In Silent Protest

*



Listen. The minstrels sing
In the departed villages. The nightingale,
Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings
And spells on the winds of the dead his winter's tale.
The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring

Is telling. The wizened
Stream with bells and baying water bounds. The dew rings
On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening
Parish of snow. The carved mouths in the rock are wind swept strings.
Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.

It was a hand or sound
In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide
And there outside on the bread of the ground
A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride.
A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet downed.

Look. And the dancers move
On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light
As a dust of pigeons. Exulting, the graved hooved
Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white
Paddocks in the farms of birds. The dead oak walks for love.

The carved limbs in the rock
Leap, as to trumpets. Calligraphy of the old
Leaves is dancing. Lines of age on the stone weave in a flock.
And the harp shaped voice of the water's dust plucks in a fold
Of fields. For love, the long ago she bird rises. Look.

From A Winter's Tale, Dylan Thomas.



Vast tracks were covered now, in an era of easy transport. From the days as a child staring out plane windows to later years crisscrossing the state, he had always found himself staring out of windows, watching the landscape go by. His father was an airline pilot, which meant as a child he travelled more than the average for those days, if not as much as he would have liked. Now rich kids fly from Australia to Europe or even Aspen for their summer holidays, but back then getting out of the state, or out of the city, was an astonishing thing.

The moment was so clear, when he watched transfixed the sun set over the mountains as they flew from San Franciso to Los Angeles. It was so breathtakingly beautiful he thought: I am never going to forget this. He was 12. On the cusp of everything. After all the beatings he was a silent, weird little child. He looked down at that amazing scene, a little kid from the outflown suburbs of Sydney, and thought this special gift of experience, these great adventures in this astonishing world, he was going to absorb them, remember them, write about them. It was all for a purpose. His destiny was marked.

But of course, he forgot many things. His parents had never once shown up for a parent teacher night, and for the last year, while his mother became obsessed with Garner Ted Armstrong and The World Tomorrow, he and his brother had been forced to stand out in the playground while the rest of the kids did scripture, the only kids in that position. It was appallingly embarrassing. It marked him as different at the very age when the last thing he wanted was to be different. His dreams were obsessed with flying, floating high above the city, looking down at the sleeping houses.

Or the strange dripping catacombs that he believed most fervently lay just below the school grounds, just behind the swings where the kids would bully him after school, and he would escape through these hidden doors into this very odd world where men stood pissing into urinals and other naked men moved in the mist and the shadows, waiting for something he did not understand. It was a mental trick to find the door, and during the daylight hours, when they ran out of the school yard with their satchels and he sought comfort with his mate Chris Gosling, he always thought he would find the door to that place.

But it was not somewhere that could be found during daylight hours. Or waking hours. They were very strange dreams for a school boy to be having, and sometimes he expected some figure of authority to step in and prevent him from having them, as if they were somehow wrong, instead of just downright strange. He met Chris years later, about town, a biggish, gawkish gay man, or that's the way he remembered him now, intensely uncomfortable in his own skin. That was the most terrible time, they agreed, just terrible. Newport. It was just a horrible place, just horrible.

And yet from the outside, Newport was an idyllic beach side suburb, drenched in colour and sun, trees coating the climbs around the inlets, the yachts dotting the depth blue of Pittwater, those picturesque bays. But to those two kids, those two friends, that wasn't what it was at all. The horror of their changing bodies, the horror of a place where there was no one like them amidst the stifling conformity of Australian suburbs in the 1950s, it was a living nightmare.

The two misfits clubbed together. They shared everything. Most of all their desire to escape. And they ran in circles and they whooped, as they passed the neat white houses on the long walk home from school, home to places which made their skin crawl with misery and the tears start through their young eyes. It was an agony of the spirit more than an agony of the flesh, and no one could have realised, or even understood, the depth of psychic pain that dwelled in their young hearts.

Rescue me, rescue me, he thought, crying out to the twisting gums and feeling the first flushes of desire in the prickling heat of summer. This is not my life. This is not where I'm meant to be. And the beat of another place closed around him, and he stared out the window entranced, not just at the girls lurking in the doorways of the Cross, but at the stunning landscapes through the window, as if he could drown in beauty and be absolved, as if the secret to escape could be found in the fabric of things, in the painted deserts, in the twisting tropics, in the shafts of light from the sunlight that briefly lit up the cabin of the plane. Take me, take me, he cried, I surrender to you. Relieve me of this terrible, inexplicable suffering.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/olympics/2524984/Beijing-Olympics-How-the-opening-ceremony-unfolded.html

Beijing Olympics: How the opening ceremony unfolded
In a riot of colour, pageantry and invention, Beijing fired the starting gun for the 2008 Olympic Games with the most breathtaking opening ceremony ever seen.


By Richard Spencer in Beijing and Gordon Rayner
Last Updated: 7:10PM BST 08 Aug 2008

For the past year, 14,000 performers have relentlessly chased perfection in their rehearsals, and last night they achieved it, from the first beat of the 2008 perfectly-synchronised drummers to the moment the giant Olympic flame exploded into life four hours later.

It was an emphatic display of China's long traditions of showmanship, and a worldwide audience of up to four billion surely looked on in awed admiration.

The drummers and the footprints of fire

A countdown was beaten out on thousands of bronze 'fou' drums lit from within to form the number of seconds remaining. Then the first battery of fireworks exploded from the stadium, in the shape of a red flower, prompting raucous cheers.

A second volley of fireworks burst into the sky from Tiananmen Square to the south, forming the shape of a giant footprint. Precisely-timed rockets formed one "footprint" every second, marching to the Bird's Nest, with 29 footprints in all, one for each modern Olympiad.

As the fireworks died down, acrobats dressed as Apsarases, or sylphs, flew above the arena, and thousands of tiny lights came together to form the Olympic rings, which magically lifted into the air to gasps from the crowd.

The giant scroll

After 56 children, one from each of China's ethnic groups, brought the Chinese flag into the stadium, a 25m x 100m scroll unfurled to form a giant screen onto which images of China's 5,000-year history were projected. Dancers spread themselves across the bare scroll, making giant paintings as they went. Thousands of years of art, including cave paintings and one of China's most celebrated early paintings, the 12th century Song dynasty master work, A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, were projected onto the scroll.

Confucius and the Printing Press

A choir of 3,000 dressed as disciples of Confucius and waving bamboo slips – an early form of book – chanted lines from his greatest work of philosophy, the Analects. Meanwhile, an extraordinary performance of rising and falling blocks, each containing a person, represented a giant, living printing press, invented by the Chinese in 1041, eventually forming the character "He", meaning peace or harmony.

Terracotta Warriors and Sinbad the Sailor

Peace was followed by war in the shape a triumphal army dressed as the terracotta warriors. As the scroll showed a map of the ancient Silk Road, hundreds of women, dressed in blue silk to represent the sea, held up huge oars showing the seven voyages of the Chinese sailor Zheng He – said to be the original Sinbad the Sailor – who sailed the world 87 years before Christopher Columbus. At the centre of the tableau, a performer held an ancient compass, also invented by China.

Liu Huan and Sarah Brightman

As the performance moved into the modern age, dancers dressed in green body suits arranged themselves in the form of a dove and then of the Bird's Nest itself. After a mass performance of tai-qi – Chinese shadowboxing – and kung fu, the performance moved towards its climax. An enormous globe, its colours changing to show first the planet earth and then traditional Chinese symbols in red and yellow, rose out of the ground, with performers on wires running around it, and above them astronauts representing China's space programme to bring the performance right up to the present day.

Sarah Brightman and the Chinese singer Liu Huan then sang the Beijing Games anthem, "You and Me", in English and Chinese.

Entrance of the Athletes

Instead of arriving in alphabetical order, the athletes entered the stadium in the order of how many brush strokes it took to write the first letter of their country's name in Chinese. Greece came first, in accordance with tradition, with China at the rear with 639 athletes, its largest ever squad. The Chinese flag was carried by 7ft 6in basketball star Yao Ming, accompanied by Lin Hao, a nine-year-old survivor of the earthquake in Sichuan province, who bravely led his classmates in singing songs to keep their spirits up until they were rescued from their collapsed school.

As the athletes paraded around the arena, they walked over a giant canvas, infused with ink, so that their footprints made a giant landscape picture which was then raised to form the podium on which the official speeches were made.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24150580-2703,00.html

BEIJING: US President George W.Bush has opened a massive new embassy in Beijing, one of the US's biggest and a symbol of the growing importance of Washington's relationship with Beijing.

Mr Bush, in Beijing to attend the Olympics, opened the concrete and glass building just days after the Chinese inaugurated their own sparkling new site in Washington.

"No doubt this is an impressive complex," Mr Bush said.

"To me, it speaks of the importance of our relations with China. It reflects the solid foundation underpinning our relations. It is a commitment to strengthen that foundation for years to come," he said.

But the US president also used the occasion to take another swipe at China's human rights record, calling for the communist country to lessen repression and "let people say what they think".

His comments came on the heels of a speech on Thursday in Bangkok in which he urged greater freedoms for the Chinese people. Beijing responded that Mr Bush should not meddle in its internal affairs.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/olympics/2525087/Beijing-Olympics-Protests-around-the-world-as-Games-open-in-style.html


Campaigners for Tibetan autonomy made their presence felt close to the Olympic stadium itself, but the most dramatic demonstration of dissent came from another minority group, ethnic Uighurs from Xinjiang Province, when one protester set himself on fire.

Mehmet Dursun Uygurturkoglu, 35, doused himself in petrol and set himself alight during a protest by several hundred demonstrators outside the Chinese Embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara over human rights violations in China.

He was rushed to hospital with burns to his head and body after fellow protesters extinguished the flames.

Meanwhile in the Indian capital New Delhi, up to 150 Tibetan Buddhist monks attempted to storm the heavily guarded Chinese Embassy just as the ceremony was getting under way.

The protesters, all clad in saffron robes and wearing "Free Tibet" headbands decamped from coaches and attempted to tear down steel barricades in front of the building before being repelled by police. Nearby 3,000 others staged a demonstration outside the Indian parliament.

In Nepal, which borders Tibet, as many as 1,300 refugees were arrested as they tried to storm a Chinese consular office in Kathmandu. Hundreds were hauled into vans surrounded in iron meshed or open trucks by riot police.

At Dharamsala in northern India, the seat of the Dalai Lama's Tibetan government-in-exile, around 3,000 protesters marched through the hill station chanting anti-Chinese slogans.



Horses by the side of the road on the way to Coolah, NSW, Australia.