I write early on Sunday morning, the windows having been wide open all night to maximise coolth in the bedroom, & no curtains pulled across so that light stole in long before dawn. Witty voices and song renditions from passing revellers and karaoke contestants also stole in to enliven the night hours. It’s a consequence of our relative poverty and choicelessness that we set up home opposite two pubs. In my benign hypnagogia the invading sounds were witty and of astonishing artistic originality. Thus have the gods blessed me. But now the day is pure and virgin.
Out of the unconscious and the grateful Sunday morning silence, arises a new tool for understanding, and that is my topic.
When a house is divided, both are wrong. The wrong is no more and no less than a one-sided view. It is not evil, but simply the attempt to achieve unity and simplicity by leaving out that which does not fit our vision. Apply this tool to those places in the world where there is conflict. Not just the wars reported by the media – they too have one-sided views – but where parents and teenagers, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, black and white, east and west, are all locked in irresolvable hostility.
Perhaps like me you find the previous paragraph blindingly obvious. Let’s move on to other spheres, like health. In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) is the third biggest employer in the world, after the Chinese Army and the Indian State Railways. The service is free, so you would think that fee-charging health services in the UK would be sought only by the rich and snobbish. Nothing could be further from the truth! Alternative medicine, often based on quite dubious principles, proliferates and flourishes, and its patients can often ill afford its services. The two competing approaches to health, on which so much money is spent, have each failed to corner the market. Have they agreed to carve up the market between them, and work together? No. Do they despise one another? Of course.
Conventional medicine treats illness as being the malfunction of a particular part of a complex machine. Interventions by drugs or surgery patches the malfunction and the machine can return to full-speed operation, until it wears out eventually and the patient dies. What could be simpler?
Alternative medicine treats illness as a symptom of disharmony of the whole. Mind and spirit are just as important as body. Energy, or chi, is a mystical force which flows along certain channels of our body and can be put back into harmony via subtle interventions when it gets dammed up somewhere. How we think, how we behave, our spirit’s harmony with the greater whole, all affect our body’s functioning. What could be simpler?
Both models of health spend a lot of their resources on defending their rightness. Of course. Just as in any conflict zone, propaganda is the main weapon of the war, for actual results when measured statistically are just inconclusive numbers waiting for interpretation.
But what I really want to discuss, according to this tool of understanding, is the war between the atheists and the adherents of “spirit”. The atheists look for support in science, which like Lord Nelson puts its telescope, or microscope, to its blind eye, and proclaims, “I see no ships!” or rather, “I see no evidence!” The adherents of spirit, whether religionists or New Agers, unfettered by the requirement for evidence, don’t allow their beliefs to be fettered by mere facts.
The sheer irresolvability of these antinomies has led, in “polite society”, to the rule “Never discuss religion or politics [if you want to keep your friends, customers, a semblance of family unity etc]”. So there is a long tradition of sweeping them under the carpet or blunting them with platitudes.
So I will write on this topic. Enough for now.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Friday, July 28, 2006
Seaside coach trip
She’s been a member of Star of Bethlehem Lodge since 1960 when she first arrived in London. Now, aged 74, she has the honour of being Matron of her chapter and I have the honour of being her son-in-law. From beneath the well-dressed dignity of a mature lady, an outrageous saucy wit keeps popping out. She’s a great gardener and I have helped dig fresh ground with her, preparing it for planting calaloo, pumpkin, corn, and peas. Not ganja: respectable these days.
On Sunday we went on a coach trip she’d organised from Brixton to Folkestone, and though I had the only white skin of 180 in the party, I didn't notice it, being on the inside looking out. We danced to the throbbing reggae sounds of Lappy Ding Back. We went to the beach to bathe, and my young nephew had his spectacles ripped from his face by a powerful wave. We looked for them, but gave up as the lenses would have been pounded by the restless pebbles till they became pebbles themselves – fragments of glass ground to cloudiness on all sides. He feared for the wrath of his Mum when he got home, and so did I!
The dance floor was in the Sports Centre, in a basketball hall. The greenish light and strange acoustics gave the hall an underwater feel, but with the powerful sound-system instead of pounding waves, while just outside, the strong whiff of chlorine from the indoor swimming pool brought back childhood excitement.
The day was a pell-mell of impressions and memories. I’d once worked for two years at Eurotunnel, based in Folkestone and Calais, France, so this was a trip down memory lane. But it was also the next best thing to a Caribbean adventure. We had the sunshine and we had the people, so much more attuned to their own physicality than the pale Caucasians, of the southern English tribe, who are so wary of one another, so class-ridden.
Mom produced from her capacious bag bottles of Irish cream, whisky, wine, sorrel – a fruit drink flavoured with ginger and preserved with wine and rum. She passed round plastic plates heaped with rice and peas, jerk chicken, fried fish. Our ears and limbs were aroused by the extraordinary rhythms of soca, ragga & reggae, which emphasise the off-beat and intoxicate you with their sweet insistence. Our eyes were enticed with the antics of dancers. A young woman of stately and generous curves showed how to “shake your booty” whilst her other convex parts gyrated in harmony. She was joined by two other young women, less substantial but almost as skilled in this particular dance style. All shapes and ages from five to eighty were represented in our party, each happy in their own skin.
Caribbean immigrants have been in the UK since the nineteen-fifties, with the biggest influx in the sixties and seventies. Unlike those from the Indian subcontinent, who have their own languages and ancient cultures, they came speaking English, or at least a patois thereof, with English surnames, adopted from the slaving plantation owners who’d bought them in past centuries. Despite racist history and sometimes actuality, they respected the British and now are British, having made it their home, now that their grandchildren are here too. Forty years! Have they been wandering in the desert, looking for their promised land? No, they aren’t God’s specially chosen people. They’re part of one worldwide brotherhood of humanity, as celebrated in the Rasta cult which provides counterpoint to Jamaican hell-fire Christianity, which itself provides counterpoint to Jamaica’s undercurrent of lawless violence. West Indians have brought their own kind of sunshine into their adopted country.
I say “their”, but I want to say “our”. I’m an immigrant too, and linked to them, via roots (we all originate from Africa, if you go back far enough), through marriage, and through shared citizenship of the world. Irie!
On Sunday we went on a coach trip she’d organised from Brixton to Folkestone, and though I had the only white skin of 180 in the party, I didn't notice it, being on the inside looking out. We danced to the throbbing reggae sounds of Lappy Ding Back. We went to the beach to bathe, and my young nephew had his spectacles ripped from his face by a powerful wave. We looked for them, but gave up as the lenses would have been pounded by the restless pebbles till they became pebbles themselves – fragments of glass ground to cloudiness on all sides. He feared for the wrath of his Mum when he got home, and so did I!
The dance floor was in the Sports Centre, in a basketball hall. The greenish light and strange acoustics gave the hall an underwater feel, but with the powerful sound-system instead of pounding waves, while just outside, the strong whiff of chlorine from the indoor swimming pool brought back childhood excitement.
The day was a pell-mell of impressions and memories. I’d once worked for two years at Eurotunnel, based in Folkestone and Calais, France, so this was a trip down memory lane. But it was also the next best thing to a Caribbean adventure. We had the sunshine and we had the people, so much more attuned to their own physicality than the pale Caucasians, of the southern English tribe, who are so wary of one another, so class-ridden.
Mom produced from her capacious bag bottles of Irish cream, whisky, wine, sorrel – a fruit drink flavoured with ginger and preserved with wine and rum. She passed round plastic plates heaped with rice and peas, jerk chicken, fried fish. Our ears and limbs were aroused by the extraordinary rhythms of soca, ragga & reggae, which emphasise the off-beat and intoxicate you with their sweet insistence. Our eyes were enticed with the antics of dancers. A young woman of stately and generous curves showed how to “shake your booty” whilst her other convex parts gyrated in harmony. She was joined by two other young women, less substantial but almost as skilled in this particular dance style. All shapes and ages from five to eighty were represented in our party, each happy in their own skin.
Caribbean immigrants have been in the UK since the nineteen-fifties, with the biggest influx in the sixties and seventies. Unlike those from the Indian subcontinent, who have their own languages and ancient cultures, they came speaking English, or at least a patois thereof, with English surnames, adopted from the slaving plantation owners who’d bought them in past centuries. Despite racist history and sometimes actuality, they respected the British and now are British, having made it their home, now that their grandchildren are here too. Forty years! Have they been wandering in the desert, looking for their promised land? No, they aren’t God’s specially chosen people. They’re part of one worldwide brotherhood of humanity, as celebrated in the Rasta cult which provides counterpoint to Jamaican hell-fire Christianity, which itself provides counterpoint to Jamaica’s undercurrent of lawless violence. West Indians have brought their own kind of sunshine into their adopted country.
I say “their”, but I want to say “our”. I’m an immigrant too, and linked to them, via roots (we all originate from Africa, if you go back far enough), through marriage, and through shared citizenship of the world. Irie!
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Ripening*
*Ripening? Hayden reports here on translations from the Aramaic, where “unripeness” was rendered, supposedly, as “evil”.
On Sunday morning the radio (BBC Radio 4) told the story, with interviews, of a woman who runs a retirement home for chickens. They’ve worked at laying eggs in battery or free-range farms, and their residual value is too low to be worth feeding any more. She offers their first-ever chance to scratch the ground for worms and beetles, and to flap their wings freely. In their new-found contentment, many start egg-laying again, but in any event they discover what life as a chicken should be, and die happy of natural causes. A sick bay nurses the wounded and diseased birds back to health. She’s the Mother Theresa and Florence Nightingale of the hen world.
One morning last week, I went early to the communal rubbish bins at the back of the flats and heard a noise. Looking inside, I saw two cute young rats checking me out with intelligent beady eyes. I went to get my camera, not so much for their cuteness but to try and persuade the Council to change the bin as I have been asking for the last three months, as it’s broken and lidless and a threat to hygiene. When I returned ready to take the picture (which, placed in the local paper, could have shamed the Council), the rats were in a more nervous mood, desperately trying to jump out of the bin. So I leaned a plank in the bin to provide them with a ramp. Their comfort was more important than my cunning scheme to get my way.
Though we are programmed by evolution to survive at all costs, there’s a place inside for compassion to all living things. We’re close relatives, and our species are interdependent. Setting post hoc rationalisations aside, there is something instinctive about caring for others as well as oneself.
Contrast this with the fundamentalist versions of three religions: Christian, Muslim, Jew. Their Gods help them smite their enemies. How so? They themselves are merely the mouthpiece and the agents of their Gods' agendas, disclaiming conscience and responsibility.
So am I an atheist? No, that is another form of fundamentalism. To be an atheist is like denying the existence of pain or drunkenness. “I don’t understand, therefore the phenomenon cannot exist.” No. As a human being, I understand God as well as anyone. God is like seeing a footprint in the mud, and imagining the whole creature which made it. I clothe my imagination with the attributes I want to see in a God. Some clothe their God in less compassion than I have in my elbow.
Governments all want to look virtuous. Rama reports here on the real reasons why Calcutta wants to abolish leg-powered rickshaws, and my newspaper had a feature on Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi in Bombay, and the motivations for trying to pull it down.
Is there any justification for smiting our enemies, or letting them rot when their interests don't coincide with ours? I don’t know. When I'm linked to every creature as one family, there is no enemy.
On Sunday morning the radio (BBC Radio 4) told the story, with interviews, of a woman who runs a retirement home for chickens. They’ve worked at laying eggs in battery or free-range farms, and their residual value is too low to be worth feeding any more. She offers their first-ever chance to scratch the ground for worms and beetles, and to flap their wings freely. In their new-found contentment, many start egg-laying again, but in any event they discover what life as a chicken should be, and die happy of natural causes. A sick bay nurses the wounded and diseased birds back to health. She’s the Mother Theresa and Florence Nightingale of the hen world.
One morning last week, I went early to the communal rubbish bins at the back of the flats and heard a noise. Looking inside, I saw two cute young rats checking me out with intelligent beady eyes. I went to get my camera, not so much for their cuteness but to try and persuade the Council to change the bin as I have been asking for the last three months, as it’s broken and lidless and a threat to hygiene. When I returned ready to take the picture (which, placed in the local paper, could have shamed the Council), the rats were in a more nervous mood, desperately trying to jump out of the bin. So I leaned a plank in the bin to provide them with a ramp. Their comfort was more important than my cunning scheme to get my way.
Though we are programmed by evolution to survive at all costs, there’s a place inside for compassion to all living things. We’re close relatives, and our species are interdependent. Setting post hoc rationalisations aside, there is something instinctive about caring for others as well as oneself.
Contrast this with the fundamentalist versions of three religions: Christian, Muslim, Jew. Their Gods help them smite their enemies. How so? They themselves are merely the mouthpiece and the agents of their Gods' agendas, disclaiming conscience and responsibility.
So am I an atheist? No, that is another form of fundamentalism. To be an atheist is like denying the existence of pain or drunkenness. “I don’t understand, therefore the phenomenon cannot exist.” No. As a human being, I understand God as well as anyone. God is like seeing a footprint in the mud, and imagining the whole creature which made it. I clothe my imagination with the attributes I want to see in a God. Some clothe their God in less compassion than I have in my elbow.
Governments all want to look virtuous. Rama reports here on the real reasons why Calcutta wants to abolish leg-powered rickshaws, and my newspaper had a feature on Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi in Bombay, and the motivations for trying to pull it down.
Is there any justification for smiting our enemies, or letting them rot when their interests don't coincide with ours? I don’t know. When I'm linked to every creature as one family, there is no enemy.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
What makes the world go round
I walked to town on a mission to fix K's gold chain, and tried two jewellers: “Do you do repairs?” They consulted their price lists. The first said £15. The second said between £12 and £15. “The chain cost £14 new,” I explained. They shrugged. I could have tried a Pakistani jeweller who might have grunted and squinted and fixed it on the spot before mentioning the price. They don’t turn away custom, and they know how to do deals, unlike those ethnic English who follow the rulebooks of a Head Office far away. But the Pakistani jewellers were places of oriental mystery: arcane symbols and dowries and weddings, everything 24-carat gold. I dared not venture into that territory.
So I set out in search of cheap tools to do the repair myself. On the way I dropped into “Oxfam” to browse their second-hand books. The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief was founded in 1942, and in England we tend to forget the connection between these local charity shops and the work that Oxfam does worldwide. A middle-aged lady was patiently instructing a young African woman in how to put novels on a shelf alphabetically by author. I felt almost indignant on behalf of the shy African, whose inability to work fluently with the alphabet was as little her fault as the quite startling beauty with which she had been endowed by her Creator. Back in the street, a senior traffic warden was instructing a junior one in the intricate details of their craft or trade – penalising motorists for illegal parking. Thus it had been in the motor workshop in the morning, too: the boss helping the mechanic in the tricky business of opening a locked car bonnet from underneath, with the aid of bent crowbars. Now I was able to read the faces of the old men in town. They had spent their lives instructing or being instructed. Every job, even emptying the refuse bins, has its own lore, its special art, to be passed down from one to another. Survival skills, rather than philosophy or ethics, are what makes the world go round, as I hinted yesterday.
In the end I found a pair of “mini needle nose pliers” at Isaac Lord. “Isaac Lord Limited is a family run firm, which was started in Desborough Road, High Wycombe, England in the year 1892. Isaac and his family sold tools and supplies to the workers in the furniture factories on their way to and from work.” Its staff have an expertise and helpfulness rare these days. They still specialise in woodworking tools and remain on the same premises in unbroken continuity.
I repaired the gold chain without too much difficulty and feel pleased that England still has traditional shopkeepers who have not been driven out of business by the faceless chain stores, nor the enterprising immigrants. Town traders show us armchair philosophers what life is about.
So I set out in search of cheap tools to do the repair myself. On the way I dropped into “Oxfam” to browse their second-hand books. The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief was founded in 1942, and in England we tend to forget the connection between these local charity shops and the work that Oxfam does worldwide. A middle-aged lady was patiently instructing a young African woman in how to put novels on a shelf alphabetically by author. I felt almost indignant on behalf of the shy African, whose inability to work fluently with the alphabet was as little her fault as the quite startling beauty with which she had been endowed by her Creator. Back in the street, a senior traffic warden was instructing a junior one in the intricate details of their craft or trade – penalising motorists for illegal parking. Thus it had been in the motor workshop in the morning, too: the boss helping the mechanic in the tricky business of opening a locked car bonnet from underneath, with the aid of bent crowbars. Now I was able to read the faces of the old men in town. They had spent their lives instructing or being instructed. Every job, even emptying the refuse bins, has its own lore, its special art, to be passed down from one to another. Survival skills, rather than philosophy or ethics, are what makes the world go round, as I hinted yesterday.
In the end I found a pair of “mini needle nose pliers” at Isaac Lord. “Isaac Lord Limited is a family run firm, which was started in Desborough Road, High Wycombe, England in the year 1892. Isaac and his family sold tools and supplies to the workers in the furniture factories on their way to and from work.” Its staff have an expertise and helpfulness rare these days. They still specialise in woodworking tools and remain on the same premises in unbroken continuity.
I repaired the gold chain without too much difficulty and feel pleased that England still has traditional shopkeepers who have not been driven out of business by the faceless chain stores, nor the enterprising immigrants. Town traders show us armchair philosophers what life is about.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Back streets, oily hands
West Wycombe: Dashwood Mausoleum
& St Lawrence's Church & Golden Ball
Oil pastel: Vincent thanks, Flickr
here and here and perhaps everywhere, about goodness. I’m aware that the discourse in the US is frequently about good and evil. Bush refers to evil terrorists not just as individuals but as an Axis of evil. Meanwhile, America is considered evil, as Irish humorist Dylan Moran puts it, by “the world, mainly”. Old-fashioned preachers base their philosophy on a clear distinction between the righteous and the non-righteous, derived from the Old Testament, which was itself derived from the Israelites who made a clear distinction as to who was for them and who was against them. Wherein lies the clue.
While America discusses good and evil, Israel and its antagonists each see themselves defending their women and children, their goats and camels and land (or modern equivalents), without arguing moral justification.
Two things that I find very understandable:
1) that people---I'm thinking in particular about bloggers, not middle-east sluggers and counter-sluggers---approach truth with a great deal of baggage, in the form of beliefs and habits which have sustained them and defined reality till now, and are therefore difficult to relinquish
2) that people seek guidance from others, seeking to be part of a community---I’m tempted to say a congregation---of the like-minded
I eschew both. I’ve dumped most of the baggage, and no longer seek guidance from others. Let me clarify the latter. I don’t know better than anyone, any tramp, any man on Death Row, but nor, on the other hand, do I bow in obeisance to Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Krishna. I don’t need theology from anyone. My only meditation is to take a solitary walk amongst the trees and the butterflies and the nettles and the brambles; or indeed the back streets of this town, where I see that everyone has the same survival needs. My only prayer is opening my soul to the Universe which knows my wants and needs. My wise men are the mechanics with oily hands in the workshops. They have had to cope with the desperates who bring their broken-down cars and disappointed hopes. Engineers and mechanics wrestle with reality and it engenders wisdom because fakery cannot fix engines.
In the wonderful town where I live, which I have come to know as my first permanent home after 46 years of wandering, 15% of the population are Muslim, from Pakistan, and they with their descendants have been here for half a century whilst maintaining close links with the home country. For example my landlord (aged 19) has gone to Pakistan for 2 months to meet and marry his arranged bride. My Nigerian neighbour, who was helping me get my car started this morning, could not open the bonnet (hood) of his own car to fix jump leads to the batteries, so we took his car to a Pakistani-run workshop, where we heard Salaam Alaikums aplenty, and I borrowed the jump leads from a car hire company nearby who did not require my name or a deposit or anything. They too were Muslim. They judged me by their feeling that I would return the jump leads, that I too was part of the universal brotherhood of those who help one another and don’t try to climb on top of one another in tricky antisocial ways. Amongst this Muslim community, there is peace and trust, so I will respect them and their religion, for who wants more than this, in the struggle for survival?
I should also add that 8% of the population are Afro-Caribbean, amongst whom is dear K, my wife, from Jamaica. A majority of the Afro-Caribbeans are from St Vincent and they are mixed African / Indian descent. Yes, they have taught a willing Britain how to love reggae, how to be sensual in body, in movement, in dance, in food, in simplicity. But we have Africans too, from Zimbabwe and other parts, and Poles, and Irish, and Sikhs, and I am sure some Canadians and Americans and Italians and so on. We do not have racism, only the different types grumbling about one another with their humorous expressions of prejudice – as is only proper and reasonable: that people should prefer their own. Aesthetically, morally and culturally, I prefer the immigrants and world citizens to the diehard aboriginal English whose ancestors left their bones in the chalk hills of this county. Coming from Australia, I consider myself British but not English.
And the point of this, you may ask? Only that I have realised how very, very lucky I am. In my view, the way to this kind of luck is not through religion, following another, philosophy, being clever or rich or aristocratic or tricky. What then? Just fearlessly opening my door to the inputs from within and without. Life does not sum itself up in a sentence.
In my little town, Muslims are a community of the God-fearing. The mosque's dome and minaret are visible from my window. There are one or two young hotheads who would like to go and fight against the British and Americans in some theatre of war, despite it being treason, for I saw a poster urging them to do so in a shop window, when the invasion of Iraq was imminent. In the Thirties young men flocked to the Civil War in Spain for much the same reason, including writers Hemingway, Orwell and Laurie Lee, though some like Pound and Waugh fought on the other side. Neither side was evil. They were all idealists. History has a lot to tell us.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Wake up!
Petrol costs more than gasoline but it's still too cheap. They are of course two names for the same thing. When the price really goes up it will hurt, but life on Earth will improve. Communities will be restored, obesity will diminish, air will be less toxic, people will appreciate their home village, global warming will stop getting worse, scars of the world-wide ugliness caused by the motor car will gradually heal. And we will still have the Internet!
To ensure the peaceful restoration of a saner life style, we have to avoid these bitter wars for control of oil supplies. Our dependence is our fatal weakness. Three or four years ago, in Britain, some truck drivers complained about a tax on fuel and decided to take direct action by blockading the oil refineries, interrupting the distribution of petrol and diesel fuel. Within a week it was a national emergency. The crisis was made worse by drivers filling their tanks at every opportunity, guaranteeing that supplies ran out at every filling station except just after a tanker delivery. It was difficult to maintain priority supplies for buses, ambulances and police vehicles. Police intervention was needed to prevent traffic jams and disputes, and to monitor new regulations to protect essential services.
All this was brought about by a dozen truck drivers whose cause gained sympathy. Less bloody than terrorist bombs but more effective. Governments have bombs and practise terrorism with impunity, whilst defining the word to exclude what they do. I don’t know of any government that has learned lessons from Gandhi.
If we accepted that oil may get scarce, and organised accordingly, we could spare ourselves all this self-inflicted pain and chaos. But it’s an emotive thing and those politicians who can see what’s happening cannot do anything because it would lose them votes.
The alternative is to learn the hard way. This is what is happening. It could go on and on, not getting better till after it has got much worse.
The above rant is not my main theme, merely a concrete example. My theme is waking up, for we sleepwalk through life, aided by money and security. We insulate ourselves in our symbolic 4-wheel-drive vehicles, and it’s like driving around in a tank through enemy territory. I forget the currently fashionable name of these cars, for I sometimes hold the 21st century at arm’s length, as if it were a venom-spitting snake.
Awake, O America! Not just America of course, you are role-model to a host of emulators. Perhaps you know the ugliness and indignity of poverty because it is not unknown within your borders. But do you know poverty's sweeter tang, the keenness of its senses, the brilliant clarity of its thoughts, when one walks the earth naked like an Aboriginal – of whatever race – or like Adam? Do Jews believe in the Fall of Man, wherein Adam and Eve contracted the disease called Original Sin, so soon after the Garden of Eden was planted for their benefit?
It's cultivated, bleached and refined sin that poisons us today. There is one great hypocritical, smiley-faced sin: to sleepwalk through life!
To ensure the peaceful restoration of a saner life style, we have to avoid these bitter wars for control of oil supplies. Our dependence is our fatal weakness. Three or four years ago, in Britain, some truck drivers complained about a tax on fuel and decided to take direct action by blockading the oil refineries, interrupting the distribution of petrol and diesel fuel. Within a week it was a national emergency. The crisis was made worse by drivers filling their tanks at every opportunity, guaranteeing that supplies ran out at every filling station except just after a tanker delivery. It was difficult to maintain priority supplies for buses, ambulances and police vehicles. Police intervention was needed to prevent traffic jams and disputes, and to monitor new regulations to protect essential services.
All this was brought about by a dozen truck drivers whose cause gained sympathy. Less bloody than terrorist bombs but more effective. Governments have bombs and practise terrorism with impunity, whilst defining the word to exclude what they do. I don’t know of any government that has learned lessons from Gandhi.
If we accepted that oil may get scarce, and organised accordingly, we could spare ourselves all this self-inflicted pain and chaos. But it’s an emotive thing and those politicians who can see what’s happening cannot do anything because it would lose them votes.
The alternative is to learn the hard way. This is what is happening. It could go on and on, not getting better till after it has got much worse.
The above rant is not my main theme, merely a concrete example. My theme is waking up, for we sleepwalk through life, aided by money and security. We insulate ourselves in our symbolic 4-wheel-drive vehicles, and it’s like driving around in a tank through enemy territory. I forget the currently fashionable name of these cars, for I sometimes hold the 21st century at arm’s length, as if it were a venom-spitting snake.
Awake, O America! Not just America of course, you are role-model to a host of emulators. Perhaps you know the ugliness and indignity of poverty because it is not unknown within your borders. But do you know poverty's sweeter tang, the keenness of its senses, the brilliant clarity of its thoughts, when one walks the earth naked like an Aboriginal – of whatever race – or like Adam? Do Jews believe in the Fall of Man, wherein Adam and Eve contracted the disease called Original Sin, so soon after the Garden of Eden was planted for their benefit?
It's cultivated, bleached and refined sin that poisons us today. There is one great hypocritical, smiley-faced sin: to sleepwalk through life!
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Image and ecstasy
After the suicide of my old camera, now is the short period of mourning before the arrival of a new one. Meanwhile, I borrowed 6 books on painting in pastel from the public library, not in order to “learn how to do it properly”, but to see if there were any essential techniques that would pre-empt the more foolish of my trials and errors. I got a teaspoonful of usefulness from a gallon of printer’s ink, but some points to brood on too.
The books assume you will first go to the art shop and buy the best materials – paper and crayons – that you can afford. I appreciate reading why this is better than that, but I need to experiment, and so far I have only used the cheapest scholastic quality, that some parents would think not good enough for their children. Since it’s the process and not the result that’s been my concern, the materials have not been relevant. You do what you can with what you’ve got. As in life.
The books assume you will learn the craft by copying from photographs, but I cannot bring myself to do that. If a photo could capture the colour and form which inspire my ecstasies, why would I go through the agony of sketching? Yes, agony. Yesterday, shaded from the noonday sun, I started a picture of St Lawrence’s Church and the hill on which it sits. The Golden Ball was tiny from this distance. I was exhausted after an hour, though the resulting unfinished sketch was pleasing. So many emotions! Irritation, disappointment, confusion, frustration, despair. Underlying all these, a continuous ecstasy. I’m not made to live in peace, to grow fat in tranquillity. As K says in her Jamaican patois, I’m “dramatic”.
A photograph is flat. Would you want to experience the vibrant colours and sensational shapes of life through the cold eye of a fish?
When I go to the site with my bag of crayons and bottle of turpentine and supply of cotton buds and cheap pad I appreciate Vincent Van Gogh all the more. I know of only one painting in which he copied from a photo – a portrait of his mother. He could not go and visit her. He was in Arles, Provence, and she was in Holland, and he lived on pocket money from his brother Theo. So he used the photo to refresh his memory and changed her formal expression to the sweeter one that he saw in his mind’s eye.
I noticed that when I sketch, after drawing an outline in pencil, I don’t look at the scene much. The struggle is not to copy what I see but to create a coherent world on the paper. I have to add shade to this tree here, and a feature to that house there, to make them look like a tree and a house. I’m improving on what I see. I edit what I see. Realising that an interesting feature would be out of frame – fall off the edge of the paper – I remove a section of the seen landscape to make it fit on. We create our own world. As in life.
My illustration is of a caterpillar that lives on the Dark Mullein wild flower. It took a while to identify it. Apparently they (Striped Lychnis Moths) were endangered, and in 2001 Buckinghamshire County Council issued a website about it. I have seen plenty in the last few days, all within walking distance. I did not have the camera to record them. Today I thought I would paint one with pastels. But when you actually need a caterpillar, you can never find one. Such is life.
PS, the new camera was delivered today, giving me access to a scanning device so here is a glimpse of a sketch I am working on.
The books assume you will first go to the art shop and buy the best materials – paper and crayons – that you can afford. I appreciate reading why this is better than that, but I need to experiment, and so far I have only used the cheapest scholastic quality, that some parents would think not good enough for their children. Since it’s the process and not the result that’s been my concern, the materials have not been relevant. You do what you can with what you’ve got. As in life.
The books assume you will learn the craft by copying from photographs, but I cannot bring myself to do that. If a photo could capture the colour and form which inspire my ecstasies, why would I go through the agony of sketching? Yes, agony. Yesterday, shaded from the noonday sun, I started a picture of St Lawrence’s Church and the hill on which it sits. The Golden Ball was tiny from this distance. I was exhausted after an hour, though the resulting unfinished sketch was pleasing. So many emotions! Irritation, disappointment, confusion, frustration, despair. Underlying all these, a continuous ecstasy. I’m not made to live in peace, to grow fat in tranquillity. As K says in her Jamaican patois, I’m “dramatic”.
A photograph is flat. Would you want to experience the vibrant colours and sensational shapes of life through the cold eye of a fish?
When I go to the site with my bag of crayons and bottle of turpentine and supply of cotton buds and cheap pad I appreciate Vincent Van Gogh all the more. I know of only one painting in which he copied from a photo – a portrait of his mother. He could not go and visit her. He was in Arles, Provence, and she was in Holland, and he lived on pocket money from his brother Theo. So he used the photo to refresh his memory and changed her formal expression to the sweeter one that he saw in his mind’s eye.
I noticed that when I sketch, after drawing an outline in pencil, I don’t look at the scene much. The struggle is not to copy what I see but to create a coherent world on the paper. I have to add shade to this tree here, and a feature to that house there, to make them look like a tree and a house. I’m improving on what I see. I edit what I see. Realising that an interesting feature would be out of frame – fall off the edge of the paper – I remove a section of the seen landscape to make it fit on. We create our own world. As in life.
My illustration is of a caterpillar that lives on the Dark Mullein wild flower. It took a while to identify it. Apparently they (Striped Lychnis Moths) were endangered, and in 2001 Buckinghamshire County Council issued a website about it. I have seen plenty in the last few days, all within walking distance. I did not have the camera to record them. Today I thought I would paint one with pastels. But when you actually need a caterpillar, you can never find one. Such is life.
PS, the new camera was delivered today, giving me access to a scanning device so here is a glimpse of a sketch I am working on.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Responsibility
The Simpsons is hard on religion. Poor Ned Flanders thinks that as a Christian he must tolerate Homer’s rudeness and let him borrow all his worldly goods indefinitely. His verbal tics (“Okely-dokely! Home Sweet-diddly Home!”) are the only evidence of his repressed rage, for he conceives it as his Christian responsibility to love his neighbour.As a non-follower of any religion, indeed someone who does not subscribe to humanism, or atheism, or “freedom” or “tyranny”, do I have responsibilities in this world? I mean, to my fellow humans, to all living things, to the inanimate minerals, to the Universe?
I know that I do. Am I to be a Ned Flanders, constantly subordinating my natural self to my ideals? No.
In the last couple of days, I have watched Michael Cacoyannis’ film version of Zorba the Greek, as a sequel to reading Kazantzakis’ book. Zorba was a real man, (called Zorbas) whom Kazantzakis had known. Hearing of his death, he remembered so many incidents that he based his first novel on him. Zorba was a “natural man”, who said it was a sin unforgivable by God to miss the offered opportunity to sleep with a woman, as I quoted in an earlier post. He also said that we should live each day as if it were our last, whilst at the same time living it as if we would live forever.
Zorba confessed that in his younger days he had slain and raped and pillaged in the name of Greece. Now he did not care if a man was Turk or Greek, sinner or saint. Zorba was a man of action and a tender-hearted soul. He looked down on books and scribbling, but I salute him just as Kazantzakis did.
What is my responsibility in this world? To judge others? To condemn suicide bombers? To tell others how to live? To fight injustice? To worship God? To annihilate my ego? To obey moral rules? To pursue achievement and strive for perfection? To share collective guilt for the ills of the world? To find out what God wants me to do? To give allegiance to the righteous?
None of those things. However I cannot deny that others may have such responsibilities. It is also possible that some are born in this world to be the very opposite: to be judged, to be terrorists, to wreak violent injustice etc. It’s not my affair. As part of some voluntary work in 1966 I met a young man recently released from Rampton (a hospital for the criminally insane). He recounted to me the details of the extremely violent sexual crime for which he had been imprisoned. What he had done was not my affair. I saw a real human being in front of me. He had responsibility for the rest of his life, and he was - I hope - ready to take it.
I will some time tell here the story of my visit to the Mustardseed community in Jamaica, where I encountered a shining human being. Aged 21, she had been severely brain-damaged from birth and in consequence was no taller than a three-year old. She could not speak, she could not feed herself. Her twisted limbs were stick-like and useless. She could not sit up. She even had to be turned over on her daybed from time to time to avoid bedsores. Adorned by her carers with makeup and braided hair, she directed a regal glance at me. I felt in the presence of a superior soul.
You have only one responsibility. That is to be profoundly and intensely yourself.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Tragic death of a camera
Yesterday I managed to upset a seagull. This morning my digital camera committed suicide. I dare say an electrician would have told me not to replace the batteries whilst it was connected to a 3-volt adaptor, but this is merely a rational explanation, and electricians are notoriously cautious. They are to be trusted as much as the politician who says, “Mankind needs politicians”. Anyhow, there was a rather vengeful spark, and then - nothing. It died with its one eye still open; its gut fortunately empty of pictures.
K professes not to understand this, but I loved the camera all the more for being glued together with Araldite and Sellotape. I’ve spent days repairing it in the past, when she urged me to chuck it and buy another. I’d intended to explain here that the inadequacy of its vision was my reason for taking up sketching.
But it read my mind, and died of shame. Its final humiliation was being used merely as a scanner.
My camera had been like a faithful dog to me, accompanying each rural ramble, wagging its tail excitedly when a suitable scene appeared, sniffing the best angles. Now it’s stiff, frozen, dark. Excuse the babbling, it’s guilt at betraying my friend!
K professes not to understand this, but I loved the camera all the more for being glued together with Araldite and Sellotape. I’ve spent days repairing it in the past, when she urged me to chuck it and buy another. I’d intended to explain here that the inadequacy of its vision was my reason for taking up sketching.
But it read my mind, and died of shame. Its final humiliation was being used merely as a scanner.
My camera had been like a faithful dog to me, accompanying each rural ramble, wagging its tail excitedly when a suitable scene appeared, sniffing the best angles. Now it’s stiff, frozen, dark. Excuse the babbling, it’s guilt at betraying my friend!
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Bledlow Ridge
I'm just learning how to use these chalks (oil pastels), but was quite pleased at the result. We sat on a rug with a hedge behind us, and I peered over the ripening wheat field (in case you can't recognise it) to view this scene.
"Who are you staring at?"
I went out at 7 this overcast morning to buy fresh lemons for pancakes, passing the Bethany Gospel Hall on the way back. There’s usually a lone seagull perching on the roof, over the main door, like the guardian angel of this chapel. Why here? Does it defend the perch from rival birds? What makes seagulls come and live in this inland town, about eighty miles from the sea? As I pondered and stared, the bird flew off in loud agitation over the neighbouring rooftops. I assumed it had gone about its business and my thoughts drifted elsewhere.
Then it started dive-bombing. I was its target. It swooped low from out of the sky until its beak was aimed at a spot between my eyes. Then it swung back up again, passing three feet above my head. It must have swooped with this deadly accuracy twelve to fifteen times, as I stood transfixed: amazed but not scared. At the end of each swoop, high above the Victorian chimneypots and the engineering works, it looked over its shoulder and with a kind of backflip turned around to swoop again, each time a little closer. As soon as I walked on, it stopped buzzing me.
What is it with me and animals? Once when K & I were walking through a field of teenage bulls, one of them stared insolently at me so I stared back. Actually I am not sure which of us started it, but the challenge was obvious. Neither of us moved, and we did not take our eyes off one another. The other young bulls stopped munching grass, and even the ones engaged in their own face-off games eventually stopped to watch this interesting inter-species contest. It was my plan to walk slowly closer and show K that I was the braver of the two, but she would not let me. The next time we entered the field, I wanted to go closer to see if the same bull remembered me, but she took my arm and said “Come along now”.
The seagull this morning was determined but not angry. I know this for a fact. As a foolish young beatnik, about 43 years ago, whilst camping near St Ives in Cornwall, I had taken a seagull’s egg to fry for breakfast. The mother bird swooped till its beak was within an inch of my face. It meant business, and its family were after me too. Panicking, I stumbled on a slippery rock, dropped the egg and ran for my life. It cannot be the same bird, surely?
Or was it revenge for my sins against the Gospels?
Then it started dive-bombing. I was its target. It swooped low from out of the sky until its beak was aimed at a spot between my eyes. Then it swung back up again, passing three feet above my head. It must have swooped with this deadly accuracy twelve to fifteen times, as I stood transfixed: amazed but not scared. At the end of each swoop, high above the Victorian chimneypots and the engineering works, it looked over its shoulder and with a kind of backflip turned around to swoop again, each time a little closer. As soon as I walked on, it stopped buzzing me.
What is it with me and animals? Once when K & I were walking through a field of teenage bulls, one of them stared insolently at me so I stared back. Actually I am not sure which of us started it, but the challenge was obvious. Neither of us moved, and we did not take our eyes off one another. The other young bulls stopped munching grass, and even the ones engaged in their own face-off games eventually stopped to watch this interesting inter-species contest. It was my plan to walk slowly closer and show K that I was the braver of the two, but she would not let me. The next time we entered the field, I wanted to go closer to see if the same bull remembered me, but she took my arm and said “Come along now”.
The seagull this morning was determined but not angry. I know this for a fact. As a foolish young beatnik, about 43 years ago, whilst camping near St Ives in Cornwall, I had taken a seagull’s egg to fry for breakfast. The mother bird swooped till its beak was within an inch of my face. It meant business, and its family were after me too. Panicking, I stumbled on a slippery rock, dropped the egg and ran for my life. It cannot be the same bird, surely?
Or was it revenge for my sins against the Gospels?
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Sex therapy
The other day I called at a friend’s house to give her a book and she gave me one in return, by a sex therapist. Before you wonder the significance of this exchange, I hasten to add that the book’s co-author, a professional writer, is a friend of hers, and presumably had left her with some complimentary copies.
Wouldn’t you think a book about sex should be a teeny bit sexy, just as a book on humour should be a bit funny, or at least have jokes in it? This one has questionnaires instead. It has photos in which agency models illustrate stereotyped banalities. There's a vase with a droopy flower to illustrate erectile inadequacy. A grinning couple with the girl eating a banana to illustrate something else.
The book assumes that its reader, whilst already partnered with someone of the opposite gender, has problems in the sex department. Where does it go from this premise?
If it were my book, not that I am a professional sex therapist, it would go very widely indeed. Sex is so fundamental to our existence as human animals that there is nothing that I would not touch on. I would have got the reader to examine the nature of the attraction towards his or her partner, the state of spiritual health, their life-situation and reproductive prospects, their stresses and anxieties, their attitudes to life, their aesthetic and emotional reactions with the “other” - not just one another but the world. My premise would be, “Don’t try to fix a dysfunctional sex life, but see how your whole life may be dysfunctional by comparison to your true nature and needs”. I’d point out that mankind has managed for 400,000 years without benefit of sex manuals in fulfilling the three main purposes of sex. Primary purpose: reproduction. Secondary purpose: make sure parents remain fascinated enough with one another to bring up their children. Tertiary purpose: “Make love, not war.” I'd give more than a passing nod to the main “sex problem” known to men and women in the last 400,000 years: not getting any!
I almost started writing the book right here! But let’s get back to our hapless “psycho-sexual therapist within the National Health Service, who also runs a successful private practice”. Reproduction plays little part in his opus, apart from cursory references to contraception. Nor does he have much time for love:
I have not talked much about love in [this book] because I see it as part of the relational whole. . . .People [who] come to the clinic . . . see love as a magical and spiritual feeling, experienced when they were first attracted to one another . . . [but] now love has ‘gone’. They don’t see how it can be fixed. . . . Love is proportionate to the amount of spadework they have done.
He’s a doctor, they don’t use words like “lust” and “love”. No, it's “libido” and “spadework”. And as a doctor working for the National Health Service, he needs to make sure that no romantic or spiritual notions infect his practice, let alone the prose in this book. It is written with the passion and poetry of an accountant’s report, or the Yearbook of the Institute of Epidemiology. The foreword is entitled “Our vision for high quality sex”. A vision statement, yes. Perhaps the authors are planning to export high quality sex to those places in the world where, for lack of appropriate guidance, sex is scarce and of mediocre quality.
Or perhaps the quality of sex is inhibited by inappropriate scripts. Hm. There is a whole chapter about this. “A script is a belief or set of ideas or stories, often rigidly held. . . . Scripts tend to limit choice: this is one of their key attributes.” What, you may ask, is their book but a “script”?
You’d think sex was a traded commodity, the way the authors write about it. Yes, a leisure commodity. What a pity that a brewery or gambling conglomerate can’t seize it in a hostile take-over bid. Or a drug company: Pfizer, of course. From the unsolicited email I get, you'd think Pfizer have already cornered the market in sex.
The book recommends fantasy, pornography and masturbation. My sex book, if I ever write it, will recommend finding out who you really are, and devoting your life 100% to being it. Then sex will take care of itself, and you.
Wouldn’t you think a book about sex should be a teeny bit sexy, just as a book on humour should be a bit funny, or at least have jokes in it? This one has questionnaires instead. It has photos in which agency models illustrate stereotyped banalities. There's a vase with a droopy flower to illustrate erectile inadequacy. A grinning couple with the girl eating a banana to illustrate something else.
The book assumes that its reader, whilst already partnered with someone of the opposite gender, has problems in the sex department. Where does it go from this premise?
If it were my book, not that I am a professional sex therapist, it would go very widely indeed. Sex is so fundamental to our existence as human animals that there is nothing that I would not touch on. I would have got the reader to examine the nature of the attraction towards his or her partner, the state of spiritual health, their life-situation and reproductive prospects, their stresses and anxieties, their attitudes to life, their aesthetic and emotional reactions with the “other” - not just one another but the world. My premise would be, “Don’t try to fix a dysfunctional sex life, but see how your whole life may be dysfunctional by comparison to your true nature and needs”. I’d point out that mankind has managed for 400,000 years without benefit of sex manuals in fulfilling the three main purposes of sex. Primary purpose: reproduction. Secondary purpose: make sure parents remain fascinated enough with one another to bring up their children. Tertiary purpose: “Make love, not war.” I'd give more than a passing nod to the main “sex problem” known to men and women in the last 400,000 years: not getting any!
I almost started writing the book right here! But let’s get back to our hapless “psycho-sexual therapist within the National Health Service, who also runs a successful private practice”. Reproduction plays little part in his opus, apart from cursory references to contraception. Nor does he have much time for love:
I have not talked much about love in [this book] because I see it as part of the relational whole. . . .People [who] come to the clinic . . . see love as a magical and spiritual feeling, experienced when they were first attracted to one another . . . [but] now love has ‘gone’. They don’t see how it can be fixed. . . . Love is proportionate to the amount of spadework they have done.
He’s a doctor, they don’t use words like “lust” and “love”. No, it's “libido” and “spadework”. And as a doctor working for the National Health Service, he needs to make sure that no romantic or spiritual notions infect his practice, let alone the prose in this book. It is written with the passion and poetry of an accountant’s report, or the Yearbook of the Institute of Epidemiology. The foreword is entitled “Our vision for high quality sex”. A vision statement, yes. Perhaps the authors are planning to export high quality sex to those places in the world where, for lack of appropriate guidance, sex is scarce and of mediocre quality.
Or perhaps the quality of sex is inhibited by inappropriate scripts. Hm. There is a whole chapter about this. “A script is a belief or set of ideas or stories, often rigidly held. . . . Scripts tend to limit choice: this is one of their key attributes.” What, you may ask, is their book but a “script”?
You’d think sex was a traded commodity, the way the authors write about it. Yes, a leisure commodity. What a pity that a brewery or gambling conglomerate can’t seize it in a hostile take-over bid. Or a drug company: Pfizer, of course. From the unsolicited email I get, you'd think Pfizer have already cornered the market in sex.
The book recommends fantasy, pornography and masturbation. My sex book, if I ever write it, will recommend finding out who you really are, and devoting your life 100% to being it. Then sex will take care of itself, and you.
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