Category: Uncategorized

While we were in Chihshang a typhoon came and hit the island, actually forcing our return train to be cancelled, but fortunately we were spared the worst of the storm. Typhoons always affect the weather for many days before and after they arrive. This typhoon caused it to rain and become cloudier than it had been. I enjoyed watching the rainstorms coming across the valley and as they left I had the chance to draw these beautiful wispy clouds hugging the mountainsides and snaking across the peaks. It was a lot of fun to draw this constantly changing wonder of nature.

Academic Marxism is hardly the whole of the political Left. Recent symposiums on the Left have stressed that the goals of the past decades have not been met: racism, poverty, discrimination, remain current realities; the 80s will see groups trying to survive in the teeth of government retrenchment and recession. This is undeniable. The struggle to survive cannot be criticized; yet it has little to do with the fate of a political Left. Nor is this an insult. The Left has often confused oppression with revolution; the most oppressed were the most blessed. Yet it belongs to basic Marxism that there is no automatic link between suffering and revolutionary activity. Marx never argued that the working class suffered more than the peasantry. The specific conditions of the working class prompted the hope of revolution. That various socioeconomic groups and minorities are in for a bad deal in the coming years…

This was my second rice field drawing and it’s another impression of the Chihshang area and famous Mr. Brown Boulevard drawn from a different viewpoint to the first. It is a very beautiful, relaxing area and you can see the flowing rice fields stretching out in front of the distant farmhouses and mountains.

Not long ago in The Walls Came Tumbling Down by Henriette Roosenburg, I read the story of a Dutch Resistance woman who made her way home in the chaos of postwar Europe. Roosenburg was a member of the Nacht and Nebel (‘Night and Fog’) group of political prisoners and had been liberated from the Waldheim camp in Germany, but the French Resistance women whose story is told in The Nine, How a Band of Daring Resistance Women Escaped from Nazi Germany had been in Ravensbrück, the camp exclusively for women slave labourers which I had read about in Sarah Helm’s If This is a Woman.  The escape of the women who are featured in The Nine was not from the Ravensbrück camp itself but from one of the infamous WW2 Nazi Death Marches.  Many of the thousands who perished in this Death March were Jewish, but the…

Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

Louis MacNeice (1907 – 1963)

The title – The Sunlight on the Garden – this creates an image in the mind and as soon as you have read the poem an association develops. As the…