Be Like a Dog

Mantra:

Human mantra: Who is this "I" you chatter about?

Dog mantra: Woof is this Woof, you Woof about?

Humans are simultaneously tiny and massive. Biologically,

geologically, cosmologically speaking we are small fry,

with our noses still running in shock from when we learned

to stand up a few species ago. We are a blip, a strata of

plastic mobile phone pendants and PET bottles amongst the

radioactive rocks which follow the Phanerozoic and proceed

the dull sandstones.

Our culture, our progression, our philosophies, our

monuments which will last thousands of years after our

passing are pretty impressive, but to a dog they are less

interesting than a juicy bone, many times less impressive

than a bitch on heat. Dogs piss on our monuments with no

qualms at all, aiming as high as they can to try and outdo

their fellow dogs so the smell of their urine will travel

further. This calls to mind a certain lesson Zen teachers

were said to have taught. The abbot would piss on statues

of the Buddha, to encourage novices to focus on the inward

path and not the outward trappings of the tradition. To

the Buddha mind or to the canine mind, the action is the

same, piss on a rock. The human and canine personalities

interpret this action according to their respective

constitutions. The pious and arrogant consider this kind

of thing to be disrespectful.

My boss has a wild dog. His name is "Hemp", he is the

naughtiest dog I have ever met, a fighting, pissing, eye

clawing, shirt tearing, computer licking monster. He is

all dog, no human ethics at all (resembling his master in

many ways). Along with Hemp, I was invited to a harvest

festival in Nara, the bastion of Japanese Rastafarianism.

For some reason Nara and the nearby town of Yoshino have a

large number of Orientals who claim the divinity of Haile

Selassie, can cook fish tea and ackie, and who have spent

many years forcing their unlikely hair into unconvincing

locks. Perhaps analogous forces, the mystique of the

unfamiliar, drove Ninja Man to call himself Ninja Man, I

don't know. The clientele of the harvest festival was

clearly divided into two morphic groups (local organic

farmers in wellies and overalls, and beardy Rasta men in

big hats.) The days events were similarly divided - the

pickings of the organic rice and vegetable harvest were

cooked into a feast at lunchtime, and the finest hydro

buds of the season were consumed in the evening. No

exaggeration, the leader of the Rasta men skinned up

solidly for 3 hours before he dropped the pace. Less

disciplined were the dogs, "Hemp" and "Ganja", who started

fighting when Hemp broke his leash and tore into his

namesake. Ganja, to his credit, was a gentleman, or a

coward, depending on your point of view.

When dog fights dog, it is very difficult for we monkeys

to judge the issues involved. No doubt the reasons are

valid, the highest disrespect has been caused on a

Pheromone level - "you son of a bitch, comin' round my

patch, waving yer arse in the air, drooling over my bitch,

acting like you own the place, pissing in my perfumes" but

in the greater scheme of things, they are just two dogs

fighting. No one but the stuffiest of reverends thinks that

they are evil.

Turn the tables, bring your nose back down to the ground

where it doesn't run so much. From the dog's eye view,

political disputes are utterly ridiculous. Fighting the

infidel, fighting to liberate the oppressed from communism

or imperialism, fighting to do anything really other than

poke more bitches must be completely baffling to them.

Perhaps a really wise dog could understand the concept of

fighting for a flag. A dog's world is primarily olfactory

and the scent of an enemy can him into a rage, so in a

similar way a man with his visual bias may understandably

behave unpleasantly to someone visually different -

(flared trousers, swastika armband, black face, pointy

hat, warts and broomstick.)

Hemp is a bad dog, a really bad dog, but he wouldn't have

killed Ganja. He would have been satisfied with a retreat,

tail between the legs and whimpering. It is a tired old

truism but nevertheless true that man is the only species

which kills his own with such premeditation. And contrary

to the wisdom of our wise dog, it is not the flag which

enrages but what the flag stands for. The cross was so

offensive to medieval Jews that all the paving stones in

certain synagogues are laid so as to form no crosses, but

the real offense lies in what the cross stood for - a

culture which was both oppressive and unchosen. The blue

coats of the bluecoats were no doubt very handsome, but

they became a valid reason for murder in the context of

the American civil war because they were a symbol of

allegiance to the enemy, with its different goals and

beliefs. It is difficult to judge whether Hemp objected to

the actual smell of Ganja himself, or to the symbolic fact

implied by the smell (that another dog was in the area). I

think probably the former, but I can't say. I can say with

some certainty that Hemp would have stopped short of

dogicide.

Here is the paradox of man's situation - we are supposed

to be civilized but we can be driven to murder, even to

genocide and nuclear attack, by symbolism and ideology.

Dogs have much less freedom to talk about charity and good

will and sin and hell and other things which don't exist,

they are slaves to their noses and can be driven wild by

the bitch next door, but they cause much less trouble than

do we humans. We are separated from the physical world by

a conceptual world, which we claim is rational and makes

us behave rationally.

Whilst it is practically a term of endearment in the UK,

the word "cunt" is so offensive that well raised American

girls cry if you say it to them with enough power. The

same word is found on the back of a certain jacket you can

buy in Japan. It is an anorak with the letters "C.U.N.T. -

Outdoor life is good with friends" or something on the

back, I imagine it was done on purpose by some cheeky

foreigner. I chased a little girl around a room trying to

take a photo of the jacket once. Anyway, the point is that

the word has no bad associations. If I use the word "bunt"

in front of my mum, doesn't have the same effect, though

there’s only a letter’s worth of difference. The symbolism behind

it is what makes tears flow. Dogs have no problem with

either cunts, nor the word "cunt". It is humans who feel

obliged to cover up their cunts for fear of causing

offense, and not talk about them on the airwaves. What

exactly are we scared of? Why are the most offensive words

in English words which refer to our biggest gifts - sex

and genitals? And we are meant to be rational by virtue of

our abstractions? If we take an objective look at our

taboos we find that our symbolism is a paranoid mess of

neuroses and hang-ups, projected hatred and unresolved

issues. The dog with his nose to the ground is much more

in touch with the natural world, and much less dangerous

to the natural world than the human with his head in the

clouds. We are stuffed so full of concept, ritual and

protocol that it is difficult to know how to behave. We

are so advanced that it is illegal to plant ganja seeds.

So whereas we think we are the dogs bollocks, we are

really nothing of the sort. From a planetary perspective

we are a dangerous, dirty, irresponsible plague, worse

than locusts, rats, rivers of blood, and killings of the

first-born. We are the vermin, the rattiest rats, and we

built the sewers where we run and filled them with shit

too. Oh no, we say, foxes in our rubbish bins, monkeys

stealing our crops, mosquitoes in our flats. What titanic

arrogance is this? Who claimed the land as owned in the

first place? No dog ever claimed to be the rightful owner

of a land, no King Philips of Jerusalem in the natural

world. A dog remains rightful leader of the pack until he

is knocked down to size by another dog. There is nothing

so indefensible as ownership of land, but it is the

fallacy under which we exist. 

When the Spanish and Portuguese Catholics zealously

conquistadored South America, they claimed the land with

the permission of the pope, the authority of God, and

preached the good news wherever they went. The Old World

diseases they bought with them decimated the Indians, and

there was much joy that God was clearing the way for them

with the plague. Things were not so easy for the

colonizers of North America. As protestants, all this

divine authority and humbug was a little close to the

philosophy of the anti-Christ pope, so they developed the

concept of "meum" and "teum". The argument ran that, as

the Indian tribes had no concept of "meum" and "teum"

(mine and yours), believing that the land was simply where

they lived rather than a possession, then the land was

technically unclaimed, and there could be no objection to

Europeans claiming it.

The resulting genocide was much more thorough than

Catholic conquistadors could have ever hoped for. The

average Mexican or Brazilian today retains much DNA of

Mayan or Inca origin, whereas the DNA of the various North

American tribes is largely confined to the reservations.

There is more Aztec blood in North America that there is

Sioux or Blackfoot, so much more efficient were the

founding fathers than the Catholic conquistadors. How did

this come to pass? What was the difference between the

devil Cortez and the devil Columbus?

The main theological difference is in the matter of

transubstantiation. A Catholic, especially a Catholic in

the 16th century, was taught to believe that the bread and

wine become the body and blood of Christ with some cunning

hocus-pocus during Mass. The Protestants take a more

rational approach, claiming in their stuffy accents that

the bread and wine are symbolic of the body and blood of

Christ, and patting themselves on the back for their

wisdom. So whilst the swarthy Southern Europeans set forth

with a zealous agenda, exploiting, no doubt burning and

converting and leaving mixed genotypes and some very

beautiful girls a few hundred years down the line, the

Puritans simply and calculatedly exterminated the buffalo

and destroyed most of the tribes.

So our Spaniards and Portuguese took their abstract

construction (the Catholic church) and caused misery and

death to the New World peoples. Later, Northern Europeans

suffering from an even more convoluted abstract belief

system (both symbolic and cognizant of the symbolism) came

to North America and all but wiped out the locals. What do

you think, Spot, about our rational function? Aren't you

jealous, don't you wish you could make Cherry Coke

flavoured bones? "Woof" he barks. "Smells a bit funny to

me."

There is a way out of our rut, an escape from the perils

of being so intelligent that we behave stupidly. We have

to recognize just how low our abstract function makes us

sin. Without it we would be hairless apes. With it we are

dangerous exterminators of other species, and makers of

misery for the other inhabitants of the planet. We have to

understand that our rational judgments, the symbolic

matrix which we have created, has to a great extent taken

the place of our natural desires, but can only be

considered an improvement when viewed through the

rationalistic goggles we have created and super-glued onto

our faces. From any other point of view, (the rat in the

lab, the dugon in the zoo, the dodo in the history books),

our natural desires and the natural limitations of our

flesh would be entirely preferable. No panda bear gives

two panda poos that we have written poems and soap operas

and conquered nations and disease and trigonometry. A

panda would rather have its home back.

We have a gift, but we have become rather too proud of it,

and have been using it irresponsibly. It is time for us to

justify our intelligence, justify our abstract universes,

as up ‘til now the biggest fruits have all been rotten.

Step one: ditch the goggles. This should be no difficult

task, just stop talking and believing rubbish. The

perceived difficulty lies in fear, because if we look at

ourselves in our present state without our pompous

waistcoats, our cowardly legal defenses, our righteous

morals, cunning justifications and appeals to authority,

we should be deeply ashamed of what we have done, and of

what we have allowed to happen by conscious neglect. We

are knowingly allowing unnatural and perverted things to

occur right in front of us. Whether it is using extremely

unorthodox methods and powerful chemicals for Coca crop

spraying in Columbia, or employing radioactive materials

in conventional wars, it is filth that even the filthiest

dog in Christendom would be unable to match.

I love my mind, I really do. I am proud of my reasoning

facility, and I consider it my right to express beauty in

the abstract as much as a dog has the right to express

himself in the olfactory. I am the king of this world, I

believe that humans are special in this, in their ability

to judge and theorize and muse and incite with words, with

semantics, with the abstract world. But I am not proud of

what we have done. We have taken our beautiful minds and

used them to drag ourselves down to be miserable and dirty

and suicidal and disgusting. No other animal commits

suicide (not even lemmings, it is a myth we cling to

because it makes us feel better), what is so clever about

being able to kill ourselves and still think we are the

dogs bollocks? Our first task is to clear up the mess we

have made to redeem ourselves, and this is a truly

Herculean task. One of Hercules' labors was, in fact, to

clean up in a day the shits of thousands of cattle which

had been neglected in the Augean stables for years. This

is much like the situation we face now. We ate the fruit

of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, quickly

progressed to fratricide and politics, and thousands of

years later we still bear the curse. We are not taking

responsibility for our gift. If we become mindful of our

minds, as a dog is mindful of his bladder, we will be able

to create things to make ourselves proud, as a dog is

proud of his piss. Maybe we can also learn to avoid

shitting on the floor of our kennel, like even the dumbest

of dogs avoids.

Danny Nemu

TheArtichoke.org

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Politics, Ignorance and the Devil

By Danny Nemu

The first draft of this piece was written when I was at a very low point, two days into a trip down the three gorges in China, on a stinking, rat and roach infested plague ship with Satan's own toilet and a deck awash with phlegm. Then I reviewed it back in Japan when I was happy, feeling loved and a little bit more employed, and so I pasted some less miserable bits here and there. 

I will start this essay by stating that I don't believe in Evil. Ignorance, veils, misapplied effort, unskillfulness, ugliness yes, but not “Evil” with a capital E, inverted commas, shivers down the spine and a cameo by Boris Karlof. I consider what we commonly refer to as Evil to be a form of ugliness. A dot of red paint may be sublime dabbed deftly into in the shading of a tree in a Monet, but would be a pimple if daubed carelessly on the nose of the Mona Lisa by a Di Vinci with his mind on other things. A bass drum is an admirable instrument, sounds fantastic when skillfully employed in a breakbeat, but it doesn't gel harmoniously with, for example, a string quartet. And a long, wispy white beard is just the thing for the face of an ancient and wise oriental sitting by a mah-jongg table, but I wouldn't like to find it on the back-side of a young girl I had managed to lure back to my house. Red paint, the bass drum and a wispy beard are not intrinsically Evil, and by the same token, enthusiasm, obedience, pride, sex, violence, modesty and hunger are not Evil, but can be pretty ugly and dangerous in the wrong situations. Some Buddhist teachers hold that there is no such thing as good or bad in the absolute sense, and we should rather speak of skillfulness and unskillfulness. For example, it might be unskillful to be enthusiastic at a funeral, or to have sex in a toilet in King’s Cross station. In comparison to the wisdom of the Buddha, the “Seven Deadly Sins” thing seems to be a fairly simplistic philosophy. Lust can be a pure and beautiful thing, gluttony is a must at a good wedding, and even murder, performed skillfully, has its place. According to the legend, the old man of the mountains, Hassan I Sabbah, with crazy Christians on one side and mad Muslims on the other, trained his assassins to be expert and dispassionate killers, following the logic that a well placed knife in the throat of a religiously inflated, megalomaniac warlord would save everyone else a good deal of trouble in the long term. He may never have existed, but the story illustrates an important point, that a gangrenous toe is best amputated before it becomes a gangrenous leg, and the loss of a toe in an extreme situation is not, per se, Evil.

Take, as an example of something more complicated than "Evil", the monumentally annoying boy who has been tirelessly following me around this disgusting boat. He has been trying to engage me in conversation for the past seventy-two hours, past the refugee camp of fifth class, up to the storeroom where they keep the giant cabbages, into my stinking cell when I am trying to sleep, and onto shore, up the steep steps of temples (which would be beautiful were it not 5.30am and dark and raining and freezing and no time for sightseeing). This kid is educated, bright, a university student who is practically fluent in English, but his racist and ill-informed views, tirelessly expounded, are a red dot on the Mona Lisa’s nose to me. He grew up being fed tales of the Nanking massacre, but learning nothing about the acts the Chinese perpetrated on other Chinese in that period, and continue to perpetrate in the present period.

He (I'm speaking generically now) learned such rubbish as "chop-sticks have been scientifically proven to make you more intelligent", he learned of the beauty of China but not about the relationship that beauty has to the few hundred instant noodle pots thrown out of the windows of this rusting, belching ship three times a day. In short, he cannot fairly be expected to have a well-rounded view of the world. I cannot blame him for having imperialistic, rabidly racist and destructive tendencies, offensive though they are. Certain questions arise, such as "Where does his own responsibility for his beliefs begin?" and even "Despite the unfortunate and undeserved set of circumstances which lead to him being such a titanic prick, wouldn't the whole world be better off if his lungs were full of filthy water six feet below the water-line, rather than filthy polemic and wind six feet above it, next to your humble correspondent?" These are interesting questions, and I would like to come back to them at some, but for this essay my point is that he cannot be held fully responsible for his mind-set. By the same token, a Japanese raised on stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but ignorant of the historical forces that brought about the dropping of the bombs, cannot be blamed for having an enigmatic slant on international relations, and a sixteen year old private schoolgirl from Henley-upon-Thames cannot be expected to have balanced views on ritual cannibalism, voluntary mortification in the Hindu faith, and Taoist devotional acts of mutilation. My Chinese denizen is not Evil. He is a fool, he makes my skin crawl and my fists clench, but he is not Evil. His enthusiasm is admirable, though misdirected towards hatred, and his friendliness could be endearing if it was not coupled with hard-right views, confused history, and a truly horrible cruise along the river Styx. It is his ignorance and his dreadful timing which make him objectionable.

To turn to a more important ramification of this idea, we will look at another fool, George W. Bush. He is my archetype of ignorance, my demigod of dim. Granted, he has a (dubious) MBA, and he can fly a jet fighter. He has overcome the handicap of his terrible rhetorical skills to become President of the United States indicating that he has excellent political skills. Later in this essay, I will look at Plato's ideas on Wisdom, but for now, let us think of one aspect of Wisdom as being able to predict the results of one's actions, and to act accordingly. A man who consistently employs such simplistic terminology as "crusade" or "axis", who exhibits no concern for the environment of our planet, and who keeps carelessly pissing off Muslims despite the dangers involved is the Wisdom equivalent of a vacuum. In his defence, however, I would add that he is not fully responsible for his ignorance, and neither are the people who voted him in. Great swathes of the population of the US may have traded in memories of US apartheid and CIA funded anti-Soviet terrorism for a database of weak story-lines from sit-coms, but the trend towards ignorance began a long time ago, and it is a difficult trend to reverse. And if the media is more interested in covering the minutiae of the O.J. case or Clinton and his sticky cigar than it is in describing the state of Anti-American feeling in the middle-east, then we can't be overly critical of the consumers of this offal soup, just as we can’t be critical of the ginger hair and retarded brains of kids in certain parts of Africa whose diets are lacking in certain essential proteins. Rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out

A friend of mine on that nasty boat summed up Bush's politics concisely – "Do you like Mummy, or Daddy?" The majority of Americans (and British, and Japanese) are as ignorant about the world as a babe in arms, but we’re not Evil, and if insults like that one about "The Axis of Evil" can be cast around as political polemic, this is only more evidence that this Evil is really ignorance. No-one thinks that little Jo-Jo is being Evil when he shouts to all his friends "Sophie done a poo-poo in her pants". Cute acts of hatred and aggression can be quite endearing, and only become terrifying when the perpetrator has access to an army and nuclear weapons.

The second point I wish to make is that it takes more than a Hitler or a Pol Pot to kill a few million civilians. It takes a cause, a belief in black and white, nurtured in an environment of ignorance and censorship, crystallized around a nugget of desperation, and supported by an efficient propaganda machine. It doesn't take an antichrist or a slave to the Lord of all Evil. There is a strong case to say that our enemies, our Bin Ladens and Kim Il Sungs, are products of their environments as much as progenitors. Before mass-murder can take place, there must be an analogous process in our heads, a purely cerebral crime – the extermination of conflicting viewpoints. This is a sinister crime, because opposition and doubt are vital pieces of the puzzle, without which the full picture cannot be revealed. Consider the king’s jester who, unlike the formal advisors, is immune from punishment regardless of whom he offends. Consider the off-key note in an Indian scale called vivadi or “the enemy” which makes the sound rounded and complete. Think of the respect our culture holds for Emily Pankhurst, or Galileo, or Jesus. A rabbi once demanded to know when I would stop being the annoying little brother – in retrospect, it was the most encouraging thing he could have said to me. The dissident is our friend, and doubt is the key to our maturity. Forgetting to doubt, starting to see in terms of the righteous (us) and the Evil (them), marks the end of our sanity, and paves the way for the murder of people going about their business in office blocks in New York or scrubby farmlands in the middle-east. This is the meaning behind the wise quote I am paraphrasing, that where books are burned, bodies will burn later.

A Christian friend I travelled with in Yunan claimed that the Devil’s most ingenious act was to convince mankind that he doesn't exist. I would suggest the opposite, that the most malicious piece of ignorance which ever popped into existence is the concept of the Devil as an animate enemy, and the resultant belief that what is keeping us unhappy is a thing rather than the absence of a thing, the absence of reason and information. We in the West may not be a religious people in the manner of the middle-ages anymore, but our dichotomy-fraught culture is the heir to our Christian history and its God and Satan, heaven and hell, Mummy and Daddy cosmology. Theorists theorise about conspiracies, governments and secret societies controlling our lives by insidious means, and there may be some truth in these ideas, but the arch-conspiracy is the specter of ignorance which makes us believe that there is anything other than ourselves keeping us down. The real enemy is the set of confused beliefs which names an enemy, which names it Bin Laden or Bush, global capitalism or Islamic fundamentalism, and dictates that murder and suicide are necessary to fight it.

My third point is that ignorance is the rule, rather than the exception. Find one wise adult in a room of twenty and you are doing well. You may find a competent businesswoman, a fine chef, and someone who can beat their chess software on level six, but specialisation is not wisdom. Plato describes how Socrates, the wisest of all men, goes from specialist to specialist trying to find true wisdom, and concludes along with the Oracle that the wisest man is one who knows that he is ignorant, as this is just about all you can definitively know. But find one Western adult in two-hundred who has read Plato and you are doing very well, despite the importance he has had on our culture. A terrifying one in twenty adults in the UK is functionally illiterate. We live in ignorant times, we have probably always lived in ignorant times, the difference is that now we have skyscrapers containing thousands, airplanes in the sky, and networks capable of hijacking them. Our ignorance can now upset people time zones and cultural chasms away. How many New Yorkers could have found Kabul on a map before that little war started? How many people with firm beliefs on Iraq understand what the sanctions have been doing to that country, or even that the sanctions exist? How many different ways can the British media find to pronounce the word “Pakistan”? Most Japanese don't know about the Nanking massacres, most Chinese don't see the irony in the term "The Peaceful Liberation of Tibet," most British don't know what Gandhi did or why he did it.

And ignorance is bliss. It really is. Seeing the world in black and white is easy. You have your friends and your enemies, your likes and your hates, and you don't have to think any more, you can just believe instead. Once something is decided, we can stop thinking about it, and we can stop striving to limit the scope of our ignorance. “I don’t like carrots” was one belief which lodged in my brain during childhood and haunted me for many years, denying me access to such heavenly pleasures as Thai salad, before I finally bit the bullet and bit the carrot with an open mind. In the words or Robert Anton Wilson (www.omnimag.com/archives/chats/hs091697.html):

I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no belief system.

Perhaps one of the laziest and most dangerous dogmas to take aboard is “such-and-such is right” “Thatcher is right, Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh is right, liberal democracy is right, and can do no wrong”. If we decide a thing like this, we not only limit our scope to think, but also our ability to choose what to think about. In politics, when we start believing the rubbish about Crusades against an Evil enemy, we excuse ourselves from thinking about why people are hell-bent on our destruction – we can remain ignorant of why we are so hated in the first place. For example, now we know that Iraq, Iran and North Korea are Evil – well, that's great, we knew that anyway, they wear funny clothes, they do bad things to us. Let's damage their collateral! Ignorance is FUN! Crusades are fun, hating your enemies is fun, agreeing with your friends is fun. An educational program on cultural relativity is a bit of a hassle.

A further aspect of ignorance – it makes us incapable of making informed decisions about skillfulness and unskillfulness. Take for example the spate of window smashing and arson perpetrated by angry women in London in the early 1910s. Ugly acts, but consider the failure of fifty years of peaceful campaigning for women’s suffrage, and then the subsequent history – British women eventually attained the right to vote in 1918, partly thanks to these militant tactics. To stretch the metaphor to unreasonable lengths – that red blob of paint may be high satire in a book entitled “Renaissance masterpieces in polka-dot”, penned as a Dada protest against institutional art, perhaps. Without access to all the facts, we are not qualified to judge a particular course of action.

So where do we stand? Where does the optimist put his faith, what philosophy does a thoughtful person adopt when surrounded by ignorance. Three options:

Option 1) The wise must educate the ignorant. Lofty and moral, but consider the amount of ignorance that there is to cut through, the increasingly political state of the media, and the sheer ease of playing computer games for 15 hours a day rather than waking up and tearing down the cloth cage of stupidity and cynicism around us, and it appears that we are on to a loser. Still, it is a sin to be negative, so let’s consult some wise men. One time the Buddha was asked (well, I think he was anyway) – "How can you smile when there is all this misery around you?" He replied – "When it is pitch dark, why don't you light a lantern?" It is much the same for ignorance, and history teaches us that the efforts of a small number of determined and clued up individuals can produce great results. It is said that Kyoto and Nara were spared the fire-bombing suffered by the rest of Japan due to the efforts of a single resident American academic who informed the military establishment that these cities were culturally important but militarily inconsequential. Galileo has already been mentioned, but the history of science is peppered with similar cases from Paracelsus to Pasteur, and political history could furnish us with many more examples than just Gandhi and Pankhurst. One candle can be seen from a great distance in the dark, and as Mao sinisterly informs us, “A single spark can start a prairie fire”.

Option 2) Retreat, go nihilist or apocalyptic, choose a philosophy to support snooty sectarianism – most major thought complexes can be readily adapted. Go wierdy Buddhist, know that there are myriad millions of other worlds beyond this one, that all things arise and then pass, relinquish your attachments as far as your attachment to the earth, bear no children to such an unforgiving world. Or go fatalistic Hindu, hide behind the sofa for the Kali Yuga, until the universe is a gray soup for Shiva's midnight feast as Brahma finally succumbs to his yawns at the cosmic pajama party. Or become a Jehovah's Witness and piss people off until Kingdom comes, when you can rise with your ignorant friends to the height of arrogance at God's side. Be still like an apocalyptic environmentalist mentalist, or wait with short breaths for the calm to break, the purge to come in the form of pandemic, epic famine, a huge war, earthquakes. All of the above end-games are looking likely from this little fault line nation, just across the Pacific from where that crazy, blind, paranoid man is running with a sharp sword around an uncharted room called "Islam". Believe that it has to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

This philosophy is attractive, but personally I have found it unworkable, perhaps because of that damned mark on my forehead. It seems that embracing a miserable and defeatist philosophy only makes me miserable and defeatist. Furthermore it is historically untenable – apocalyptic scenarios have appeared periodically, brought forth by portents such as comets, plagues, great fires, or terrible wars. The end of times has been weaved into the narrative of contemporary events, and is historically significant, providing impetus for mass movements such as the Puritan exodus to North America, but we are still here despite the hype. My favourite punch-bag, the Jehovah's Witnesses miscalculated the date of the end of the world as many as four times in the last century, and each time pious farmers neglected to plant, and the diseased faithful postponed life-saving operations, but they were wrong, and probably very embarrassed indeed. Environmental end of the world scenarios abound today – AIDS may well kill massive swathes of Africa and demographically change the shape of the earth, but we have had comparable plagues before, and we're still here. The seas may rise, but we will climb a little higher and we'll still be here. A little warmer, a little hungrier, a little sparser, but we'll survive, as a species. Probably. Of course, just because the predictions have disappointed for thousands of years, it doesn’t mean that they will disappoint for ever, though then we can’t say for sure that the sun will ever rise again either, but I still intend to do my homework for tomorrow. And if I'm wrong and we don't survive, there's still nothing to be gained by believing that we will. The jury is still out, and it's no fun living as the living dead. Besides, our mission during the Kali Yuga is to maintain our dharma despite the difficulties, so when Shiva finally triumphs over Vishnu and Brahma sleeps, the sleeper can remember the dharma and dream, and maybe one day, open his eyes again to creation.

Option 3) Turn off your brain. Believe the hype, sink into the warm swamp of ignorance if you can. If you need help, find a drug to sedate the wolves of your intellect – alcohol, Ritalin, Prozac, or the tabloid press are all readily available. Find a pass-time – collect something ridiculous, like stamps, train numbers, lottery tickets, beliefs. I met a guy at a station in November who had been injured, permanently precluded from his trade as a chef, and took up hardcore train spotting to pass his days. Enthusing about all the train numbers he had collected at Western Supermare the previous week. And this man is meant to be sane? Pursuing an utterly meritless pastime, for the sake of passing time? The more traditional forms of delusion (paranoid and messiah and all the colourful faces of schizophrenia) are of course reasonable means of escaping the malignant stupidity of the world and hiding in a fabricated cosmology, or you may select a readymade by such luminaries as Gurjieff or Jim Jones or the Church of Scientology. But who needs such extreme measures when you can just make a simple decision which the conspiracy of mindlessness doesn't recognise as insane – I will watch trains for ten years of my adult life. I will support my government's murder of innocent farmers who have never even heard of "Baywatch".

None of these three options are looking very tasty at the moment. On a rough day, or on a shitty river-boat trip, I think it will have to get a lot worse before it gets any better, that our stupidity is as much a distinguishing feature of our species as our genius, and certainly the more prevalent. And we are all guilty in some way of maintaining the charade. I collect stupid shit, collected my toenails for several years in fact. But before we disappear in a puff of misery, we must remember that negative thinking is the very hemp of our restraining ropes, and if we tied these knots, then we can untie them as well.

Oh yeah, that damned mark. There's a Jewish story about a king and his advisor, who are the only two souls in the kingdom who know that the supply of grain is contaminated. Everyone who eats the grain goes mad and to date, no one has recovered, but reserves of uncontaminated grain are running out, and a course of action must be decided upon. The pair discuss what they are going to do, theorising at first that they keep the safe grain for themselves, so they can stay sane and hence govern the crazy people with wisdom? But the king wonders how he would govern people whose thoughts he did not understand, so he suggests that he too should eat the fruit-loops cereal, and the advisor should stay sane and tell him how best to rule. The adviser considers this option, but concludes that he would not be able to persuade a loony king that a given course of action was a wise one. And of course if the advisor alone eats the contaminated grain, how could his advice be trusted. Finally they both decide to eat the grain, and the king's final sane act before he chows down is to order that everyone in the kingdom marks their foreheads with super-permanent marker. Now every day when we wake up to perform our morning office, we look in the mirror and we wonder how this mark came to be there, have an inkling that something is not quite right with the world, and have a constant reminder that we are mere shadows of what we are capable of being.

Now the mark is sometimes obscured by layers of filth, and we can forget for a time that, say, eugenics in it's later incarnations is very very wrong, or that a strip of land is worth dying or killing for. But at other times it stares us in the face, and it takes all our strength so stop the words "Why the fuck do you collect train numbers / support the murder of people you have never met / keep turning up at my door with your juvenile prophesy?" from coming out of our mouths.

Concentrate, wake up a little, and you can see that mark all the time. And if you're not yet a nihilist or a fatalist or a junky or something dull like that, and your mind is still your own, then you will want to fight the ignorance. And as a fat man with tattoos on his arms and a magnificent beard once explained to me, that fight comes in different grades, like peanut butter, from the course to the smooth. Over to you, beardy man:

Stage one – Rebellion. This manifests itself as painting your face blue and scaring old ladies, shouting at policemen, vandalising McDonalds as a political statement, disrupting the speech of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It can be tiresome at times, and the individual acts of aggression don’t add up to much, but it shows recognition of the fact that the individual is free, and that something is not quite right with the world as it is, and as such this urge should be encouraged, or better, channeled.

Stage two – Revolution. The periodic ejaculations of anger characteristic of stage one are not deeply satisfying for an extended period of time, and a concerted, organized effort is deemed necessary. The state of the world cries out for change! Destroy the State! Smash capitalism! (The utterances of this stage cry out for exclamation marks.) You can go and join Socialist Worker if you like, march with like minded people. Class War, they’ll take you too, give you a complementary spray can, Chumbawamba bootleg cassette, and a balaclava helmet.

There are a few problems with this gambit, one of which is that you have to take on the belief system of the people you are marching with. It is no good to say – “I object to the state which supports tyrannical rulers in oil producing nations, to the condition of our hospitals and schools, to the degree of the gap between the rich and the poor, but I don't want to support a bunch of Neo-Marxist fools who paint over racist graffiti with equally ugly anti-racist graffiti, come out with silly plans about twinning Jenin with Tower Hamlets, and disregard all the rules of grammar in their literature.” That is no good at all. To be part of a group, you must necessarily section part of your gray matter and tow the line, otherwise you are the fracture in the front, the weak link in the chain, the bourgeois intellectual. Though I cannot speak for all of the leftist groups in the world, I am yet to be impressed by any new hard left political literature, and the Turkish Communist Front stuff that came my way a few weeks ago bore absolutely no relation to reality as I perceive it (and they really should have hired a proof-reader). Adopting the ethics and dogma of another brings us right back to the start of our argument, to the dangers of eliminating the element of doubt and seeing in black and white (unless, my friends, the dogma is mine). The snake has swallowed his tail, and the right to rebel has brought us back to obedience. When we think we are being rebels it is wise to remember Crowely’s words – “Doubt, and doubt that you doubt.”

Another problem with the cry for revolution is a historical one – revolutions always fail. The French revolution, the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution – revolutions tend to be bloody and always replace the monster with another monster. The root problem is the mass of ignorance, and though it may be a deliberate ploy on the part of the few to keep the masses unenlightened, we cannot eliminate that retardation by eliminating the few. People need their dogma, in fact, they like it. The Tsar is gone - quick, find me a Stalin! How successful was the Russian provisional government, or the Weimar republic? Both were lame, directionless, half-hearted namby-pamby and unpopular. Kuhn wrote some great essays on dogma, the importance it holds in our lives. His sad conclusion, with respect to scientific revolutions but pertinent to political ones as well, was that they are never complete until the old thinkers die off, taking their untrendy paisley and flannel paradigms with them to the grave. Cutting off the head of a chicken is no way to get the chicken out of the cage. All you get is a lot of blood spilt and a lot of running around in circles.

Step three – Subversion. This is the mature state of the same urge. Subversion means introducing an element of doubt into whoever and whatever you can, skillfully tiptoeing around the mind of your target person or institution like an inter-neural ninja, dodging dogmas to avoid tripping the alarms, strangling the life out of dozing opinions, turning the guards of morality against each other. But this is dangerous work, and you may earn some enemies suggesting that, for example, queuing up for an entire night to go and see the corpse of a 101 year old monarch's mum is a funny thing to be doing whilst war brews and the lives of a great number of able-bodied Muslims are at risk. Certain English bakeries stopped selling cake a week after the Queen Mother hopped the twig. What? – is it bad to eat cake after a very old woman dies? Imagine the uproar if kebabs went off-limits for a week every time a Muslim family lost it's home to a bomb. To me, the contradiction is patently obvious, but mention this to the wrong person and you are liable to be beaten senseless. Subversion requires that you keep your sanity, and stay alert to infect anyone or anything you can when two confused dogmas slip past each other to reveal a crack. Sugar the pill, spike the drink, and wake up your neighbours.

Excuse me while I mess with the metaphors, but I want to allow the Devil back into proceedings, in a more symbolic guise than a few paragraphs ago when I so unceremoniously showed him the door. It is good practice to conclude an essay on an irreverent and Satanic note, I think. Traditionally, the Devil can do nothing by himself, he can only influence others indirectly, stirring up passions, popping up as doubt here and there in moments of idleness (“the Devil makes work for idle hands”). He, or one of his alter-egos, is the patron saint of subversives – Loki opposing the Gods at Ragnarok, Discordia throwing the golden apple into the party of the gods, the snake in the garden of Eden urging proto-man to munch the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil and WAKE UP.* The Devil is our friend. We need to let him in, and listen carefully to what he has to say, however rude his demeanor, however malodorous his breath, however offensive his opinions may be to the status quo and to our lethargy.

Of course, to take every Devilish urge as a divine directive is simplistic – the Devil is to be heeded, his opinions to be considered alongside the others available, but don’t go selling your soul to him, giving up your Will like various literary denizens, or you will be unhappy on the one hand, and considered antisocial on the other, and find it difficult to get a reservation at one of London’s better restaurants. You will make a terrible ninja if you cannot control your destructive urges, regardless of how loudly an opinion or an institution cries out for destruction.

To borrow a metaphor from magick – in the operation called evocation, a demon is summoned to perform some task or provide some information. The demon is confined to the inside of a circle drawn by the initiate, and if he escapes through a lapse of concentration or an unchecked passion, then, very literally, all hell breaks loose. The demon is treated with caution and respect, and the operation closes with a banishing, sending him back to his rightful place. Whatever your views on magick, there is wisdom in the metaphor – invite the Devil in, ask him questions, hear his opinions, but keep him in check, and keep him in his circle or his field. And then send him away when you are done with him.

There are several reasons to listen to the wisdom of our adversary, be he internal and infernal or external and flesh and blood. I will illustrate this with examples from a lovers’ tiff, and from the contemporary political arena. Firstly, there may well be some truth in what our co-tangoer says, and there may be something to learn about the nature of our conduct, and how we could behave more skillfully. “Yes sweetheart, maybe the fridge would be in a happier state if I had put the lid on the beans.” “Yes, Mr. Abdullah, maybe the Middle East would be in a better state if we had handled the sanctions on Iraq issue with a little more humanity.”

Related to this – although the phrasing may lose something in translation, although the words or actions of our foe may be fierce and difficult to understand at times, extreme behavior is always motivated by some issue, and it can point to the fact that there is a problem somewhere, although the cause may be obscure and only distantly related to the accusation. The symbolic utterance “You’re a useless prick” may relate so some long-standing issue concerning the washing up, but will never be expressed in simple terms when it has ballooned to become an issue of hyperbolic proportions. Compare this with Bin Laden’s words, taken from the BBC website:

We should also renounce the atheists and infidels. It suffices me to seek God's help against them… [Muslims around the world] resist the most ferocious, serious, and violent Crusade campaign against Islam ever since the message was revealed to Muhammad… What terrorism are they speaking about at a time when the Islamic nation has been slaughtered for tens of years without hearing their voices and without seeing any action by them?

But when the victim starts to take revenge for those innocent children in Palestine, Iraq, southern Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir and the Philippines, the rulers' ulema [Islamic leaders] and the hypocrites come to defend the clear blasphemy. It suffices me to seek God's help against them. The unequivocal truth is that Bush has carried the cross and raised its banner high and stood at the front of the queue.

The language is rather more colourful than we might deem polite from our sofas across the developed world, but the message is clear, and we need to start listening.

Violence is the inevitable result of the dichotomy between Good and Evil becoming an external rather than a cerebral conflict. When our minds become too dull and lazy to contain and consider conflicting viewpoints, the fight spills out of our ears and into the streets – Good and Evil become defined by arbitrary parameters in the external arena, along racial, geographical, religious or class lines, and tension brews. The externalization of the conflict can be avoided by realising that the Devil is our friend – we must be clear on this point. The Devil will tell you all kinds of things, carry all kinds of messages from forgotten corners of our labyrinthine minds, but sometimes he brings a message we need to hear. Sometimes the doubt he represents is doubt about the wisdom of our actions, and the morality of our opinions. If we pretend he is not there knocking at the door whilst we move onto the brandy and cigars, and we don’t invite him in to hear the wisdom contained in his bawdy stories and his rousing shanties, he will come anyway, if he needs to slip through the letterbox in a lethal powder form, or smash a plane through the windows, he will come to wake us up. And we can name him Evil, and he can name us blasphemous, and no-one is any the wiser.

FIN

Danny Nemu

TheArtichoke.org

* I favour a more Gnostic reading of this creation myth, where the snake is a good guy. If the garden was perfect, and we are assured that it was, why should the Almighty and omnipotent God allow it to contain a flaw? A cosmological typo, a slip of the tongue, a moment of lapsed awareness perhaps, on the part of the creator? A more sensible exegesis is that the desire to rebel against authority, the disobedient force in the garden is a necessary component of perfection. “Would you jump off a cliff if Vikram told you to?” as my mum used to say to me. No, you wouldn’t, if you had any sense.

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SELF INTRODUCTION

Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted.

Bit of a tired old motto, but the oldies are still the best. My interest is in belief - why people believe what they do, the effects a particular belief have, and what I should believe myself. To start with a simple example, for a very long time, a good proportion of the world believed, or claimed to believe, that despite all appearances to the contrary, a wafer and a dash of red waved under the consecrated hands of a celibate man ARE the blood and the body of Christ. Furthermore, many of these faithful believed that those who didn't make this leap of faith were destined to spend eternity in a fiery lake tormented by Satan and his minions.

"Do you know how long eternity is!" shouted a man in Birmingham station once. He had "Jesus is the Lord" written down the side of his trousers. I enjoyed his show so much that I missed my train.

Going hand in hand with belief in this pagan rubbish, squatting the same head-space if you like, one can usually find the belief that magic is the work of the devil. Burn the witch, kneel down to the idol.

That blood and body stuff has been abstracted away by Luther, or brushed away by atheism, or theism, or rationalism, or absorbed into the infinite folds of the lavender scented baggy trousers of the New Age movement, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief. Just don't you touch thems devil's condoms.

I picked an easy target, even an obsolete one in the Catholic church, which was unkind, but then I used to teach schoolchildren in Kenya whose minds had been poisoned by this rubbish by cane-wielding parents and teachers who genuinely believed that they were doing the best for their charges.

The effects of strong beliefs in particular belief systems are very obvious to the non-believer. Rape-statistics soar in South Africa, propagated by the belief that sex with a virgin is the one way to oust HIV from the body. Fools in the disputed territories of the middle east strap explosives to themselves and send themselves to heaven by charging into settlements of idiots who believe that the West Bank really is a wise place to raise a family. Let's not even start on Afghanistan for the moment.

Where do beliefs come from? For obscure, perhaps neuro-chemical or sociological reasons, humans need to believe something, but what that thing is can be as dubious as the mind is inventive. A world with no rules is terrifying on the one hand, and rather difficult to predict on the other, so we invent models, then come to believe in them, and sooner or later someone dies. The nature of a particular belief stems from, I would suggest, from the agar in which it was nurtured. The Norse based their cosmology on the battle between ice and fire, being a warlike culture in a very cold place. The scantily clad Mayans worshipped the sun, and the farming culture of the Indian subcontinent find a special place for the Ganges river in their belief system. The Judeo-Christian command to go forth and reproduce makes good sense in a desert surrounded by hostile tribes, as it does for those lucky early Mormons and their lucky strings of wives, but it's fairly dodgy advice for large swathes of South America and Africa in the twenty-first century. Political ideologies also come from their environment - without the dire economic and social conditions of Germany in the mid-twentieth century, it is unlikely that we would have seen such a twisted mish-mash of Monism, social Darwinism, hatred, and race pride as the Nazi movement. Perhaps the same can be said about neo Nazi-ism in some parts of London.

All doom and gloom? Belief can keep us alive, if the statistics pointing to a peak in the number of deaths immediately after the Jewish day of atonement amongst orthodox populations are to be believed, or if we believe the growing body of evidence on the efficacy of placebos in clinical tests.  New beliefs engender new outlooks, new technologies, new societies. The roots of such positive movements as the renaissance, the study of history, the scientific outlook, as well as the massive bloodshed of the hundred years war, can be found in the Luther's ideology. I think we should select our beliefs according to the desired goal, much as we select what sweater to wear according to the weather. And the same sweater worn every day quickly becomes boring, and eventually becomes a health issue.

Let's move away from religion for a little. Ask a child psychologist, an economist, a Darwinian biologist, an anthropologist, and a drug-law reformist about the causes of gang culture in inner-city neighborhoods of the US, and you will get at least five different answers. I'm going to come back to this question at some point in this website, but suffice it to say here that different models of reality yield different answers to the same question, much like different physics models approximate different aspects of the universe, and different artists will render the same object in different ways. To declare that the economist is wise, and the biologist is misguided or a liar is no more sensible than declaring that cubism is a truer representation of the world than is manga. Though the emphasis of my introduction is religion, as the weakness of confusing the menu with the meal is easiest displayed here, I intend to discuss our new god of science in this website in the future, and morality is due for a thrashing too. I am yet to find a sigle moral axiom which can be held up in all cases, let alone a set of ten commandments, 613 laws of the ancient Jews, however many make up the legal corpus of the United Kingdom, or the conditions of my contract of employment. As an example, I would suggest that the old moral chestnut "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" was clearly dreamt up by someone who had never met a masochist, didn't understand the ins and outs of homosexuality, didn't mix with junkies, and had never played with a baby.

Belief is also great fun. One of favorite places in England is Speaker's Corner on a Sunday, where you can find any number of people absolutely convinced of the truth of their own particular take on things. "I had 10,000 snakes removed from my belly!" was a piece of wisdom I learned there from a middle aged man, supported by the solemn nodding head of his friend next to him as he held sandwich board. The mad mullahs with their unique brand of aggression, the angry man for the liberation of men, foaming at the mouth with the ire of the downtrodden, the wobbly preacher with the speech impediment, tirelessly teaching anyone who cares to listen about "JEEEHHUUUUFF, WHO DHIED FOR YOUR HHINNS!". My favorite speaker is the energetic Nigerian in a tunic, wearing a red and silver plastic broach with the cryptic legend "03" on it, banging on with the power of one who knows he brings a message, talking about the Messiah who has come to Nigeria in the form of Ulumba Uboo Uboo. He sometimes sings for us, oblivious to the carnival of hecklers around him. The fervor of the religious groups is at least equaled by that of the secular - the anti-imperialists, the Marxists, and the various brands of reactionary producing as much froth and bile as the Jesus Army.

I am interested in education, so I am a teacher of children in Japan, where I can see first hand the perpetuation of a value system totally different to that in which I was raised. I studied, and still study the history of medicine, which is a history of the struggle between conflicting views on the body. I am interested in religion, for obvious reasons, magick for similar reasons, and Zen, because its most famous central dogma is that there is no central dogma. I am yet to find serious fault with Robert Anton Wilson, and though I sometimes find fault with Aleister Crowley, a few years later the fault usually turns out to be mine. I really dig Charles Fort's non-judgmental approach to scientific phenomena, and Susan Blackmore has caught my attention recently, for her secular and intelligent treatment of how ideas, memes as she calls them, become spread throughout brains and other data storage systems.

"Come off the fence, you wussy!"
"Get out of that field, you fool. There's an angry half-witted farmer with a shotgun in it!"

My own personal beliefs are few, more tendencies than beliefs, except for perhaps the one quoted at the start of this rather long self-intro, which is attributable to the common sense of William Burroughs, or to Hassan I Sabbah, the leader of the assassins, depending on who you believe. I hold certain beliefs about myself, developed from experiment and analysis (for example, a daily meditation is good for my state of mind, and more than four prunes at one sitting spells trouble etc.) but these are not to be applied to other people, and are subject to change. I consider dogma to be the enemy of thought, that when you believe something you can stop thinking about it and go back to sleep, though I may find cause to change my mind. I would say that my outlook is generally Zen Buddhist, or agnostic, quite often qabbalistic, intermittently Discordian, operationalist existentialist when I remember to employ the rigors that E-prime English requires (more on E-Prime at a later date), ontologically anarchistic, compassionate and intolerant by turns depending on my mood. I capitalize according to whim, and will refer to God, the Tau, the Buddha-mind, the Void, or to anything else I choose to without feeling that I need to justify the transition.

Pieces I intend to submit include my travel writing, diary excerpts, my thoughts on aspects of western mysticism such as the qabbalah and the four elements, some creative writing, some comparative medicine, some haiku, and some guest writing. It's a fairly eclectic lot, so please come back and check it out now and again even if one month holds no interest for you at all. Any comments gratefully appreciated.

I'm twenty-five, I make a mean egg-fried rice, and I live in Kyoto (which is absolutely lovely), with my girlfriend (who is absolutely lovely).  

Danny Nemu

TheArtichoke.org

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English Teacher Kills Two, Wounds Five in Japanese Staff-room

International observers and psychologists have been baffled by the events occurring in a junior high school in Soma, northern Japan. In this normally sleepy city, famous locally for its traditional pottery and yearly reenactment of former samurai glories, an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) from the internationally respected Japanese Exchange Teaching (JET) program went on the rampage, killing two and injuring a further five, one critically.

Although some psychologists have suggested that the catalyst of his psychosis was the sight of twenty-one fourteen year old girls untucking their shirts and pulling off their cravats in order to change into their P.E. outfits after first period, the first signs of trouble occurred just before 1pm on Friday. Danny-sensei, as his students respectfully knew him, was heard to mutter “bitch” under his breath as one of the secretaries left the computer room following a dispute over the allocation of school lunch, although sources close to the detained have pointed out that this behavior was not out of character.

Five minutes later, the Vice Headmaster was surprised when Mr.Nemu did not thank him and perform the customary bow after the former reminded the latter of the rules on the use of e.mail in school. This behavioural oddity was attributed to Mr. Nemu's genetic background, which differs from his Japanese co-workers by approximately 0.001%

Knowing that two rules had been broken in the space of half an hour, the staff were observing the ALT closely as he returned to the staff-room, and the biology teacher later remarked that there had been a stiffness to his gait. As he sat at his desk, which had that week been moved to the corner of the room to make the students less likely to talk to him and cause congestion during break-time, the maths teacher asked a question which appears to have precipitated the crisis: “You can’t eat meat?”

The ALT had not been eating meat for the past fourteen months at the school, and had previously mentioned to an Irish  acquaintance that his vegetarianism was consistently the only subject he had discussed with co-workers throughout that period.

Mr. Nemu calmly picked up the ceremonial spear won by the girl’s basketball team and stabbed the maths teacher through the chest, killing him instantly. The two had previously had and ostensibly amicable relationship, and had been overheard on the previous day discussing the likelihood of finding a good vegetarian curry in Sendai. The deceased Mr. Yamamoto leaves behind a widow and two daughters.

After bowing to the corpse, the wayward teacher began to assault the social science teacher about the head and throat with a heavy hole-punch. His former composure fell away, and he began to scream about institutional racism, paternalism and a popular dish made from fermented soya beans.

Ms. Ito believes she owes her life to Mr. Watanabe, a 4^th dan Kendo swordsman now in a critical condition in the accident and emergency ward of Sendai Public Hospital. He pulled the assailant away after Ms. Ito’s jaw and cheekbone had been fractured. She has since regained consciousness and is resting in Soma Public Hospital with 23 stitches in her face and neck. Mr. Watanabe was pushed backwards through a first story french window and broke his neck and skull on the concrete below.

A thirteen year-old boy who had spent the entire thirty minute cleaning period of the previous day imitating a Chinese and trying to feel Mr. Nemu's testicles and backside was in the staff-room at the time. He died from internal bleeding after the ALT punctured both of his lungs in a vicious attack with a pair of scissors, during which he was heard to shout “How do you like that, you little faggot piece of shit, how do you like that?”

Mr. Nemu then turned on the teachers who were fleeing. As he picked up the hot water storage unit, he was grabbed from behind by Mr. Takahashi, Mr. Endo and Mr. Meguro. These teachers and the ALT all suffered burns from the spilt water. Mr. Endo also lost four teeth when the detained struck him with a pot containing Japanese pickled plums which he had managed to acquire during the fracas. The rest of the teachers managed to restrain the assailant until the police arrived.

Mr. Nemu is now being held in a secure unit in Tokyo, where he has been moaning the name of his girlfriend and comparing the merits of various Japanese convenience stores. Although his physical injuries are slight, psychiatrists believe that due to the outburst and the stress which preceded it, it is unlikely that he will ever emerge from his delirium.

Students and teachers have been baffled by the violent mood-swing of this previously well-loved assistant, although the Head Master was unsurprised, saying “They’re a funny bunch, those foreigners”. The Council of Local Authorities for International Relations which governs the JET program has suspended all duties of JETS until talks with the police have been concluded and a course of action has been decided.

Danny Nemu

TheArtichoke.org

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Selected Haiku

In the thick Thai sun,

A monk at a computer

Playing solitaire.

A small dog in spring.

Who can blame him for longing

To love my trainers?

Oh slow computer

Must the peaches hang heavy

Before you reboot?

A sticky night. Her arse

The ultimate summer fruit.

Shame she speaks with it.

Six jellies wobble

In Kaiten Zushi orbit

Ordered, unwanted.

(Kaiten Zushi is a revolving sushi restaurant)

School-kids being marched

In sinister formation.

Butterfly flits by.

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