A River in Darkness

If you have a Kindle and £1.00 to spare, Masaji Ishikawa’s A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea is well worth reading. It is fairly short but covers an interesting aspect of North Korean history – the repatriation of Koreans from Japan. From Amazon -

Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen years old, and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. His father, himself a Korean national, was lured to the new Communist country by promises of abundant work, education for his children, and a higher station in society. But the reality of their new life was far from utopian.

Mr Ishikawa escaped back to Japan during the nineties famine after Kim Il-sung died. Here are a couple of quotes, the first being a recipe for pine bark cakes.

First, boil the pine bark for as long as possible to get rid of all the toxins. (Many people botched this stage and died in agony as a result.) Next, add some cornstarch and steam the evil brew. Then cool it, form it into cakes, and eat it. This was easier said than done. The pine oil stinks to high heaven and makes it almost impossible to consume it. But if you wanted to live, you choked it down. That’s when the real fun began. Crippling gut pain that brought us to our knees; constipation that you wouldn’t believe. When the pain became unbearable—there’s no delicate way of putting this—you had to shove your finger up your anus and scoop out your concrete shit. I’m sorry. You didn’t need to know that. Except you did. It’s the only thing that shows how desperate we were.

The second quote sounds almost familiar.

People in North Korea spend so much time in study meetings and calculating the number of hours they’ve worked that there’s no time to do the actual work. The result? Raw materials don’t arrive in factories, the electricity doesn’t work, and farms are overrun with weeds.

Mr Ishikawa has a grim story to tell and he tells it well. To my mind he brings out the corruption, the crazy lies and the bureaucratic insanity Kim Il-sung implemented.

FRIDAY: Music for Semana Santa, by JD

An eclectic selection -















Happy Easter, felices pascuas!

The Eyes Of Picasso, by JD

[This piece on Picasso and his vision first appeared on Nourishing Obscurity here.]

The picture shown at left was painted in 1895 when the artist was just fourteen, the same age as the young girl. It is one of the first paintings you see when you visit L’hôtel Salé in Paris.

Standing there and seeing this painting for the first time, I was immediately struck by the eyes. Large, round, black eyes with a compelling gaze out onto the world.

The artist was, of course, Pablo Ruiz Picasso; the man who dominated twentieth century art and those eyes became a recurring theme in his work over the next eighty years.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, Picasso seemed to know what power lay in the eyes.

And the eyes do have an unknown power, as Rupert Sheldrake asserts in his book The Sense Of Being Stared At.

Plato imagined light from a ball of fire emanating from the eye and combining with sunlight to hit the object seen and this is then reflected back to the eye.

Sheldrake and Plato are not the only ones to believe in the extramission theory of the eyes.

The eyes of that young girl are like Picasso’s own eyes with their mirada fuerte,nothing escapes those eyes and that gaze of Picasso’s seems to devour everything it lands upon.

Again and again, the eyes are the main point of interest in his paintings regardless of the style he uses (or invents) We see it here in the two central figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of his most celebrated works.

In a completely different style, executed in charcoal (with collage) the eyes are once more the focus in this picture of his then wife Jacqueline Roque.

In this, lesser known, work we can see the wide-eyed excitement of a child taking its first steps. This is a wonderful painting in other ways; the overarching protectiveness of the mother and the delicacy of her touch as she guides the child without grasping too tightly.

And in his final self-portrait we have an old man, shrunken of skull but still those eyes dominate the picture, staring into the undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns –

When Picasso died in 1973 it was as if a line had been drawn under the visual arts with the implicit message- follow that!

And we have been unable to do so. Over the subsequent four decades the art world has been floundering, looking for the next big thing and finding nothing of substance.

Painting has more or less disappeared and the visual arts have degenerated into infantilism and ineptitude. Words have now replaced images in that every ‘artist’ must now have an Artist’s Statement (full of meaningless platitudes) or, even worse, a manifesto! and the artworks themselves are often covered in writing. Everything now needs to be explained as if we had lost the ability to see or, more likely, artists can no longer make the invisible visible.

It seems appropriate somehow that history’s greatest painter should be the one to bring an end to the visual arts. And for those who cannot accept such an assertion, I say only – open your eyes/mind and look! Or in the words of J. Winston Lennon –

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.

The last word must go to Sir Roland Penrose; from his biography of Picasso:

The virtue common to all great painters is that they teach us to see, but few have had a more compelling way of doing so than Picasso. His power has enchanted those who are susceptible and enraged those who resent being disturbed by his brilliance. Art itself should teach us to free ourselves from the rules of art, and this is precisely what the art of Picasso has done.

There is also reason to be grateful for the violence that he has used, for in our time, when signs of apathy and despair are easy to detect, it is only a resounding and decisive passion that can succeed. As he himself has said: “The essential in this time of moral poverty is to create enthusiasm.” Without the awakening of ardent love, no life and therefore no art has any meaning.

JD adds:

After watching Picasso's last Stand on TV the other night https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09xptbr  I thought the overall message of the programme was a reinforcement of that last line I quoted from Sir Roland Penrose's biography:

" Without the awakening of ardent love, no life and therefore no art has any meaning."  

I have seen a few of the paintings shown in the programme, the ones in the Picasso Museum in Paris and they are indeed 'passionate' paintings, vibrant and 'full of meaning'.

I have seen a lot of his paintings over the years and always there is the sense that they are somehow alive, their 'presence' can be felt in the galleries. (Rembrandt's paintings have that same quality.) Not all of his work has that vitality. I have always thought that Guernica was a flat and lifeless painting; when he does a 'political' painting it is nothing more than a gesture, his heart is not really in it which reflects that quotation above.


As I wrote in the original post "When Picasso died in 1973 it was as if a line had been drawn under the visual arts with the implicit message- follow that!"  ... and we have not and we cannot follow that!

FRIDAY MUSIC: Friday Fusion, by JD

Popular music is currently in a moribund state with a distinct lack of 'music' and too many 'stars' who cannot sing. Well I would say that as I am ancient, a veritable benign old gentleman in fact.

But I can see that young people are also tired of the dreary and dismal offerings and many are looking over their shoulders for inspiration. The results of this old/new fusion are a delight.

A delectable sense of freedom

It is very agreeable to find yourself alone in a great city which is yet not quite strange to you and in a large empty hotel. It gives you a delectable sense of freedom.

W. Somerset Maugham – The Human Element (1931)

Some years ago Sackerson wrote a very interesting post on freedom - Three levels of freedom. The following post is intended to add another aspect to the debate. Not an alternative view of freedom but a possible way to frame questions of freedom - what it could be, why ideas differ so much and why freedom seems to fade away so easily.

In the above quote Somerset Maugham is clearly referring to freedom as a feeling - a delectable sense of freedom. Equally clearly people differ in how they react to restrictions placed on their freedom. Some appear not to notice many restrictions and may even welcome some of them. Others have a greater tendency to see restrictions as an oppressive burden, an imposition to be resented at every opportunity.

To take a familiar example, some motorists see our vast array of traffic laws as oppressive while others see them as necessary for road safety and not particularly oppressive. These are different reactions to the same situation and perhaps this is the important yet entirely familiar point - it is extremely common for people have different reactions to the same situation. Consequently they interpret the same situation differently – as we all know too well.

In which case neither freedom nor oppression are clearly identifiable situations in the outside world. There is an inescapable human element, an emotional component to do with feelings about oppressive situations and those feelings are far from universal. Maybe we should go further and suggest that freedom is not only a state of affairs in the outside world but also an emotion, a state of affairs in our brains. Hardly a surprising conclusion but worth exploring consequences.

How could freedom be an emotion? Not necessarily a strong emotion such as anger, but something more subtle such as unease, contempt, frustration or dissatisfaction. In her book How Emotions Are Made, Professor Lisa FeldmanBarrett says emotion is our brain’s way of interpreting an amalgam of bodily sensations linked to events in the outside world. An emotion is a concept, a way of making sense of things which affect us or seem to affect us.

This is not to suggest that ideas about freedom are caused by emotions. Ideas about freedom are themselves emotional concepts. They are rationales we use to explain and link our bodily sensations with events and situations in the outside world. Why am I fed up with all the traffic laws? Because sometimes they feel oppressive, life-sapping, frustrating. Not always though - and that is another clue.

Driving on modern roads can be mildly depressing and in some cases the feeling is explained quite well if linked to an objective reality of vastly complex traffic laws. Hence the label ‘oppressive’ applied to modern traffic laws. Yet without a feeling of oppression the laws are not oppressive. Oppression has to feel oppressive or we don’t notice because it isn’t there until we do notice it. We can’t work it out from the bare physical facts of the situation because it isn’t there - it is in our brains.

In other words, people who do not see traffic laws as oppressive are people who have little or no emotional need to interpret them as oppressive. There is no point arguing about it, no point saying that some people fail to see the oppressive nature of traffic laws. In themselves they are not oppressive. We make them so via our emotional concepts or we don’t. These emotional concepts are not our emotional reaction to the laws but our emotional concept of the laws – the laws plus our feelings about them.

To take a much more extreme example, most of us see North Korea as a grotesquely repressive regime, but from the outside this is an emotional concept of a situation we do not actually experience. Stories about North Korean oppression coupled with a sense of unease or outrage that these things can happen are probably conceived by most people in democratic countries as extreme violations of freedom.

However it is possible that many North Koreans have different emotional concepts of freedom and oppression. They may be familiar with heavily regimented lives and their sense of oppression may not be as generally acute as we suppose. In our terms they may not perceive the oppression as strongly as we think they should. Or they may perceive it more strongly than we imagine – it is not something we can simply work out from what little we know of North Korean realities.

The oppression does not cause the emotion because there is no oppression without the emotion. The oppression is an emotional concept we label as ‘oppression’ and we interpret the oppression as happening beyond our own minds, out there in the real world. Some of it is happening out there in the real world, but the concepts, the use of words such as ‘freedom’ or ‘oppression’, these lie within our own minds. Not in every mind though – that’s the point.

This is why familiarity may inhibit concepts of political freedom and oppression. It seems likely that many people do not see their heavily circumscribed modern lives as oppressive or as lacking certain important freedoms. Not because they are obtuse, but because they do not make the same use of emotional concepts others label as ‘freedom’ or ‘oppression’.

However -

In her book Professor Barrett makes a fascinating claim. She suggests that our emotional concepts are our own responsibility. We may choose to react differently to the same situation for a whole range of reasons. That’s something we see regularly too. We see it all the time in politically correct outrage – emotional concepts with a political purpose. The outrage feels artificial because it is – it has to be.

This may imply that people who do not interpret an oppressive government in terms of restricted freedoms are not well informed about what the government is actually doing or failing to do. Freedom may be an emotional concept encompassing the outside world, but people with a limited understanding of the outside world will have a limited ability to interpret their world as oppressive. Possibly no ability at all.

Perhaps a democratic government may become as oppressive as it wishes if it is also conspicuously benign – if it spins benign emotional concepts. If it also manages to avoid generating too many emotional concepts of oppression or lost freedom then there is no real barrier to totalitarian government within a democratic shell. Bare reality won’t expose it.

Freedom simply disappears.

And is finally –

forgotten.

FRIDAY MUSIC: St Patrick's Eve, by JD

It is St Patrick's Day tomorrow, Saturday, so instead of the usual 'to be sure, to be sure' and Leprechaun stereotype blather it is better to dig deeper into the roots of Erin's soul as expressed in Irish music; concentrating on two 'icons' namely Liam Clancy and Finbar Furey. Many years ago they toured together when the Clancy Brothers had the Fureys as their support act. What follows is a random selection of wonderful music:








"Oh all the money that e'er I had
I spent it in good company
And all the harm that e'er I've done
alas, it was to none but me
For all I've done for want of wit
to memory now I can't recall
So fill to me the parting glass
good night and joy be with you all

"Oh all the comrades that e'er I've had
they are sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e'er I've had
they would wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
that I should rise and you should not
I'll gently rise and I'll softly call
good night and joy be with you all"


"No fear,
No envy,
No meanness"

Liam Clancy 1935 - 2009 Slán abhaile, mo chara

Hope For Humanity