was cold and my feet hurt. I’d just been rejected, for the umpteenth time and been politely told off by a station guard for rattling my bucket. ‘It annoys the staff,’ he explained. ‘Well, if you do it too much it does.’ Then a dignified middle-aged man with a beard trailing his family behind him stepped from the throng that was flowing from the shopping centre and stopped, right in front of me. He looked me full in the eye as he dug inside his voluminous winter coat, pulled out his pocket book and proceeded to empty its contents into my bucket. My spirits soared. Then he gathered his family around him, mother, teenage son and two younger daughters and spoke to them for a while in a language I couldn’t catch. Soon they were all rummaging among their clothing. The procedure took some time. Then the teenage son, beaming from ear to ear, came over to pour handfuls more cash into my bucket.
‘Thank you’, he said, then bounced off with a spring in his step to catch his departing family. For the first time that day, I felt great.

I was with my wife, Marie, and younger son, Charlie, standing at the top of the escalators in Bond Street station, just outside the barriers. It was Easter Sunday and, though a lot thinner than we’d anticipated, a constant flow of shoppers was coming through. Marie and I each had a bucket, Charlie had two and we’d a three-hour stint to complete. We were collecting money for Syria’s refugees and those displaced by civil war inside the country, three million-plus and growing by the day.

That sea of faces rising from the escalators is daunting, first time you confront it. They come in surges, a mixed amorphous mass. The last thing they’re expecting to greet them is three white Brits in a line, rattling buckets. Not all are pleased. Most are indifferent. Some are, well, extraordinary. If only we could have an announcement at the foot of the escalator, saying, ‘Get your money ready!’

Bond Street station is the world in microcosm, a mini United Nations. In our three hours it seemed as if every conceivable ethnic grouping filed past us. We couldn’t help but notice which were the more generous. It wasn’t the white British middle classes, far from it. Charlie felt South Asians gave most to him – a Japanese woman with a huge smile gave him half the contents of her purse. A Chinese woman with a cheeky grin slipped me a tenner. But it was middle-eastern people, mainly Muslims, who put most in my bucket. Marie’s too.

Young couples are the least generous, or so it seemed to us, with older couples not far behind. Some people love givers and giving, so support us with looks. Others prefer to look away.
Three people come at me from different angles all at the same time. Briefly the bucket gets busy. I don’t know who to thank first, so I thank the whole foyer, loudly. The station manager beams. Everyone is looking at me now.

Then there’s a lull. Busyness comes and goes, but the shoppers are few and I fear it’s not enough. We’re doing badly. Someone tells us that most shops are closed. For a full 20 minutes everyone ignores us. Then Marie says, ‘I’ve got three tenners.’ I think of Pavarotti and Co. but resist breaking into song.

Smile. Make eye contact. The brightest eyes are the most generous, there’s no doubting that. The bucket feels heavier, but isn’t really. We stand stock still, not rattling, not moving, buckets aloft. Then, in unison, we give them a sway.

Children really enjoy giving. A man stood in front of me for several minutes digging in his pockets. Then, having found his oyster card, he left without giving. Behind him a gaggle of Syrian women, hands ornate with henna designs, ask if they can take my photo, then give me a pile of cash. ‘Here’s £10.00, says another woman, ‘Have a nice day and thank you very much for what you’re doing.’ Smarter-dressed people are not more generous. Expensive coats don’t give, we reckon.

A young Turkish boy maybe eight or nine asks me what I’m doing.‘Why are they fighting?’, he asks. ‘What’s a refugee?’ I try to explain but can’t give him a decent justification. ‘It’s just bad’, I say. ‘People have to leave their homes and loved ones in the middle of the night.’
He looks about to get emotional. ‘I’ll speak to my auntie, ‘ he promises, ‘and come back.’ He didn’t, though he tried, I’m sure. And used some of my lines too, I bet. Perhaps, as he grows, he’ll think about it…

A young Italian man asks me the way to Buckingham Palace. I oblige, though he gives me nothing but a smile. Then another chap asks me why I’m doing this. I should have quoted some lines from A A Gill in today’s Sunday Times, but I didn’t bring it with me.

As I watch, figures appear out of the darkness, bent double under sacks. Families hold hands, moving past us like heavy ghosts. This is the last leg of one of the most dangerous journeys on Earth.

Gill goes on, in similar, graphic vein. Note for next collection: bring a supply of moving emotional stories, because sometimes people want to talk. ‘Why isn’t there more on the News?,’ one man asks. Marie responds accurately. ‘I don’t know.’

Just as we were getting ready to go a woman in a headscarf walked up to Charlie and asked what he was doing. She was young, about 25, and crying, big tears running down her cheeks. As she left him to visit the cash machine in the corner of the concourse, her eyes met mine. Minutes later she was back, clutching money. She didn’t want to speak, just put two notes into my bucket, urgently. I watched till, with a gentle push from her, they were gone. Then so was she. I was overcome.

Our time was up. We thanked London Transport’s wonderful people, signed out then headed off to find a pub, thirsty and a bit tearful. As we sauntered down Brook Street a passing gent hailed Charlie. ‘For Syria’, he said, putting a fiver in Charlie’s bucket. For a minute I thought Charlie was going to say, ‘But we’ve finished for the day.’ He didn’t.

‘You’re a toff,’ he said, beaming.

Truly it’s never too late, to do something wonderful.

An abridged version of this article is featured on The Guardian’s website.

At the time of writing Ken Burnett was one of six independent trustees of the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee, the unifying body for 14 leading British aid charities which come together in times of great need to raise money for the victims of crisis and disaster. To support the DEC go here.

March 18, 2015

What happens when I try to give my Guantánamo guards presents?

By Ken · Posted in Conflict, Human spirit, Life, People

From the Reprieve website. See below for details.

Emad Hassan was abducted by bounty hunters while studying in Pakistan and sold to US forces for $5,000. A simple mistake in the confusion of interrogation sealed his fate – he told his interrogators he knew about ‘Al Qa’idah’, referring to a small village with that name near his hometown in Yemen. Emad was then taken to Guantánamo Bay, where he has been held ever since. He has been on hunger strike since 2007, longer than any other detainee.

Emad has never been charged with a crime and was cleared for release in 2009. But he has lost a third of his life to Guantánamo. These are his words.

While I was being fed, the Block Commander fell down unconscious, his eyes rolled back up into his head, a choking sound came out of his chest and his legs kicked at something invisible. I watched for a second. Then two. Then three. I found myself crying, calling the medical team to come. I was worried about him. I forgot who we both were. The block guards jumped to his aid, trying to help him breathe. He was taken to the hospital.

Believe it or not, I was really worried about him. I tried to analyse my feelings later, but found it odd that I would do so. This is the reaction of any human, surely? But here in Guantanamo, things are different. I’m supposed to enjoy this terrible scene. I’m supposed to be happy to see this man suffer. After all, he is, as the colonel put it, “an enemy”. If he is truly an enemy, then I shouldn’t have called the medical team over, I should not have asked about his condition for the rest of the day. Yet I thanked God for my reaction – it means I am still human.

I agree with Colonel Bogdan the guards here have been suffering. Although he said guards here suffer from PTSD at twice the rate of combat troops and that was an absurd statement. [He later retracted it.] The guards here are suffering because of the inferiority complex with which they live. They are ordered to separate their bodies from their souls and to abandon their humanity, yet this cannot be. They are forced to ignore their emotions and feelings for others. More than that, an important part of them was murdered: Justice, freedom and rights were erased.

These are the principles that they live by and are willing to die for, that’s the fuel that keeps them standing their ground in Afghanistan. So, where is it here? Guards do what they are convinced is wrong and say what they believe is nonsense. Especially the Block Commander who collapsed unconscious.  This life affected him; it created an imbalance within his personality. This conflict disabled his mind, eyes and ears and instead he used his boss’s mind, eyes and ears. What his boss decided, judged, said – that is what he does. He is a robot.

I once gave a guard a gift, if you can consider chocolate milk a gift. He refused it with a fierce look, as if I was trying to bribe him. I expected the refusal. A refusal like that is nothing new. But why did he react like that? Did the chocolate milk offend him? Did he misunderstand my simple action? I explained why I did what I did. I told him: ‘My religion and morals teach me to appreciate respect and so when you show me respect, I want to give you a gift. I know it is nothing – the chocolate milk, I mean – but as you can see, there are few things I have. If we were living outside in the real world, it would be different. I didn’t mean to offend you, it never came to my mind that such a simple offering would offend you.’

Even after this speech, he refused to accept the chocolate milk. Perhaps he just doesn’t like chocolate milk.  I continued to give guards small tokens of my appreciation. The medical staff reacted in the same way. Some accepted, but most refused my presents. I had to explain why I was doing this to everyone, particularly the women. It is hard to get beyond their suspicion. I have learned that if you give someone something then you must expect something in return. And no one here – guards, medical staff – wants to give us detainees anything.

They believe it is a risk to accept something from us. Once, one guard saw another guard accept candy bars from a prisoner. The first guard told someone what had happened, and the guard who accepted the candy was punished and moved to another camp while the detainee was targeted and harassed by the guards.  So now we have been taught as detainees that our job is to hate the guards and we will be punished if we do not do our job.

How many times have I been punished for this reason? Too many. But I refuse to stop. Sometimes the gifts are not just for them, they are for me, they are given to remind me that there is a place for gifts in my heart, to remind me that I am alive and am capable of love, honesty and sincerity.

Story reproduced with permission from Reprieve,

PO Box 72054
London EC3P 3BZ

020 7553 8140

[email protected]
www.reprieve.org.uk

Reprieve is a small organisation of courageous and committed human rights defenders, founded in 1999 by British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. Reprieve provides free legal and investigative support to some of the world’s most vulnerable people: British, European and other nationals facing execution and those victimised by states’ abusive counter-terror policies – rendition, torture, extrajudicial imprisonment and extrajudicial killing.

Reprieve’s lawyers and investigators are supported by a community of people from all around the world, connected by a belief in human rights and justice. Together, they fight for the victims of extreme human rights abuses with a combination of public pressure and legal action.

Join Reprieve and take action here.

March 7, 2015

Dorian shows the artist the dreadful fruits of his handiwork

By Ken · Posted in Conflict, Drama, Literature, Prose

From The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.

This extract perfectly shows the dark brilliance of Wilde’s gothic writings and the horror visited upon the painter of the now infamous portrait. As for Dorian himself, for the first time he seems curiously cold and detached.

He passed out of the room and began the ascent, Basil Hallward following close behind. They walked softly, as men instinctively do at night. The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. A rising wind made some of the windows rattle.

When they reached the top landing, Dorian set the lamp down on the floor, and taking out the key turned it in the lock. ‘You insist on knowing, Basil?’ he asked, in a low voice.

‘Yes.’

‘I am delighted,’ he murmured, smiling. Then he added, somewhat bitterly, ‘You are the one man in the world who is entitled to know everything about me. You have had more to do with my life than you think.’ And, taking up the lamp, he opened the door and went in. A cold current of air passed them, and the light shot up for a moment in a flame of murky orange. He shuddered. ‘Shut the door behind you,’ he said, as he placed the lamp on the table.

Hallward glanced round him, with a puzzled expression. The room looked as if it had not been lived in for years. A faded Flemish tapestry, a curtained picture, an old Italian cassone, and an almost empty bookcase, that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a chair and a table. As Dorian Gray was lighting a half-burned candle that was standing on the mantel-shelf, he saw that the whole place was covered with dust and that the carpet was in holes. A mouse ran scuffling behind the wainscoting. There was a damp odor of mildew.

‘So you think that it is only God who sees the soul, Basil? Draw that curtain back, and you will see mine.’

The voice that spoke was cold and cruel. ‘You are mad, Dorian, or playing a part,’ muttered Hallward, frowning.

‘You won’t? Then I must do it myself,’ said the young man; and he tore the curtain from its rod, and flung it on the ground.

An exclamation of horror broke from Hallward’s lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous thing on the canvas leering at him. There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! It was Dorian Gray’s own face that he was looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely marred that marvelous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual lips. The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet passed entirely away from chiseled nostrils and from plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done it? He seemed to recognize his own brush-work, and the frame was his own design. The idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized the lighted candle, and held it to the picture. In the left-hand corner was his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion.

It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire. He had never done that. Still, it was his own picture. He knew it, and he felt as if his blood had changed from fire to sluggish ice in a moment. His own picture! What did it mean? Why had it altered? He turned, and looked at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man. His mouth twitched and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate. He passed his hand across his forehead. It was dank with clammy sweat.

The young man was leaning against the mantel-shelf, watching him with that strange expression that is on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when a great artist is acting. There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in the eyes. He had taken the flower out of his coat and was smelling it, or pretending to do so.

‘What does this mean?’ cried Hallward, at last. His own voice sounded shrill and curious in his ears.

‘Years ago, when I was a boy,’ said Dorian Gray, ‘you met me, devoted yourself to me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. One day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. In a mad moment, that I don’t know, even now, whether I regret or not, I made a wish. Perhaps you would call it a prayer ….’

‘I remember it! Oh, how well I remember it! No! The thing is impossible. The room is damp. The mildew has got into the canvas. The paints I used had some wretched mineral poison in them. I tell you the thing is impossible.’

‘Ah, what is impossible?’ murmured the young man, going over to the window, and leaning his forehead against the cold, mist-stained glass.

‘You told me you had destroyed it.’

‘I was wrong. It has destroyed me.’

‘I don’t believe it is my picture.’

‘Can’t you see your romance in it?’ said Dorian, bitterly.

‘My romance, as you call it …’

‘As you called it.’

‘There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. This is the face of a satyr.’

‘It is the face of my soul.’

‘God! What a thing I must have worshipped! This has the eyes of a devil.’

‘Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Basil,’ cried Dorian, with a wild gesture of despair.

Hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it. ‘My God! if it is true,’ he exclaimed, ‘and this is what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!’ He held the light up again to the canvas, and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as he had left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.

His hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor and lay there sputtering. He placed his foot on it and put it out. Then he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table and buried his face in his hands. ‘Good God, Dorian, what a lesson! What an awful lesson!’ There was no answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window.

‘Pray, Dorian, pray,’ he murmured. ‘What is it that one was taught to say in one’s boyhood? ‘Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our sins. Wash away our iniquities.’ Let us say that together. The prayer of your pride has been answered. The prayer of your repentance will be answered also. I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.’

Dorian Gray turned slowly around and looked at him with tear-dimmed eyes. ‘It is too late, Basil,’ he murmured.

‘It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we can remember a prayer. Isn’t there a verse somewhere, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow’?’

‘Those words mean nothing to me now.’

‘Hush! don’t say that. You have done enough evil in your life. My God! Don’t you see that accursed thing leering at us?’

Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him. The mad passions of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table, more than he had ever loathed anything in his whole life.

A portrait of Dorian Gray, by Mercuralis

* * * * *

Dorian Gray hides his picture

By Ken · Posted in Conflict, Drama, Literature, Prose

From The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.

These extracts come from the 1890 text, before Wilde was obliged, in the interests of propriety, to introduce edits that would tone down any allusions to ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.

In the first Dorian, still reeling from the death of the actress Sybil Vane, has decided to hide the now loathed painting in his attic and is awaiting the arrival of the workmen he has summoned to move it. At the start of this extract it is Dorian’s housekeeper, Mrs Leaf, who is speaking.

A portrait of Dorian Gray, by Mercuralis

‘The old school-room, Master Dorian? Why, it’s full of dust. I must get it arranged and put straight before you go into it. It’s not fit for you to see, Master Dorian. It is not, indeed.’

‘I don’t want it put straight, Leaf. I only want the key.’

‘Well, Master Dorian, you’ll be covered with cobwebs if you goes into it. Why, it hasn’t been opened for nearly five years, not since his lordship died.’

He winced at the mention of his dead uncle’s name. He had hateful memories of him. ‘That does not matter, Leaf,’ he replied. ‘All I want is the key.’

‘And here is the key, Master Dorian,’ said the old lady, after going over the contents of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands. ‘Here is the key. I’ll have it off the ring in a moment. But you don’t think of living up there, Master Dorian, and you so comfortable here?’

‘No, Leaf, I don’t. I merely want to see the place, and perhaps store something in it, that is all. Thank you, Leaf. I hope your rheumatism is better; and mind you send me up jam for breakfast.’

Mrs. Leaf shook her head. ‘Them foreigners doesn’t understand jam, Master Dorian. They calls it ‘compot.’ But I’ll bring it to you myself some morning, if you lets me.’

‘That will be very kind of you, Leaf,’ he answered, looking at the key; and, having made him an elaborate courtesy, the old lady left the room, her face wreathed in smiles. She had a strong objection to the French valet. It was a poor thing, she felt, for anyone to be born a foreigner.

As the door closed, Dorian put the key in his pocket and looked round the room. His eye fell on a large purple satin coverlet heavily embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenth century Venetian work that his uncle had found in a convent near Bologna. Yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in. It had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead. Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself, something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. They would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive.

He shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told Basil the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away. Basil would have helped him to resist Lord Henry’s influence and the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament. The love that he bore him—for it was really love—had something noble and intellectual in it. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself. Yes, Basil could have saved him. But it was too late now. The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.

He took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold texture that covered it, and, holding it in his hands, passed behind the screen. Was the face on the canvas viler than before? It seemed to him that it was unchanged; and yet his loathing of it was intensified. Gold hair, blue eyes and rose- red lips—they all were there. It was simply the expression that had altered. That was horrible in its cruelty. Compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke, how shallow Basil’s reproaches about Sibyl Vane had been!, how shallow and of what little account! His own soul was looking out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgment. A look of pain came across him and he flung the rich pall over the picture. As he did so, a knock came to the door. He passed out as his servant entered.

‘The persons are here, monsieur.’

He felt that the man must be got rid of at once. He must not be allowed to know where the picture was being taken to. There was something sly about him and he had thoughtful, treacherous eyes. Sitting down at the writing-table, he scribbled a note to Lord Henry, asking him to send him round something to read, and reminding him that they were to meet at eight-fifteen that evening.

‘Wait for an answer,’ he said, handing it to him, ‘and show the men in here.’