Damien Rice

I feel a little embarrassed when I watch Damien sing... it feels like I am peering into the soul of someone and seeing their scars. And I begin to wonder do I have any business being here. Can I do something to ease this pain? 

And when he plays at a bar or something, and there are people with their iphones and cameras. People! there is a man writhing in pain and you are just standing there taking pictures.

I've never loved.... I've never loved... I've never loved.... I remember it well... The first time that I saw....

Ohgod! why does it hurt so much.

Hunger strike

There are days when I despair that no matter what one does, nothing is going to change. Manning and Wikileaks threw light on some serious wrongdoing. It got nowhere. Occupy happened. And then was promptly forgotten. Children got mown by gunfire. Did nothing to move the lawmakers. It is so easy to be cynical. What a hopelessly doomed world we live in!

And then hopelessly doomed prisoners remind me that perhaps all is lost but one must still act. Hunger strike by the Guantanamo prisoners brings the most powerful man on earth, the President of the United States to admit that Guantanamo was a "lingering problem that is not going to get better" and "we need to close it".

Now I know, words come cheap. Pres. Obama  hasn't said or done anything about it for 4 years instead choosing to "look forward". Nobody expects him to succeed in closing Guantanamo. Hell! he couldn't pass gun control after New Town.

Still, it moves my heart that these 100 people, held without trial (most of them cleared for release years ago), forgotten by the world, left to die in a no man's land have shown such bravery.They deserve to be heard, to be remembered. We have failed them and we should be sorry. I know I am.

Update: Andrew O'Hehir has a brilliant piece about it in Salon.  As he puts it, "(the hunger strike) has shamed Obama and forced America and the world to face “one of his most glaring failures."

Anguish - Rimbaud

Is it possible that She will have me forgiven for ambitions continually crushed,--

that an affluent end will make up for the ages of indigence,--

that a day of success will lull us to sleep on the shame of our fatal incompetence?

(O palms! diamond!-- Love! strength!-- higher than all joys and all fame!--

in any case, everywhere-- demon, god,-- Youth of this being: myself!)

That the accidents of scientific wonders and the movements of social brotherhood

will be cherished as the progressive restitution of our original freedom?...

But the Vampire who makes us behave, orders us to enjoy ourselves

with what she leaves us, or in other words to be more amusing.

Rolled in our wounds through the wearing air and the sea;

in torments through the silence of the murderous waters and air;

in tortures that laugh in the terrible surge of their silence.