poem about Egyptian Dogs

A dog barks in the night outside my window 

A dog barks in the night outside my window

Tethered dogs in the dirt poor yard

This one barks like a car that won’t start

turning over and over 

on a waning battery.

Egypt; the interchangebility of noise, animal and mechanical,

Life inhabiting levels of sound outside and not inside

Our heads.

composing pictures and the almighty rule of THREE

There are rules of composition just as there are rules of poetry. When I started writing poetry I became vaguely aware of them, learned them the hard way, but I also learnt that they can always be broken, every single one. I also learnt that you can write pretty good poetry by not knowing a dam thing about the correct way to write poetry…

Composition means making a pretty picture- but make it too pretty, symmetrical, following the rule of thirds and action along a diagonal and yawn it becomes boring. That is the problem. And, if you are thinking too much about composition you may miss the photograph.

When you only have light and angles you need good composition. And most pictures can to some extent be rescued by cropping (forget Cartier-Bresson on cropping- that’s just smoke and mirrors from a master disguising his tracks). When you have a solid subject- something like Lee Miller’s picture of a dead SS guard half underwater then composition is less important. Instagram can teach a lot of lessons- and one of them is that composition comes second to the overall effect of a picture- only amateurs wax long and loud about the ‘great composition’ of a basically boring and contentless picture.

And a lot of composition is the visual rule replacing what you should know ‘by eye’. Just as a good carpenter learns to estimate and cut by eye, so a good photographer gets an eye for what looks ‘right’.

That said- some rules of composition act like a whack on the side of the head, get you moving to make a better shot. It’s like knowing the trick of comics artists where you try and draw a figure with the shoulders, waist and feet all facing in different directions- if you can- thus giving some extra interest by invoking the ALMIGHTY RULE OF THREE.

The rule of three is the single most powerful tool you have in compositional terms. It’s a reminder to get the best picture you can. In its most simple terms it what taught to me by an AP photographer I met in Cairo, maybe the first professional photographer I knew. He was by no means an artist. He was out to get the news. But he told me he always tried to get something to look at (ideally something interesting) in the foreground, the middle ground and the background. 

But this is limiting- somethings are just one object- but give it three points of interest,  all connected in some way. Or line up three good things in a picture. Or get three people doing something or two and a third thing. You get the idea. Think threes and stuff happens…

laziness...

I am sitting on the sofa in front of the TV writing about..laziness. Oh, the delicious irony of it! The TV is yet to go on. I plan to write during the commercial breaks- thus maximising my time, sort of. But surely a less lazy person would do things differently. 

We think of driven people as being the opposite of lazy but they are not. The opposite of being lazy is being useful. Idries Shah wrote that lazy people have simply pursued uselessness for too long.

Unfortunately we live in a culture in which being useless is often financially rewarded. A kind of laziness enters the fabric of everyday life.

Surfice it to say: along with negativity and superficiality, laziness is a kind of viral infection of all cultures, in some measure or another. Focusing on the useful, avoiding makework at all costs, avoiding bullshit jobs, finding joy in creativity- this will all help edge you around the laziness trap. And doing stuff when you think about it, instead of putting it off.

The Desert and the Future

1. A man can perish so easily in the desert. He is like a man underwater, holding his breath. Sooner or later he must come to the surface. Sooner or later the desert survivor must drink, he must drink to survive.
2. How does he find his way to water? His way out? How does he escape the certainty of a waterless death in the desert? He follows tracks. He follows any track he can find, any prints, any marks, any alem (stone markers) even the strange wavering line left by rootless dry bushes, windblown and rolling like tumbleweed in a Western. Man is a track following creature. He will follow any track, even the wrong one, to his death- or lucky escape from the burning hell, the inferno that is the desert without water.
3. I realised, after I had been in the desert a while, moved there, travelled there, that I didn’t need to, hadn’t of needed to. I knew its secrets already. The desert is in all of us. It’s in the first books- the Bible is a desert book, so is the Koran. Poets- Shelley, Yeats and Eliot come to mind- all write with perfect accuracy about the desert though they have never been there. Cowboy westerns are desert morality tales. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Searchers. Even modern versions such as No Country for Old Men; all of them tap into and exploit our inner desert landscapes, our prior knowledge.
4. I suffered from migraines as a child. No pills worked. I had to lie in a darkened room and feel the ebb and flow of the pain until it had passed six or seven hours later. I found only one thing worked to ameliorate the pain, only one thing distanced me enough from it so that I could fall asleep. Sleep was really the only cure. But to fall asleep was hard. I used to imagine a vast studio of white, a curved penumbra with an endless horizon, glowing at the edges, the white of white sand reflecting sunlight, perhaps even a few dried bones, a cow’s skull shrunk and shrivelled remains, a typical desert offering.
5. Is it in any surprise that the first atom bomb tests were made in the desert. This huge and awful replication of the sun’s heat fused the sand into an impure form of glass called Trinitite after the bomb’s first name: Trinity, itself a sign of the suspect megalomania behind such a project. Trinitite bears some resemblance to natural glasses, some very pure, all found in nature and known as tektites. The purest of all, completely transparent with a slight greenish tinge are to be found in the Egyptian great sand sea. The knobbly cruddy Trinitite from Almogadro looks crude by comparison. One understands immediately some force a million times more powerful than the bomb made these rocky lumps of natural glass.
6.  I had already written about the desert in a book criticised by one desert explorer as ‘proving you don’t have to go to the desert to write about it’. But, as I said, poets had proved that centuries ago. Some things you don’t have to experience. In fact the whole nature of experience fascinated me. How much did you need and in what exact quantity and quality? The desert was my way of getting ‘experience’ in the sense of dealing with situations or people whom I might never otherwise encounter. Young men seek such experience traditionally, but now we keep up such endeavors longer. I was glad for this type of experience because, as a writer, though I had had a fair number of encounters with scary people I had never had to work with them or try and get them to do things. But in the desert I had to.
7. But parallel to getting this experience with handling difficult people- Bedouin, Policemen, customers, was another vein that pulled away from such mundane experience. This was a sense, purer, and closer to the poetic vision of the desert, a feeling that you only needed so much worldliness, so much push and shove to get your way. That if you had too much you’d lose sight of something.
8.  But enough about me. Far more interesting – to me, now, at least- is the prospect of the Future. I’ve given it capitals throughout because a) it is obviously important b) I like capitalising and c) I want to distinguish it from individual events in the future- that other one.   9.
9. I grew up in the 1970s really- gosh back to me already! By the 1980s I was already looking back and looking forward. I had escaped my time so to speak. As soon as you can read books and watch films from other eras- and appreciate them- you’ve escaped the tyranny of the present. People who don’t get that kind of mobility are doomed to look back on their miniscule length of living on earth as their only benchmark of time passing. Depressing. Historians are generally rather cheerful folk, geologists even more so- the longer the timescale the rosier things look. 
10. So, I grew up in the 1970s- meaning this was when I took what was on offer- on TV and the Radio and what my parents said and I swallowed it all whole. The 1970s were the beginning of the endgame for the planet. By this I mean the sort of local doom of Silent Spring now spread to the whole earth. We were all doomed. The whole place was on a high road to hell. A new ice age was coming (check old copies of New Scientist and John Gribbin’s scare text ‘The coming Ice age’). But most obviously and most repeatedly the deserts were encroaching.
11. JG Ballard wrote about it in fiction and school textbooks had photos of fences under creeping dunes. Arable land was turning into dust. The soviet Aral sea was a sand sea. Lake Chad was filling up too. Writers brought up on the dust bowl stories of John Steinbeck applied that imagery to the planet. We were drying up, turning into a global desert. 
12. And the big players in the 1970s- the people who gave it that peculiar flavour of desperation and novelty were the desert dwellers- the Arabs and Israelis and Palestinians- the oil rich and the dispossessed vying for the agenda.
13. But it was that picture of the creeping sand, overwhelming houses, fences, roads, telegraph poles, railway lines that burned itself into my retina. Years later, when I actually travelled in the desert I was really pleased to discover the road to Bahariya oasis in the Egyptian Sahara makes a huge loop, adding sixty km to the journey, just to avoid a long dune. The dune isn’t that high, it’s just that it will overwhelm the road. Even if you cleared it everyday it will cover the road each night. The desert can be as relentless as a flood. It cannot be stopped.
14. If you read the scientific press now there are rarely articles about increasing desertification. The idea that the Sahara is going to cover Africa, cross the Med and creep all over Europe is just not in fashion. Desert dune articles are more technical nowadays- some will be about moving dunes and some about dunes that never move. Quite a few will question the whole notion that desertification is even happening on a serious scale.Fashions come and go. Maybe the encroaching desert will come back in. That doesn’t concern me here, my point is- the encroaching desert was the way we chose to view the future in the 1970s.
15. Fashions come and go but the desert remains. I had to visit it. My first trips were in the early 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2004 that I made my first real desert journeys. And it wasn’t until 2007 that I began taking people out into the desert who had paid money for the experience. In the seven years since then I’ve seen a lot of dry rock, sand, empty places. But that tells you almost nothing about the significance of the place. It’s as if the mere addition of dates, times, bald description, strips away the essential atemporality of the desert experience. The desert takes you outside time, back in time and also, I found, into the future. This is why this book is called The Desert and the Future.
16. Think about it. When you weaken your conviction of the past being elsewhere you find yourself in a strange place. In the desert Bedouin will crack jokes about events that happened 1500 years ago. You will see tyre tracks left by Bagnold’s Ford Model A’s in the 1930s, tracks that look as if they were made a week ago, maybe a few weeks at most. The place is unchanged in not just centuries, but thousands of years. The last people who lived in the super arid part of the Sahara I criss-crossed died 4000 years ago or more. Only their rock art and stone tools remain to remind us this desert used to bloom.
17. I would argue that the extreme temporality of the current era is precisely what makes it hard to accurately predict the future. You need to go into a different zone, a place like the desert where past and present and future are welded together by silence, emptiness, starlight.

Walking the Great North line- Pre-Order Now!

This is a map of the first part of my walk from the South to the North past 42 ancient sites in England. In this time of LOCKDOWN misery this book- which is out 23 April- will be a nice ease and comfort to you as you read and imagine a lovely walking journey replete with adventure and imterest up the GREAT NORTH LINE of the counrty to Lindisfarne Island in the north...

CLICK HERE FOR AMAZON

reconfigure success as process

The internet suddenly went down. I unplugged the router. Fiddled with the leads. The light was off. I went into the kitchen and told my wife the router had blown. 'Maybe connected to that weird problem with the alarm yesterday?' As as superstitious type prone to hyper-connectivity in thinking I am less scientific than my wife. Then something dawned on me. I tried the light switch. Nothing. The fuse has gone. It turns out the main fuse has gone and won't go back on. So I turn off all the circuits and isolate the kettle socket as the problem. I have long disliked this kettle as it often switches itself off too soon. Now is a chance to get rid of it. But my wife is more scientific. Maybe its the socket she argues. We need to test the kettle in another socket. Sure enough it doesn't blow the fuse in another socket so it must be the original one, not the kettle itself. 

People who like testing, probling, checking off a list rather than solving a problem in a dramatic swoop usually succeed better in the loing run. They have reconfigured success as a process, a process you have to love, rather than a final result. Never mind the end justifying the means- it is more like the means justifying the ends...

If someone is frustrated at their 'lack of success' in the world their best tactic would be to reconfigure to a 'success process' rather than a final glittering 'goal'. Low key goals are usually enough...

what is a stupid person?

A&E are brilliant when you have an emergency. But less good when you have a chronic health problem. A&E procedures follow rules and checklists and work very well indeed. But many problems are chronic and need a different approach. To use the wrong approach is stupid.

Of course we are all stupid from time to time.

But a long term stupid person is one who is wedded to either the notion of rules or the notion of incentives.

This includes very many so called clever people- and of course the majority of politicians.

A left wing politican believes that with the right rules for business, and the right incentives for poor people, solutions to long term chronic problems will be found. The right wing politician believes that with the right incentives for business and the right rules for poor people long term solutions for chronic problems will be found.

Both ignore the obvious- with chronic political problems (which is most problems in the developed West): rules and incentives have been proved not to work. The fact is, in politics as in life, you also need practical wisdom to act without being stupid.

Sometimes a rule should not be followed. Sometimes an incentive won't work. But how do you know when? You have to suspend your robot mind and use your intuition- based on experience, observation, balance and foresight.

When stupid people face a problem that can't be obviously solved by rule or incentive, and, since they have become so rusty they can't sense useful intuitions, they fall back on emotion (backed up by clever rationalisation- ie. big data). This describes a large number of people in positions of authority. And this is why most people have a poor opinion of authority figures.

The single biggest useful development in education is to encourage people to develop the third path- that of practical wisdom- the path between rules and incentives.