What boots it to repeat?

This line from a stanza of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam popped into my head this morning as I was reading a charming interview in The Guardian with imprisoned climate protester, Morgan Trowland, now released on licence.

After all the doomscrolling of 2023, to which I admit I've contributed more than my fair share, it really did indeed seem bootless to repeat how time is slipping underneath our feet. We should all be well aware by now of the existential threats facing the planet in the Anthropocene Era. Sadly, though, many are still unaware or in denial and our politicians are only too happy to encourage and sustain such wilful ignorance. 

But, back to Morgan. He told Guardian journalist, Damien Gayle, of his reliance on poetry to get him through his incarceration and of the philosophy course he took while in prison which helped him validate his decision to take the action (scaling the Dartford Bridge) which brought traffic to a halt for forty hours and caused massive logistical and financial disruption. As a result of their action he, and fellow-protester, Marcus Decker, were given the longest prison sentences yet handed down for non-violent environmental activism, ostensibly to act as a punishment and deterrence, according to the judge, Shane Collery KC.

According to Morgan, however, "you can be happy in prison". This is quite a subversive statement when you think about it and I daresay Judge Collery would be unimpressed. I guess a lot depends on your mental strength when your physical liberty is removed, and how supported you are from outside. Morgan no doubt feels freedom is a state of mind and he sounded pretty philosophical - even before he took up philosophy while banged up. Of the three prisons he served time in he felt, predictably, that Pentonville was the worst, though he had nothing but praise for the vegan food served up there, the quality of which he whimsically put down to the gaol being located in Islington! He also enjoyed the regime of a rural prison which allowed him access to gardens and a wildlife area - no punishment for an environmentalist, as he wryly observed.

Poor Marcus Decker, on the other hand, faces a less than rosy prospect when he is eventually released from his longer sentence. As a German citizen there is every likelihood, under draconian new legislation brought in by the Tory government, of his being deported back to Germany. He may console himself that it's not Rwanda I suppose but that may be scant consolation if it means being separated from his British partner, Holly, and her two children.

History shows us that prison can have an unexpectedly liberating effect when it comes to releasing a flow of creative and philosophical impulses, especially when those convicted are prisoners of conscience. Think of Sir Walter Raleigh, John Bunyan, Oscar Wilde, Anne Frank and Alexander Solzhenitsyn for example. One wouldn't have wanted them to suffer as they did but imagine what the world would have lost had their deprivation of liberty not triggered an outpouring of creativity.

In a wicked world, a philosophical outlook can truly be transcendental.

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