On Cheltenham Racecourse I had a chance to put a question to Iain Sinclair. He's (tangentially, at least) a practitioner of psychogeography. In his books (Edge of the Orison; London Orbital; Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire) he explores the experience of walking through various landscapes, mythmaking with the architecture, people and histories he finds there.
He spoke about the devastation inflicted, unwittingly perhaps, on the poet John Clare, who, unable to acclimatise to London's literary life, sought to return to his labouring family home, only to find that enclosure of the commons had, in the name of progress, privatised the landscape he used to wander freely and which had given him belonging and a muse. Doubly disenfranchised, he spent the latter years of his life in an asylum.
Such enclosure currently finds its echo in the Millenium Dome (a space enclosed with nothing in it) and, now, in the site of the 2012 Olympic Village, where you are being photographed as you approach, but where you have no power to photograph back, on pain of the confiscation of your camera. The site is empty, and the architecture to be built on it modern and uniform, but the crushed stone and life-space confiscated from its previous residents was once rich and full.
Sinclair's talk was powerful, and I, and perhaps others after, asked him how, in the midst of cultural obliteration, one might make a proactive stand for cultural rejuvenation. He writes books. What else could one do?
He gave an interesting answer: "Keep moving. Keep finding new projects."
I cannot help but think that this is the way that Whitley Bay will grow: for its people, and those who come to it, to keep moving, keep on walking, keep dreaming, pushing, and pressing our projects to completion.
Showing posts with label Grand Plan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grand Plan. Show all posts
Thursday, 3 September 2009
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
827 - Found Objects, Mythos and Logos
A good summary, by Gus diZerega in Beyond The Burning Times, of the difference between Mythos and Logos - two modes of thinking explored by, among others, Karen Armstrong in her works on the history of religious thought.
It seems to me, after yesterday's post, that treating life as a sequence of found objects opens the way to both mythic and logical thought. I suspect that I favour the former more than the latter, at least on this blog. For example, I included the third 'found object', a song thrush that startled me by its closeness, as much to say 'This begins a meditation on our mutual awareness of one another' as 'Here's a rare thing: how exactly did it happen?'
So with Whitley Bay. A logical exploration of the town and its regeneration might include documentary evidence (photos, journalism, oral histories), analysis of Whitley's economy and sociology, and theories of town planning. Decisions would be deconstructed, courses of action justified.
A mythical exploration of the town takes us down a different route. The documentary evidence might be there, as a series of found objects, but analysis turns to celebration, deconstruction to lament. Oral history becomes testament, in the sense that it starts with the value of the town assumed, and spins art out of our encounter with it.
It's not so simple, however, to equate art with Mythos and science with Logos any more. People are making art out of the stuff of science, and science is reaching ever inward, so that a science book exudes the joy of a poem. If technologies represent the marriage of art and science, and Whitley Bay, regenerated, the application of both vision and realism, then the kernel out of which these things grow is the encounter with the object, the town, as found, in the first place.
Perhaps in this encounter, like a seed, all promise of future growth is held.
Sorry about the dip into Greek at the end there!Before modernity's rise, 'myth was primary' because it provided a way to understand the spiritual meaning embedded within life itself. Myth concerned itself with the meaning in life, not the meaning of life. Logos in this usage refers to reason, understanding the rationally verifiable relations between things.
Myth is not primitive science because it focuses on inner meaning rather than exterior event. Science explores externals: what can be seen, measured, repeated and predicted. Myth is a culturally and psychologically framed way of illuminating patterns and depths of inner meaning. The hagiographies of Saints would be a pretty noncontroversial example of Catholic Christian myths, but the early church even considered basic elements of Christian theology to be myths. For example, St Gregory of Nyssa (335-395)... according to Armstrong [in The Battle for God]... 'had explained the three hypostases of Father, Son and Spirit were not objective facts but simply "terms that we use" to express the way in which the "unnameable and unspeakable" divine nature (ousia) adapts itself to the limits of our human minds'.
It seems to me, after yesterday's post, that treating life as a sequence of found objects opens the way to both mythic and logical thought. I suspect that I favour the former more than the latter, at least on this blog. For example, I included the third 'found object', a song thrush that startled me by its closeness, as much to say 'This begins a meditation on our mutual awareness of one another' as 'Here's a rare thing: how exactly did it happen?'
So with Whitley Bay. A logical exploration of the town and its regeneration might include documentary evidence (photos, journalism, oral histories), analysis of Whitley's economy and sociology, and theories of town planning. Decisions would be deconstructed, courses of action justified.
A mythical exploration of the town takes us down a different route. The documentary evidence might be there, as a series of found objects, but analysis turns to celebration, deconstruction to lament. Oral history becomes testament, in the sense that it starts with the value of the town assumed, and spins art out of our encounter with it.
It's not so simple, however, to equate art with Mythos and science with Logos any more. People are making art out of the stuff of science, and science is reaching ever inward, so that a science book exudes the joy of a poem. If technologies represent the marriage of art and science, and Whitley Bay, regenerated, the application of both vision and realism, then the kernel out of which these things grow is the encounter with the object, the town, as found, in the first place.
Perhaps in this encounter, like a seed, all promise of future growth is held.
Saturday, 23 May 2009
831 - Games
On Wednesday I joined E and half a dozen others at the Culture Quarter offices opposite the Playhouse for an evening of Mind Games.
We played Bananagrams (a kind of speed-Scrabble, with a heavy banana motif), Othello, and a complicated game based on the German postal service, with tiny wooden houses, a map of Central Europe, and several decks of cards.
In addition, this game contained a written endorsement by the heiress of the family who rolled the postal service into being, portraits of whose patriarchs graced the board, intimidating modern players from a century and a half beyond the grave. This was a little disturbing, and you were left half expecting to get an invitation to join the Bilderberg Group if you scored high enough.
Whatever conspiracy of events led to Whitley Bay becoming the first North East team to play at the new Wembley, play and win, whilst three of the four teams wrestling it out to avoid relegation from the Premier Division tomorrow are the big hitters from the North East, I don't know.
Similarly I struggle to fathom the depths of local politics, and doubt there are any big conspiracies behind the power-play talk of regenerating Whitley Bay, despite the games asserting the opposite regularly played on the letter pages of the News Guardian.
I feel strangely comforted by my ignorance. Bilderberg can wait.
We played Bananagrams (a kind of speed-Scrabble, with a heavy banana motif), Othello, and a complicated game based on the German postal service, with tiny wooden houses, a map of Central Europe, and several decks of cards.
In addition, this game contained a written endorsement by the heiress of the family who rolled the postal service into being, portraits of whose patriarchs graced the board, intimidating modern players from a century and a half beyond the grave. This was a little disturbing, and you were left half expecting to get an invitation to join the Bilderberg Group if you scored high enough.
Whatever conspiracy of events led to Whitley Bay becoming the first North East team to play at the new Wembley, play and win, whilst three of the four teams wrestling it out to avoid relegation from the Premier Division tomorrow are the big hitters from the North East, I don't know.
Similarly I struggle to fathom the depths of local politics, and doubt there are any big conspiracies behind the power-play talk of regenerating Whitley Bay, despite the games asserting the opposite regularly played on the letter pages of the News Guardian.
I feel strangely comforted by my ignorance. Bilderberg can wait.
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
843 - Catechism
That your life is a story,
That you are the centre of that story,
That you are in control of your story:
no religion, philosophy or science has ever promised more than this. The religion I know most thoroughly, Christianity, uses one word - love - and many words - the Bible, but I don't think it offers anything other than a demonstration of this truth.
It follows from love, because from the perspective of love, all things are possible, and all are bestowed upon the beloved, so that we, being loved, have the tools, inclination and permission to make of our lives what we want.
It follows from the Bible, because, whether fact or fiction, the story of Jesus unlocks the possibilities of love and, in making them known to us, gives us mastery over them. Even if the surface claims of the gospels are untrue, there is a perspective from which they become true. You can stand four-square a scientist and allow this perspective.
But it would be true to say, I think, that the Church, as an institution, has had problems with this news. Which is why, through the ages, its members have, in about equal measure, chosen to embrace the institution despite themselves, and embrace themselves despite the institution. A centripetal force argues for the core, whilst a centrifugal force propels outside.
I'm not ashamed of my upbringing and young adulthood, which drove me towards the core of the gospel, but I'm also not ashamed of my decision first to leave the Church, and then to remain outside it. I believe this is a prophetic stance - a testimony to the overarching reach of love, very much of the moment, given the rise of new technologies and the impact of globalisation at a point in our history when modernism, in its institutional, consumerist guise, has run itself, and our planet, out of steam.
John Gray writes forcefully, over his thirty plus year career, of the collapse of the Christian myth, and of the myths, such as atheism and liberal progress, that have spun from it. But it is my understanding that Christianity is not Christianity unless it stares its collapse in the face. Christianity is precisely about what you do when your myths have all collapsed - Jesus the Messiah is patently not the Messiah of contemporary Judeo-Roman myth if, instead of restoring the kingship of Jerusalem, he is dead on a cross. Christianity's answer is that, having accepted the collapse of the guiding myth given to you by your older peers, you are absolutely free to tell one of your own choosing.
For the past five years I've been exploring the terrain where this insight leaves me. And I'm working up ideas on at least two scales. First, on a societal scale. I'm captured by the image of a seagull flying low over the water as an argument for the celebration of thrift: high-flyers have represented the pinnacle of achievement for many years, with the attendant benefits of a luxury lifestyle, kudos and freedom from moral restraints (the mile-high club), but it takes as much skill, and a good deal of daring, for a gull to skim the waves. It shouldn't be hard to construct a population-wide cultural niche where value and esteem is attached not, say, to consumption, but to environmental reparation - and indeed, blossoming in all kinds of places, is just this sensibility.
But societal change rests, I believe, on individual change, and in order to change like this, to become the early-bird lone-voice creative low-flier in a given society, community, family, mirror, it helps to feel secure in your right to choose at a most profound level whatever story best appeals to you. Hence my passion for our rights of identity, for the celebration, across cultures, of our ability to story ourselves whichever way we choose (regardless of what I want, or you, or our present society, or whatever).
My call, as a once-Christian, is for churches to promote storying as the new core tenet of their faith. As I have made clear, I believe this is actually true to the ancient heart of the Christian gospel. It is also profoundly ecumenical, common cause with storytellers across the ages. If you want a temporary enemy, by all means fight those who would steal our right to tell stories - but remember, all they are doing is telling stories for themselves, so fight with infinite care and gentleness, lest you become a stealer of stories yourselves.
But I am a once-Christian, and don't believe this is a message just for the institutions. The most effective way I can think of, to argue as an individual amongst individuals for the value of storying, is to embody it as a consciously creative act, an art and/or science. It's not a lonely cause to adopt - there are storytellers making the headlines everywhere: today in the Metro newspaper I read of the Japanese barman who has founded a new genre - the mobile phone novel. I read also of Marie Bashkirtseff, who in 1875, Jon Savage argues, as a prototype for today's teenagers, defining her identity, writes 'I am the most interesting book of all'. And neuroscientists, becoming, by their research, a story themselves, tell us how neural plasticity hardwires the stories we live into our very brain structures and personal identity both.
Sometimes it seems daft that I am writing all this on a tiny blog, but in the end that's the essence of the case I am making. This isn't about a money-making fix, or the short-term. If it's about getting the message out, I want it out organically. You don't need the support of an institution to fashion the story you live by. Have it if it is offered, but (my advice, anyway) don't wait for it to come to you. In Whitley Bay, or wherever you are, set to your dragon slaying, or big swoon, or comedy of kings, by yourself.
That you are the centre of that story,
That you are in control of your story:
no religion, philosophy or science has ever promised more than this. The religion I know most thoroughly, Christianity, uses one word - love - and many words - the Bible, but I don't think it offers anything other than a demonstration of this truth.
It follows from love, because from the perspective of love, all things are possible, and all are bestowed upon the beloved, so that we, being loved, have the tools, inclination and permission to make of our lives what we want.
It follows from the Bible, because, whether fact or fiction, the story of Jesus unlocks the possibilities of love and, in making them known to us, gives us mastery over them. Even if the surface claims of the gospels are untrue, there is a perspective from which they become true. You can stand four-square a scientist and allow this perspective.
But it would be true to say, I think, that the Church, as an institution, has had problems with this news. Which is why, through the ages, its members have, in about equal measure, chosen to embrace the institution despite themselves, and embrace themselves despite the institution. A centripetal force argues for the core, whilst a centrifugal force propels outside.
I'm not ashamed of my upbringing and young adulthood, which drove me towards the core of the gospel, but I'm also not ashamed of my decision first to leave the Church, and then to remain outside it. I believe this is a prophetic stance - a testimony to the overarching reach of love, very much of the moment, given the rise of new technologies and the impact of globalisation at a point in our history when modernism, in its institutional, consumerist guise, has run itself, and our planet, out of steam.
John Gray writes forcefully, over his thirty plus year career, of the collapse of the Christian myth, and of the myths, such as atheism and liberal progress, that have spun from it. But it is my understanding that Christianity is not Christianity unless it stares its collapse in the face. Christianity is precisely about what you do when your myths have all collapsed - Jesus the Messiah is patently not the Messiah of contemporary Judeo-Roman myth if, instead of restoring the kingship of Jerusalem, he is dead on a cross. Christianity's answer is that, having accepted the collapse of the guiding myth given to you by your older peers, you are absolutely free to tell one of your own choosing.
For the past five years I've been exploring the terrain where this insight leaves me. And I'm working up ideas on at least two scales. First, on a societal scale. I'm captured by the image of a seagull flying low over the water as an argument for the celebration of thrift: high-flyers have represented the pinnacle of achievement for many years, with the attendant benefits of a luxury lifestyle, kudos and freedom from moral restraints (the mile-high club), but it takes as much skill, and a good deal of daring, for a gull to skim the waves. It shouldn't be hard to construct a population-wide cultural niche where value and esteem is attached not, say, to consumption, but to environmental reparation - and indeed, blossoming in all kinds of places, is just this sensibility.
But societal change rests, I believe, on individual change, and in order to change like this, to become the early-bird lone-voice creative low-flier in a given society, community, family, mirror, it helps to feel secure in your right to choose at a most profound level whatever story best appeals to you. Hence my passion for our rights of identity, for the celebration, across cultures, of our ability to story ourselves whichever way we choose (regardless of what I want, or you, or our present society, or whatever).
My call, as a once-Christian, is for churches to promote storying as the new core tenet of their faith. As I have made clear, I believe this is actually true to the ancient heart of the Christian gospel. It is also profoundly ecumenical, common cause with storytellers across the ages. If you want a temporary enemy, by all means fight those who would steal our right to tell stories - but remember, all they are doing is telling stories for themselves, so fight with infinite care and gentleness, lest you become a stealer of stories yourselves.
But I am a once-Christian, and don't believe this is a message just for the institutions. The most effective way I can think of, to argue as an individual amongst individuals for the value of storying, is to embody it as a consciously creative act, an art and/or science. It's not a lonely cause to adopt - there are storytellers making the headlines everywhere: today in the Metro newspaper I read of the Japanese barman who has founded a new genre - the mobile phone novel. I read also of Marie Bashkirtseff, who in 1875, Jon Savage argues, as a prototype for today's teenagers, defining her identity, writes 'I am the most interesting book of all'. And neuroscientists, becoming, by their research, a story themselves, tell us how neural plasticity hardwires the stories we live into our very brain structures and personal identity both.
Sometimes it seems daft that I am writing all this on a tiny blog, but in the end that's the essence of the case I am making. This isn't about a money-making fix, or the short-term. If it's about getting the message out, I want it out organically. You don't need the support of an institution to fashion the story you live by. Have it if it is offered, but (my advice, anyway) don't wait for it to come to you. In Whitley Bay, or wherever you are, set to your dragon slaying, or big swoon, or comedy of kings, by yourself.
Friday, 3 April 2009
858 - Niche Construction and Storymaking
Building on the ideas sketched out here, where what defines us is described as a continuous process of niche construction operating at genetic, ontogenetic (developmental) and cultural levels, and where spiritual communities are defined as groupings where such niche construction is undertaken more or less consciously, it should be possible to link the concepts of niche construction and storymaking in the following way.
With respect to any given individual, the three levels of niche construction operate effectively as separate, but interacting dimensions.
Genetics, in the wider environment, is a landscape one finds oneself in: it is about the interplay of organic and inorganic chemicals, which follow physical laws. At any given moment these may be being defined by, or defining, the environment around or within them.
Ontogenetics introduces a temporal dimension to proceedings. Ontogenetics is about bodily change over time: an immunity developed, a neural pathway altered and a new skill learned (or lost). Depending on one's age in developmental terms, one's internal landscape will behave differently, and the landscape that interacts with it will also have changed. Genes will have been switched on or off; outside influences removed or encountered for the first time. Moving in two dimensions, one is able to place oneself in the way of, or at a distance from the direct physical influence of aspects of the chemical world.
Culture introduces the element of interpretation. Chemical landscapes can be analysed according to different criteria; bodily changes monitored and explained in multiple ways; the results can be communicated through external and internal means, across genes and taking account of different developmental states. Information can be released or withheld, wholly or partially, dependant on one's sense of time and of the landscape about one. One may choose to restrict the learning of a skill, internally by removing oneself from one's learning environment, externally (in relation, perhaps, to others' learning) by disrupting a lesson. In the process new lessons become available to be taught and learnt. Other developmental processes are disrupted, proceed unaffected, or become stimulated. Moving in three dimensions, one is able to select one's life story, and other stories occurring about one, and in which one is involved. One is able to acknowledge the possibility of other stories, other options, and to take the time to communicate them.
As a chemical landscape predicts but cannot explain development, and as development predicts but cannot explain culture, so culture predicts, but cannot explain the real presence at one and the same time of conflicting stories about the same cultural states. Stories where time's arrow is reversed at the same time as it travels forward; where not just photons but bodies and whole worlds exist in two or more places at once. Stories where one is applauded for seducing the villain, who gives birth to a mantlepiece and ends twice at once, and is still in the middle of their story, and already at its start, when one pops one's clogs. Perhaps these do not exist, or perhaps they anticipate a God's eye view of the cosmos, one that only in moments out of time and space and worldview we can share. Ecstatic moments. Dreams.
If we have home, or origin of some kind, in such a perspective, then our only guarantee that it is a kind space is the nature of God. I'm not even sure conventional definitions of Love, or life after death, do it full justice. Such a home is known in one's innermost being, maybe.
With respect to any given individual, the three levels of niche construction operate effectively as separate, but interacting dimensions.
Genetics, in the wider environment, is a landscape one finds oneself in: it is about the interplay of organic and inorganic chemicals, which follow physical laws. At any given moment these may be being defined by, or defining, the environment around or within them.
Ontogenetics introduces a temporal dimension to proceedings. Ontogenetics is about bodily change over time: an immunity developed, a neural pathway altered and a new skill learned (or lost). Depending on one's age in developmental terms, one's internal landscape will behave differently, and the landscape that interacts with it will also have changed. Genes will have been switched on or off; outside influences removed or encountered for the first time. Moving in two dimensions, one is able to place oneself in the way of, or at a distance from the direct physical influence of aspects of the chemical world.
Culture introduces the element of interpretation. Chemical landscapes can be analysed according to different criteria; bodily changes monitored and explained in multiple ways; the results can be communicated through external and internal means, across genes and taking account of different developmental states. Information can be released or withheld, wholly or partially, dependant on one's sense of time and of the landscape about one. One may choose to restrict the learning of a skill, internally by removing oneself from one's learning environment, externally (in relation, perhaps, to others' learning) by disrupting a lesson. In the process new lessons become available to be taught and learnt. Other developmental processes are disrupted, proceed unaffected, or become stimulated. Moving in three dimensions, one is able to select one's life story, and other stories occurring about one, and in which one is involved. One is able to acknowledge the possibility of other stories, other options, and to take the time to communicate them.
As a chemical landscape predicts but cannot explain development, and as development predicts but cannot explain culture, so culture predicts, but cannot explain the real presence at one and the same time of conflicting stories about the same cultural states. Stories where time's arrow is reversed at the same time as it travels forward; where not just photons but bodies and whole worlds exist in two or more places at once. Stories where one is applauded for seducing the villain, who gives birth to a mantlepiece and ends twice at once, and is still in the middle of their story, and already at its start, when one pops one's clogs. Perhaps these do not exist, or perhaps they anticipate a God's eye view of the cosmos, one that only in moments out of time and space and worldview we can share. Ecstatic moments. Dreams.
If we have home, or origin of some kind, in such a perspective, then our only guarantee that it is a kind space is the nature of God. I'm not even sure conventional definitions of Love, or life after death, do it full justice. Such a home is known in one's innermost being, maybe.
Friday, 20 March 2009
876 - Reprioritising
Funny how a post clears the air. This one has cleared up a lot for me. The point of stories being to give relevance to life, which is in turn to be lived as a story of stories.
My story recently has been one of radically questioning why society looks the way it does, and how alternative models may be generated, not because this society is necessarily wrong in itself, but because it's always good to have something in your back pocket for the (it'll never happen) (not if I can help it) Apocalypse.
Time perhaps, having made that clear, to put away some of the books, and get a little bit less radical, a little bit more integrated.
So, from Monday, I want to dip my toe back into the rat-race. Or at least, pro-actively articulate and get engaged with it. Face-to-face articulate, not blogosphere articulate. Proportionately less time poring over books in Starbucks, and more ... anything else, really - purely, you understand, in the interests of a good story. Money being a work battery, and all that: I could even do a bit of work for money...
Reckon I can? Honestly, I'm not sure, actually. Employment has given me a headache in the past (literally - stress): I like being my own boss. When I'm my own boss, I don't get headaches. So at this stage I'm reprioritising from, without actually knowing what I'm reprioritising to.
Which is perhaps to say, the whole of this post has been phoney. Part of me wants a zappy Goddy thing to take me out of myself and set me down in a body with neurons rewired to be - I don't know - a happy mind-doctor or shop-manager or something. Part of me likes my whole Che Guevara house-husband persona. Part of me would just like to go down to HMV and pick up the first series of Battlestar Gallactica, blow the fact that it costs £50. Part of me says, hey, you know you're a vicar, whether you like it or not, 'cos of that love-blast you got back in 2003 (or was it 1989?). And isn't the world just weird? And isn't that the point of your story?
What's it gonna be?
My story recently has been one of radically questioning why society looks the way it does, and how alternative models may be generated, not because this society is necessarily wrong in itself, but because it's always good to have something in your back pocket for the (it'll never happen) (not if I can help it) Apocalypse.
Time perhaps, having made that clear, to put away some of the books, and get a little bit less radical, a little bit more integrated.
So, from Monday, I want to dip my toe back into the rat-race. Or at least, pro-actively articulate and get engaged with it. Face-to-face articulate, not blogosphere articulate. Proportionately less time poring over books in Starbucks, and more ... anything else, really - purely, you understand, in the interests of a good story. Money being a work battery, and all that: I could even do a bit of work for money...
Reckon I can? Honestly, I'm not sure, actually. Employment has given me a headache in the past (literally - stress): I like being my own boss. When I'm my own boss, I don't get headaches. So at this stage I'm reprioritising from, without actually knowing what I'm reprioritising to.
Which is perhaps to say, the whole of this post has been phoney. Part of me wants a zappy Goddy thing to take me out of myself and set me down in a body with neurons rewired to be - I don't know - a happy mind-doctor or shop-manager or something. Part of me likes my whole Che Guevara house-husband persona. Part of me would just like to go down to HMV and pick up the first series of Battlestar Gallactica, blow the fact that it costs £50. Part of me says, hey, you know you're a vicar, whether you like it or not, 'cos of that love-blast you got back in 2003 (or was it 1989?). And isn't the world just weird? And isn't that the point of your story?
What's it gonna be?
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
888 - Identity is Story
In the wee small hours this sounds profound, so publish and be damned.
The civil right of identity is the right to tell stories.
Tell your life story: it is who you are.
Tell a story about your life;
Tell it how you please;
Tell it in whatever manner you please:
In words,
In pictures,
By your actions,
With explanation,
Embellished,
Plain-spoken,
Fictitious,
Silently,
In contradiction,
Many times and
Ways over.
Tell it quietly, among friends;
Tell it with friends -
Tell stories together:
About your kin,
About your kind,
About humankind,
Kindly.
Tell stories about this world;
Tell them about this world and its kind,
And others not of its kind -
Forge your identity:
Only the unkind could steal it.
My stories are not to be stolen,
Made slave, nor slave master:
I am not to be made victim by stories you tell of me.
I am the master of my own tales -
Director, captain,
Beloved ravisher.
Ariadne taught me to weave:
Like you, I weave well.
The grandest narrative is
No narrative at all
Unless we wish it to be -
As the man once said:
"I am forsaken!" - till he
Claimed his stories back,
Or forged new ones,
To tell on the road to his companions,
Or so they told us -
More than could fill all the books of this world.
Our right of identity is the right to tell stories.
Under threat we will see our stories stolen away.
I will not let my story be stolen.
I will tell my stories
Even if to myself.
The civil right of identity is the right to tell stories.
Tell your life story: it is who you are.
Tell a story about your life;
Tell it how you please;
Tell it in whatever manner you please:
In words,
In pictures,
By your actions,
With explanation,
Embellished,
Plain-spoken,
Fictitious,
Silently,
In contradiction,
Many times and
Ways over.
Tell it quietly, among friends;
Tell it with friends -
Tell stories together:
About your kin,
About your kind,
About humankind,
Kindly.
Tell stories about this world;
Tell them about this world and its kind,
And others not of its kind -
Forge your identity:
Only the unkind could steal it.
My stories are not to be stolen,
Made slave, nor slave master:
I am not to be made victim by stories you tell of me.
I am the master of my own tales -
Director, captain,
Beloved ravisher.
Ariadne taught me to weave:
Like you, I weave well.
The grandest narrative is
No narrative at all
Unless we wish it to be -
As the man once said:
"I am forsaken!" - till he
Claimed his stories back,
Or forged new ones,
To tell on the road to his companions,
Or so they told us -
More than could fill all the books of this world.
Our right of identity is the right to tell stories.
Under threat we will see our stories stolen away.
I will not let my story be stolen.
I will tell my stories
Even if to myself.
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
891 - The Civil Rights of Identity
Following this post I've grown more and more certain that there is a fundamental rights issue, concerning identity, related to our freedom, as human beings, to choose to define ourselves by labels, or not.
The civil rights movement has in the past fought for equal rights regardless of sex, race or gender. Totemic battles over voting rights for women, the abolition of slavery, and Gay Pride movements, have come to symbolise wider struggles, some of which have lasted centuries. There is now, in Britain as elsewhere, a battle over our future obligation to carry ID cards. This battle could be a lone stand, or it could be totemic of a wider struggle. I suspect the latter is true.
The following is a quote from Susan Greenfield's book on i.d., about the world she anticipates is breaking upon us as a result of information technology. Note the tone:
The book concerns me, because, as Greenfield herself explains early on in her book (p.ix), as an eminent scientist and a Baroness, she has contributed to debates in the House of Lords with, presumably, the aim of informing Britain's future cultural and legislative direction. And it is worth pausing to consider who would be impacted by any attempt to redress widespread neurologically-related irresponsibility. Over the course of the book, drawing on medical studies, Greenfield provides a list of people prone to recklessness:
1. Children;
2. Schizophrenics;
3. The neurologically damaged;
4. Those in romantic love;
5. Others prone to psychotic episodes;
6. The sleep deprived;
7. The obese;
8. Takers of drugs, such as cannabis, that promote, or replicate dopamine in the brain;
9. Sportsmen and women and others who engage in physical activities that alter temporarily the mind;
10. Future-generation users of screen-based technology;
11. Those genetically predisposed to take risks.
Because I recognise myself in the description above, and also its similarity to the description of hunter-gatherers provided by Hugh Brody in his book, The Other Side of Eden, where the lack of checks and balances recognised by the Western World derives from a fundamentally different set of cultural experiences, to this list I would add:
12. Those who have achieved a degree of maturity, having processed conflicting fundamentalist worldviews,
and
13. Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers and those who endeavour to live inspired by them.
That's a fair few people. And although Greenfield does not treat them all equally, she does define them against a perceived adult norm.
The fundamental problem to me is that Greenfield's 'adult norm', full of checks and balances, and shaped by the twentieth century schooling system, not to mention four-hundred plus years of the printed word, sounds simply like the Modernist worldview. And her list of the reckless (with the inclusion of my two additions) is a combination of everything the Modernist worldview disproves of, from infantilism, to addiction, to wild romanticism, to mental disturbance, to the uncivilised, to the hedonistic, to the not strictly scientifically positivist, to the postmodern and geeky.
We live in a world of tribes, and we currently deal with those we take issue with by labelling them. It's okay, they're not our tribe, so we know they are not like us. We're happy, should someone choose a label for themselves, to consort with them, our own sense of identity intact. We're even happy if others define themselves against the label we give them, like Jimmy Dean, or Doctor Horrible. That's the modernist way.
But I meet, and hear of, growing numbers of people who are not happy to be labelled. There is the teenager on the metro who is uncomfortable with being an '-ist'. I understand this is a common attitude amongst Generation Y. There are Christians in the evangelical tradition who reject the 'Christian' label - I suspect this is true across many religions. There are movements in psychology away from the labelling of syndromes. In an age where work is transitory, growing numbers of people distrust the badge of their profession as the mark of who they are. I know of people who do not like to be defined by their marital status, as most forms in Britain currently require.
I'm not calling for the abandoning of tribes, of identities, of labels. I am calling for the freedom to choose whether to be labelled or not. We were not born pre-packaged. We should be free to choose how we define ourselves, or even if we define ourselves at all.
If this freedom is not fought for, or retained, we set up a world of categories and divisions. Systems like i.d cards will formalise them and restrict... what? Hunter-gatherers may give us a clue. These peoples live in a data-rich, unexplained world - the one Greenfield fears, in the form of new technologies, is coming for us all. And guess what? They evolved - we evolved, because we are they - precisely to be able to do so.
Labels direct our freedom to respond to life, in tune with or counterpoint to it, whatever it throws at us, be it uncommon experiences, the ability to participate in mass movements, the chance to risk all for a dream, or for someone we love, the mass-democratisation and new experiences embodied in screen technologies. But we need, surely, to be free to leave those labels behind, take time out, perhaps permanent time out, to be fully human, because they can also restrict our freedom, or exclude us.
If I am right, a struggle is already in progress between those who seek to identify themselves and others, and those who retain the right to remain uncategorised, and not to categorise others. In fullness of time this civil rights movement will be won by those who admit a way for the two worldviews to live together permanently and peacefully, or for one or the other to fade away naturally. This is about fundamentalists and liberals, in all spheres, and a world where both can co-exist.
May I suggest that one way to circumvent the logic traps of modernist civil rights thinking, which might risk labelling one or other side as 'good' or 'bad', would be to speak in stories, and dreams, like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela?
The civil rights movement has in the past fought for equal rights regardless of sex, race or gender. Totemic battles over voting rights for women, the abolition of slavery, and Gay Pride movements, have come to symbolise wider struggles, some of which have lasted centuries. There is now, in Britain as elsewhere, a battle over our future obligation to carry ID cards. This battle could be a lone stand, or it could be totemic of a wider struggle. I suspect the latter is true.
The following is a quote from Susan Greenfield's book on i.d., about the world she anticipates is breaking upon us as a result of information technology. Note the tone:
Perhaps future generations will live instead, in the fast-paced, immediate world of screen experience: a world arguably trapped in early childhood, where the infant doesn't yet think metaphorically. It's a world, remember, that lacks the checks and balances of the adult mind: reality can blur easily with fantasy, since there is no read-off against past conversations, thoughts or events. It is consequently a frightening, exciting, unpredictable and above all emotionally-charged world - a world of immediate response rather than one of reflective initiative.(p.180)The implication of this passage, as I read it, is that although sensual, deliberately choosing such a life would be irresponsible, unreflective. The word Susan Greenfield uses later is reckless.
The book concerns me, because, as Greenfield herself explains early on in her book (p.ix), as an eminent scientist and a Baroness, she has contributed to debates in the House of Lords with, presumably, the aim of informing Britain's future cultural and legislative direction. And it is worth pausing to consider who would be impacted by any attempt to redress widespread neurologically-related irresponsibility. Over the course of the book, drawing on medical studies, Greenfield provides a list of people prone to recklessness:
1. Children;
2. Schizophrenics;
3. The neurologically damaged;
4. Those in romantic love;
5. Others prone to psychotic episodes;
6. The sleep deprived;
7. The obese;
8. Takers of drugs, such as cannabis, that promote, or replicate dopamine in the brain;
9. Sportsmen and women and others who engage in physical activities that alter temporarily the mind;
10. Future-generation users of screen-based technology;
11. Those genetically predisposed to take risks.
Because I recognise myself in the description above, and also its similarity to the description of hunter-gatherers provided by Hugh Brody in his book, The Other Side of Eden, where the lack of checks and balances recognised by the Western World derives from a fundamentally different set of cultural experiences, to this list I would add:
12. Those who have achieved a degree of maturity, having processed conflicting fundamentalist worldviews,
and
13. Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers and those who endeavour to live inspired by them.
That's a fair few people. And although Greenfield does not treat them all equally, she does define them against a perceived adult norm.
The fundamental problem to me is that Greenfield's 'adult norm', full of checks and balances, and shaped by the twentieth century schooling system, not to mention four-hundred plus years of the printed word, sounds simply like the Modernist worldview. And her list of the reckless (with the inclusion of my two additions) is a combination of everything the Modernist worldview disproves of, from infantilism, to addiction, to wild romanticism, to mental disturbance, to the uncivilised, to the hedonistic, to the not strictly scientifically positivist, to the postmodern and geeky.
We live in a world of tribes, and we currently deal with those we take issue with by labelling them. It's okay, they're not our tribe, so we know they are not like us. We're happy, should someone choose a label for themselves, to consort with them, our own sense of identity intact. We're even happy if others define themselves against the label we give them, like Jimmy Dean, or Doctor Horrible. That's the modernist way.
But I meet, and hear of, growing numbers of people who are not happy to be labelled. There is the teenager on the metro who is uncomfortable with being an '-ist'. I understand this is a common attitude amongst Generation Y. There are Christians in the evangelical tradition who reject the 'Christian' label - I suspect this is true across many religions. There are movements in psychology away from the labelling of syndromes. In an age where work is transitory, growing numbers of people distrust the badge of their profession as the mark of who they are. I know of people who do not like to be defined by their marital status, as most forms in Britain currently require.
I'm not calling for the abandoning of tribes, of identities, of labels. I am calling for the freedom to choose whether to be labelled or not. We were not born pre-packaged. We should be free to choose how we define ourselves, or even if we define ourselves at all.
If this freedom is not fought for, or retained, we set up a world of categories and divisions. Systems like i.d cards will formalise them and restrict... what? Hunter-gatherers may give us a clue. These peoples live in a data-rich, unexplained world - the one Greenfield fears, in the form of new technologies, is coming for us all. And guess what? They evolved - we evolved, because we are they - precisely to be able to do so.
Labels direct our freedom to respond to life, in tune with or counterpoint to it, whatever it throws at us, be it uncommon experiences, the ability to participate in mass movements, the chance to risk all for a dream, or for someone we love, the mass-democratisation and new experiences embodied in screen technologies. But we need, surely, to be free to leave those labels behind, take time out, perhaps permanent time out, to be fully human, because they can also restrict our freedom, or exclude us.
If I am right, a struggle is already in progress between those who seek to identify themselves and others, and those who retain the right to remain uncategorised, and not to categorise others. In fullness of time this civil rights movement will be won by those who admit a way for the two worldviews to live together permanently and peacefully, or for one or the other to fade away naturally. This is about fundamentalists and liberals, in all spheres, and a world where both can co-exist.
May I suggest that one way to circumvent the logic traps of modernist civil rights thinking, which might risk labelling one or other side as 'good' or 'bad', would be to speak in stories, and dreams, like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela?
Saturday, 28 February 2009
893 - Guy Aged Fifteen On The Metro...
...was talking to a couple of friends, and said, "I'm an 'ist'... everything I do is an 'ist'." Then he paused and had a thought, which he sounded out with the others. "That makes me a rapist!" he said.
At the time, I was reading Susan Greenfield's book, i.d. - about the way (possibly) that our sense of identity is changing in the 21st Century. A very pertinent, but very highly-strung book, I'm thinking.
Here's what I had just read:
I don't want to comment on the validity or otherwise of Greenfield's argument, not yet. I've not read it in full, and the book is controversial. My gut feeling is that any theory which starts by isolating an issue, like identity, from its context, such as a developing cultural trajectory, runs the risk of introducing dichotomies into the resulting analysis, and rendering the organic inorganic (not in itself a particularly original thought!).
But here are some commonalities between the event and the text, as they strike me.
The teenager was concerned with his identity. He felt trapped by his attempts to define himself. Everything had already a word to define it. However he chose to act, it would be fitting a pre-existing expectation pressed upon him by the world around him. He did not want this, which is why, exasperated, he sought the humour in it.
Greenfield has proposed two poles by which identity is defined. The first is individualist, modern, Western. The second is communal, traditional, fundamentalist. The poles are such that what is 'sinful' to one is the acme of identity to the other. She is proposing a moment in Western culture whereby the individualist pole is no longer obviously in the ascendent. The propensity to polarise is itself part of the Modernist identity - part of the 'ist'-ifying identity of which the teenager is making fun.
The teenager jokes that he is even a rapist. He is obviously not a rapist, but again, the joke reveals an insecurity. Listening in, it occurs to me that the way he declares this deduction, twice over, and to an awkward response from his girl friends, which he doesn't handle brilliantly (and why, at fifteen, should he?), suggests he is not happy with pressures either to over- or under- sexualise his identity. Also that there may indeed be something in the way Greenfield, avoiding theology, nevertheless links identity formation to concepts of sin and the structure of societies.
It occurred to me, because I share the guy's awkwardness with labels, that when I reject a label violently, I am being 'ist'-ist. Because of this:
The tail end of Modernism, which, from one perspective, is about atomising the world into its barest components, culturally as well as scientifically, has been left holding a mass of isolated data-units. Every data-unit, or word, has become an 'ist', simple because we've analysed the big 'ists', like Fascism or Marxism, into their smallest constituent parts. No wonder we have become so sensitized to the use of language.
And therefore, perhaps political correctness can be redefined as an aversion to some of these mini-'ists'? As sexism is the arbitrary favouring of one sex over another, political correctness (and its reactive opposite) is the favouring of one arbitrary set of words over another. The mindset sets words against each other. Our culture has become labelist, verb-ist, identity-ist.
The teenage guy gets this. As in the sixties the great civil rights movement was against racism, perhaps what we are seeing now is the birth of a civil rights movement against ist-ism. Against any attempt to pit identity against identity. Or the labelled against the unlabelled. And because it deals with labels, it embraces every single civil-rights movement that has gone before.
I think this is more important, the more I think about it. I think this is very important indeed. I feel as I close this post that I am onto something big.
At the time, I was reading Susan Greenfield's book, i.d. - about the way (possibly) that our sense of identity is changing in the 21st Century. A very pertinent, but very highly-strung book, I'm thinking.
Here's what I had just read:
"If the Seven Deadly Sins are the behaviours through which we each establish our unique identity, it follows that in contemporary societies, where the individual identity is encouraged, the significance and dread of sin are greatly diminished. Conversely, such behaviours would have been, and sometimes still are, perceived as undesirable, 'deadly' indeed, in societies where, and at times when, the significance and nurturing of individual identity were, or are, not paramount, as in fundamentalist societies." (p.153)
I don't want to comment on the validity or otherwise of Greenfield's argument, not yet. I've not read it in full, and the book is controversial. My gut feeling is that any theory which starts by isolating an issue, like identity, from its context, such as a developing cultural trajectory, runs the risk of introducing dichotomies into the resulting analysis, and rendering the organic inorganic (not in itself a particularly original thought!).
But here are some commonalities between the event and the text, as they strike me.
The teenager was concerned with his identity. He felt trapped by his attempts to define himself. Everything had already a word to define it. However he chose to act, it would be fitting a pre-existing expectation pressed upon him by the world around him. He did not want this, which is why, exasperated, he sought the humour in it.
Greenfield has proposed two poles by which identity is defined. The first is individualist, modern, Western. The second is communal, traditional, fundamentalist. The poles are such that what is 'sinful' to one is the acme of identity to the other. She is proposing a moment in Western culture whereby the individualist pole is no longer obviously in the ascendent. The propensity to polarise is itself part of the Modernist identity - part of the 'ist'-ifying identity of which the teenager is making fun.
The teenager jokes that he is even a rapist. He is obviously not a rapist, but again, the joke reveals an insecurity. Listening in, it occurs to me that the way he declares this deduction, twice over, and to an awkward response from his girl friends, which he doesn't handle brilliantly (and why, at fifteen, should he?), suggests he is not happy with pressures either to over- or under- sexualise his identity. Also that there may indeed be something in the way Greenfield, avoiding theology, nevertheless links identity formation to concepts of sin and the structure of societies.
It occurred to me, because I share the guy's awkwardness with labels, that when I reject a label violently, I am being 'ist'-ist. Because of this:
The tail end of Modernism, which, from one perspective, is about atomising the world into its barest components, culturally as well as scientifically, has been left holding a mass of isolated data-units. Every data-unit, or word, has become an 'ist', simple because we've analysed the big 'ists', like Fascism or Marxism, into their smallest constituent parts. No wonder we have become so sensitized to the use of language.
And therefore, perhaps political correctness can be redefined as an aversion to some of these mini-'ists'? As sexism is the arbitrary favouring of one sex over another, political correctness (and its reactive opposite) is the favouring of one arbitrary set of words over another. The mindset sets words against each other. Our culture has become labelist, verb-ist, identity-ist.
The teenage guy gets this. As in the sixties the great civil rights movement was against racism, perhaps what we are seeing now is the birth of a civil rights movement against ist-ism. Against any attempt to pit identity against identity. Or the labelled against the unlabelled. And because it deals with labels, it embraces every single civil-rights movement that has gone before.
I think this is more important, the more I think about it. I think this is very important indeed. I feel as I close this post that I am onto something big.
895 - Simon Beaufoy in the North East
Simon Beaufoy spoke, at the Darlington Arts Centre last night, as a key-note speaker at The Story Engine - the Third Northern Screenwriters' Conference. That's Hollywood to the North East of England in five days. He's a down-to-earth, Oscar-hugging, boat-dwelling, beer-swilling, gent!
His interview, by conference organiser Ian Fenton, concentrated on four films he'd written across his career, culminating with Slumdog Millionaire, launched with The Full Monty, and bridging Among Giants and This Is Not A Love Song.
After revealing that his recent Golden Globe award sits in a thousand pieces at home (though you'd have to chase him for the full story), he proceeded with a detailed strip-down of the processes which brought these movies to the screen. It was an incredibly insightful evening: good psychological nuts-and-bolts, writer's life stuff, with plenty of input from delegates.
I was at the conference to learn tricks about story-making from some of the best and most innovative story-tellers you'll find. These are some of the insights I'll take from Simon:
On adapting Slumdog: that adaption should strip a book to its soul - what is built up from then on, what is woven back onto the piece in its movie form, comes second. Simon is up-front about this when speaking to authors. He travelled to the Mumbai slums to find the soul of the book in the people he interviewed there. He used a trick from his days as a documentary film-maker: to find the heart of a place, ask its people what they would film if they held the camera. Slumdog became a movie about romance, about gangsters, about the naive and glorious generosity he found amidst the violence of Mumbai.
On place: that place is a character and films are about character. So place is considered from the word go in the development of his scripts. In Slumdog it was Mumbai; in The Full Monty it was Sheffield. The Full Monty is as much a hymn to Sheffield as a depiction of male disenfranchisement and the humour that arises from it. The movie is bleak, under all the great gags.
A great question from one of the delegates on Monty: now that we are back in a recession, does this change the way we view the film, no longer nostalgic for the characters, but empathetic? For Simon, you could tell, this question was the reward of the evening, something new for him to ponder after the event, and his answer illuminated because it was about the transparency with which he let us see his pleasure at the questioner's acute insight. You knew that the film had always been about the solidarity he felt with the men he was depicting, their resilience, their pain and fortitude. Political, he said, with a small 'p', meaning a very big 'P' indeed.
Finally, on This Is Not A Love Song, a guerilla piece of film-making that was the first to be released on the web simultaneously with its cinema showing. It lost money, which stymied the production of similar low-budget, on-line movie releases for a media generation, because it became the target of a hacker protesting the need to pay a subscription fee to view the content. It seemed, from the clip shown, to be a raw and very, very exciting piece. The crew behind the film shot, edited and released it in (do I remember?) sixteen weeks, holding down two jobs each (the writer was also the caterer), on digital cameras, and at a minimum wage.
But there was the film, and after a couple of days where the sheer exuberant potential of on-line films and an accompanying 'just do it' mentality had been showcased, here we could see someone at the top of his game, forced in 2002 to push the medium as far as he could, first to protest against the lumbering machinery that was holding his creativity in abeyance, and second, to do something new, truly democratic, hand-held, bright.
There were more insights, of course, but these I found particularly relevant, and directly applicable to my own 'just do it' vision for storymaking, real-life, real-time, without cameras or the crossing of any cultural threshhold, on the streets and in the houses of Whitley.
His interview, by conference organiser Ian Fenton, concentrated on four films he'd written across his career, culminating with Slumdog Millionaire, launched with The Full Monty, and bridging Among Giants and This Is Not A Love Song.
After revealing that his recent Golden Globe award sits in a thousand pieces at home (though you'd have to chase him for the full story), he proceeded with a detailed strip-down of the processes which brought these movies to the screen. It was an incredibly insightful evening: good psychological nuts-and-bolts, writer's life stuff, with plenty of input from delegates.
I was at the conference to learn tricks about story-making from some of the best and most innovative story-tellers you'll find. These are some of the insights I'll take from Simon:
On adapting Slumdog: that adaption should strip a book to its soul - what is built up from then on, what is woven back onto the piece in its movie form, comes second. Simon is up-front about this when speaking to authors. He travelled to the Mumbai slums to find the soul of the book in the people he interviewed there. He used a trick from his days as a documentary film-maker: to find the heart of a place, ask its people what they would film if they held the camera. Slumdog became a movie about romance, about gangsters, about the naive and glorious generosity he found amidst the violence of Mumbai.
On place: that place is a character and films are about character. So place is considered from the word go in the development of his scripts. In Slumdog it was Mumbai; in The Full Monty it was Sheffield. The Full Monty is as much a hymn to Sheffield as a depiction of male disenfranchisement and the humour that arises from it. The movie is bleak, under all the great gags.
A great question from one of the delegates on Monty: now that we are back in a recession, does this change the way we view the film, no longer nostalgic for the characters, but empathetic? For Simon, you could tell, this question was the reward of the evening, something new for him to ponder after the event, and his answer illuminated because it was about the transparency with which he let us see his pleasure at the questioner's acute insight. You knew that the film had always been about the solidarity he felt with the men he was depicting, their resilience, their pain and fortitude. Political, he said, with a small 'p', meaning a very big 'P' indeed.
Finally, on This Is Not A Love Song, a guerilla piece of film-making that was the first to be released on the web simultaneously with its cinema showing. It lost money, which stymied the production of similar low-budget, on-line movie releases for a media generation, because it became the target of a hacker protesting the need to pay a subscription fee to view the content. It seemed, from the clip shown, to be a raw and very, very exciting piece. The crew behind the film shot, edited and released it in (do I remember?) sixteen weeks, holding down two jobs each (the writer was also the caterer), on digital cameras, and at a minimum wage.
But there was the film, and after a couple of days where the sheer exuberant potential of on-line films and an accompanying 'just do it' mentality had been showcased, here we could see someone at the top of his game, forced in 2002 to push the medium as far as he could, first to protest against the lumbering machinery that was holding his creativity in abeyance, and second, to do something new, truly democratic, hand-held, bright.
There were more insights, of course, but these I found particularly relevant, and directly applicable to my own 'just do it' vision for storymaking, real-life, real-time, without cameras or the crossing of any cultural threshhold, on the streets and in the houses of Whitley.
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
896 - Story Engine
Recovering after the high that was the first day of this.
Great to hear from commissioning editors and writers about the very real changes that the internet is bringing for media industries new and old.
Even more exciting to sense that I'm riding the same wave, with the big idea that I am having - somebody called me a pioneer today. I feel like a pioneer, and that can be bloody scary (and lonely). But how could I have it any other way? This ride is a thrill and a passion.
Very vague (sorry). Nouvelle Vague (double sorry - bad pun for film buffs). Will blog more about my big idea and the Story Engine Script-Writing Conference at the weekend.
Great to hear from commissioning editors and writers about the very real changes that the internet is bringing for media industries new and old.
Even more exciting to sense that I'm riding the same wave, with the big idea that I am having - somebody called me a pioneer today. I feel like a pioneer, and that can be bloody scary (and lonely). But how could I have it any other way? This ride is a thrill and a passion.
Very vague (sorry). Nouvelle Vague (double sorry - bad pun for film buffs). Will blog more about my big idea and the Story Engine Script-Writing Conference at the weekend.
Monday, 23 February 2009
900 - In Which I Go All Mulder (3)
Some odd events to do with prayer and intention.
Starting with a qualified apology about the religious language, in case it sounds freaky, or presumptious, or out of place. In what I'm about to write, I'm not out to persuade, and the language I used at the time I'm repeating here because I used it at the time. I talk about prayer, and especially the verbal kind (evangelical Christians call it 'intercession'), but aspects of it'll sound familiar, perhaps, to people from other spiritual traditions, like Wicca and Buddhism, where maybe it is referred to as something else.
And there may be a Black Swan explanation of it all which does not require anything other than coincidence and the laws of nature. But I'm not here trying to unpick subjective elements from objective ones. This is partly because the very reason I've experienced some of the things I have is because I motivated myself to go about engaging with them the way I did, a phenomenon that cannot help but be both subjective and objective. More subtle analysis can (and will!) follow in later posts.
Here's what happened, anyway.
After the shower experience that had pitched me into questioning reality, and, perhaps because it was to hand, after I had immersed myself into the evangelical Christianity that offered to mediate it for me, I realised pretty soon that this was a hook, line and sinker gig.
I began to seek out books and experiences which would demonstrate to me, to others, to the God that I had committed myself to, that I was in it for the long haul. I found myself exploring prayer, which I have come to understand as engagement at its deepest level with the reality we can reach out and touch, in such a way, perhaps, that that reality is affected by our actions.
Four uncanny events, on each occasion I ventured to the edge of my inhibitions, encouraged me to believe this.
First, at Uni, emboldened (though not beyond the point of uncertainty) by stories of men and women asking God to intervene in the world, on my own one night I prayed the first thing that came into my head. A kind of bargain - give me something to pray and I will say it (give me something important to pray, God, and you'll get what you want). What I would get was the validation that my prayer was worthwhile. The risk, of course, was that I would say something stupid. Tentatively, with as much conviction as I could muster, I opened my mouth, and without preparing the words, found myself saying 'I pray for the victims of the train crash'. Single sentence. I rolled over and went to sleep. I woke up to catch late night radio news of a train crash in Europe. Only two dead, though many injured.
Then, as a passenger on a car journey past the Chichester Sainsbury's in 1993, I sensed some kind of weight, a gathering of - what? intention? in the atmosphere around the place. Although I understood I could articulate a prayer, nervously I didn't. I'd been shocked by my experience of the train-crash prayer. Within a day or two, though without injury to anyone, the supermarket had burned down.
Third, in Bognor, summer 1994, I bought tickets to travel for a fortnight's break from L'Arche. By this stage, much of my interior life was caught up in a process of negotiation and imaginative acts of life rehearsal, in the light of theology and the God that that theology argued for. On the way to Bognor station I felt the same sense of weight. Whatever it was, it led me to break my revery and, choosing words a bit more carefully than before, to pray (and forgive the stiltedness!) "Lord, if the IRA are to bomb this town, at least let it be for a good purpose." Whilst I was away, this happened. It was the last IRA bomb found in mainland Britain. The shock of an IRA blast in a small seaside town, in which, amazingly, no-one was hurt, and the resilient response of the town, led directly to the IRA abandoning these tactics.
How to make sense of this? How to make sense of this when you are, of your own volition, within a church community that encourages the belief in effective prayer? When these events, though rare, maintain an internal consistency? When you are aware that any attempt to explore these things in public debate risks notoriety and misconstrual? Was the prayer effective? Who knows, objectively? What sense do you make of the not knowing?
When I left Church, in those magical weeks of grief, midsummer 1995, I was in great panic that the devil had some grip on me. A door-slam at midnight and I'd be sure I was being watched. It was as if I was operating at an acute spiritual pitch, and conspiracies that others had told me of in my church years rang horribly true. Though on the edge of madness, I was steered from it by the visit of an local crisis team, who interviewed me, and assured me that, though I wasn't insane, carry on as I was doing and I might end up so. I'd scared myself towards the release of disassociation, but the crisis team scared me back, so that I was like a rabbit zig-zagging.
On the last occasion I want to speak of, I was sat in one half of the kitchen, my mother preparing lunch at the other end. I was half aware of the door of the washing machine, open and empty. If I was damned, there'd be nothing to stop the world unravelling around me. I could be pulled every which way. I started to sense a build-up of intention, which focussed itself, as I focussed in, on the washing machine door. The windows were closed. The air was stuffy, absolutely still, and my senses were alert. If I was a puppet, the devil, anything, could have me nudge that door by thinking of it, and it would move. And you've guessed it: as I engaged, gave myself up to, the world around me and the door, the door moved. No more than a millimetre. Scalded again, I leapt away.
I list these experiences, and these, and these, to make the point that there is a state of being where positivism - an understandable trust in the material world - becomes uncertain. I don't want to go further than that, not here, and probably - given the choices I've made, and the fulfilment I find precisely in the openness of uncertainty - not ever. Unlike Fox Mulder, I'm no longer in pursuit of a truth that is out there. Nor do I believe the truth is purely subjective, within. I won't cart my own load of dogma onto your patch, and just dump it there.
Though I do want to tease at these events in future posts, and one or two others like them, and especially to begin to ask whether they can be shared in any meaningful way, as a church or coven might, or a covey of storytellers. The possibility is there. That's all, right now, I believe I'm confident to say.
Starting with a qualified apology about the religious language, in case it sounds freaky, or presumptious, or out of place. In what I'm about to write, I'm not out to persuade, and the language I used at the time I'm repeating here because I used it at the time. I talk about prayer, and especially the verbal kind (evangelical Christians call it 'intercession'), but aspects of it'll sound familiar, perhaps, to people from other spiritual traditions, like Wicca and Buddhism, where maybe it is referred to as something else.
And there may be a Black Swan explanation of it all which does not require anything other than coincidence and the laws of nature. But I'm not here trying to unpick subjective elements from objective ones. This is partly because the very reason I've experienced some of the things I have is because I motivated myself to go about engaging with them the way I did, a phenomenon that cannot help but be both subjective and objective. More subtle analysis can (and will!) follow in later posts.
Here's what happened, anyway.
After the shower experience that had pitched me into questioning reality, and, perhaps because it was to hand, after I had immersed myself into the evangelical Christianity that offered to mediate it for me, I realised pretty soon that this was a hook, line and sinker gig.
I began to seek out books and experiences which would demonstrate to me, to others, to the God that I had committed myself to, that I was in it for the long haul. I found myself exploring prayer, which I have come to understand as engagement at its deepest level with the reality we can reach out and touch, in such a way, perhaps, that that reality is affected by our actions.
Four uncanny events, on each occasion I ventured to the edge of my inhibitions, encouraged me to believe this.
First, at Uni, emboldened (though not beyond the point of uncertainty) by stories of men and women asking God to intervene in the world, on my own one night I prayed the first thing that came into my head. A kind of bargain - give me something to pray and I will say it (give me something important to pray, God, and you'll get what you want). What I would get was the validation that my prayer was worthwhile. The risk, of course, was that I would say something stupid. Tentatively, with as much conviction as I could muster, I opened my mouth, and without preparing the words, found myself saying 'I pray for the victims of the train crash'. Single sentence. I rolled over and went to sleep. I woke up to catch late night radio news of a train crash in Europe. Only two dead, though many injured.
Then, as a passenger on a car journey past the Chichester Sainsbury's in 1993, I sensed some kind of weight, a gathering of - what? intention? in the atmosphere around the place. Although I understood I could articulate a prayer, nervously I didn't. I'd been shocked by my experience of the train-crash prayer. Within a day or two, though without injury to anyone, the supermarket had burned down.
Third, in Bognor, summer 1994, I bought tickets to travel for a fortnight's break from L'Arche. By this stage, much of my interior life was caught up in a process of negotiation and imaginative acts of life rehearsal, in the light of theology and the God that that theology argued for. On the way to Bognor station I felt the same sense of weight. Whatever it was, it led me to break my revery and, choosing words a bit more carefully than before, to pray (and forgive the stiltedness!) "Lord, if the IRA are to bomb this town, at least let it be for a good purpose." Whilst I was away, this happened. It was the last IRA bomb found in mainland Britain. The shock of an IRA blast in a small seaside town, in which, amazingly, no-one was hurt, and the resilient response of the town, led directly to the IRA abandoning these tactics.
How to make sense of this? How to make sense of this when you are, of your own volition, within a church community that encourages the belief in effective prayer? When these events, though rare, maintain an internal consistency? When you are aware that any attempt to explore these things in public debate risks notoriety and misconstrual? Was the prayer effective? Who knows, objectively? What sense do you make of the not knowing?
When I left Church, in those magical weeks of grief, midsummer 1995, I was in great panic that the devil had some grip on me. A door-slam at midnight and I'd be sure I was being watched. It was as if I was operating at an acute spiritual pitch, and conspiracies that others had told me of in my church years rang horribly true. Though on the edge of madness, I was steered from it by the visit of an local crisis team, who interviewed me, and assured me that, though I wasn't insane, carry on as I was doing and I might end up so. I'd scared myself towards the release of disassociation, but the crisis team scared me back, so that I was like a rabbit zig-zagging.
On the last occasion I want to speak of, I was sat in one half of the kitchen, my mother preparing lunch at the other end. I was half aware of the door of the washing machine, open and empty. If I was damned, there'd be nothing to stop the world unravelling around me. I could be pulled every which way. I started to sense a build-up of intention, which focussed itself, as I focussed in, on the washing machine door. The windows were closed. The air was stuffy, absolutely still, and my senses were alert. If I was a puppet, the devil, anything, could have me nudge that door by thinking of it, and it would move. And you've guessed it: as I engaged, gave myself up to, the world around me and the door, the door moved. No more than a millimetre. Scalded again, I leapt away.
I list these experiences, and these, and these, to make the point that there is a state of being where positivism - an understandable trust in the material world - becomes uncertain. I don't want to go further than that, not here, and probably - given the choices I've made, and the fulfilment I find precisely in the openness of uncertainty - not ever. Unlike Fox Mulder, I'm no longer in pursuit of a truth that is out there. Nor do I believe the truth is purely subjective, within. I won't cart my own load of dogma onto your patch, and just dump it there.
Though I do want to tease at these events in future posts, and one or two others like them, and especially to begin to ask whether they can be shared in any meaningful way, as a church or coven might, or a covey of storytellers. The possibility is there. That's all, right now, I believe I'm confident to say.
Friday, 20 February 2009
902 - In Which I Go All Mulder (2)
A handful of dreams, the common denominator being that they seem to involve experiences of the future.
Perhaps these fall into the category of random coincidences. Or perhaps both dreams and subsequent events are part of a single delusion. Maybe there is a conspiracy of friends (or aliens) planting ideas and 'arranging' events - as someone once suggested to me on Richard Dawkin's site - so that I'm caught in a kind of human or suprahuman Truman Show (I desperately hope not! Far too much effort...). Maybe I'm in a two-way (though feels pretty one way) conversation with a God with a penchant for plot-spoilers. Or maybe (seriously) there's something about consciousness and the nature of reality that gives everyone unity across their lifetime - some personal, or even interpersonal, vantage point, accessible in dreams, in which content from past, present and future intermingles.
See what you think.
In the dream from my childhood I return to, I stand this side of a vast river, which itself sweeps across shelves of rock, and is edged on the far side by mile-high cliffs. A strong wind picks up and carries the water flow, driving it faster, if this were possible. There's a sense, which I had the day I dreamt it, that the other side of the river is beyond this life, and for another time.
Then, at university, caught in the expectation that a Christian God brings truth in dreams, I decided, in 1992, to talk about a couple to friends, when they seemed particularly sharp (the dreams, though the friends were, too, of course...) and when I had nothing else to say. The two I spoke about were, first, of a print of a portrait of the queen - this one, I think - in a student common room, with a presentation label beneath it from a particular reverend gentleman; second, of two trees - one a mural dessed in handprint leaves, and the other, small, of fir-cones stacked three or four high, tied with red ribbons, and held stable by an arrangement of wooden struts which criss-crossed one another at the tree's base. The handprints and the ribbons had names written on them.
What was remarkable was that, on each of the two occasions, subsequently, that I spent a night in communities I had never been to before, expressly to determine whether I might join them for a while, I found these objects where I was staying. The portrait was hidden at the back of a wardrobe in the disused former student's room I was given prior to an admissions interview at St John's College, Nottingham, in 1994. When I turned it around, I found on the back a label, with presentation details and the name of the donor written on it. The tree mural and the fir-cones were both used by L'Arche Zacchaeus, a house in Bognor Regis, to symbolize, firstly, all the current and former members of the whole L'Arche Bognor community, and secondly, specifically, those of the members in the house where I was staying, current in the summer of 1992.
Finding these objects, in the context of a religious decision-making process, was, on both occasions, uncanny, but it seemed sensible for me to take them to mean that, whatever decision I made about whether to join the communities or not, I was at least, at point of decision, at the 'right' place. And on both occasions, subsequently, I chose to join the communities.
I didn't always tell my dreams to others. One freaky dream, which unrolled just as I dreamt it, was of a young male stranger, arms swinging, who walked up to me on Barnet High Street, thumped me on my arm, said something like 'You're one of us now', and walked on. This chilled me. I had just walked away from Church. It was 1995. I was in something of a trance-like state as I searched for some sense of normality in the weeks following that decision. Joan Didion, I think, captures the state beautifully in the title of her book, on grieving, 'The Year of Magical Thinking': I was thinking magically. Then this event - dreamt of, again, a long time previously - manifested itself like a moment of real and fearful magic, out of the blue in broad daylight. After years of evangelical thinking, it seemed to me that the young man, in some form of insanity, was mouthpiecing demonic voices to me, pressing the consequences of my decision to walk away from Church upon me. And I kept walking.
And finally an inconsequential dream, of Doctor Who books in a newsagent, glossy covered, in sharp focus. Doctor Who was a childhood hero and I'd collected all the Target books as a boy. This was in the early 90s, after the series had been discontinued, and the stories were no longer fresh in my mind. Again, in the weeks after leaving Church, I came across a run of these books - new ones, freshly covered, written by fans perpetuating the myth, and looking just as I had dreamt them. Kind of embarrassed, I didn't know what to make of such a dream, though perhaps, now that the series is continued again, and my passion for narrative and deliberate myth-making awakened, the story's power to inspire, and the nature of the Doctor as a strange embodiment of kindness and infinite possibility, gives this experience of dream and twinned event greater resonance. Dunno. ;)
Actually there was another dream, I think - though because I spoke to no-one about it I am less sure - more recently, of a trip to a mattress factory and a high building with tropical plants growing up its centre. Of me and E and peacocks amongst the plants. On our trip to Majorca last year we stayed in this building - a hotel - and were invited as part of the holiday package to just such a factory. This time, trusting that there was no right or wrong decision a God might be asking me to make, and not unduly concerned I'd be missing a demonstration of mattress-construction, I decided not to talk E onto the trip. Instead we walked to a high promitory, overlooking the resort, and I read Marina Warner on Signs and Wonders as E slept in my lap.
Perhaps these fall into the category of random coincidences. Or perhaps both dreams and subsequent events are part of a single delusion. Maybe there is a conspiracy of friends (or aliens) planting ideas and 'arranging' events - as someone once suggested to me on Richard Dawkin's site - so that I'm caught in a kind of human or suprahuman Truman Show (I desperately hope not! Far too much effort...). Maybe I'm in a two-way (though feels pretty one way) conversation with a God with a penchant for plot-spoilers. Or maybe (seriously) there's something about consciousness and the nature of reality that gives everyone unity across their lifetime - some personal, or even interpersonal, vantage point, accessible in dreams, in which content from past, present and future intermingles.
See what you think.
In the dream from my childhood I return to, I stand this side of a vast river, which itself sweeps across shelves of rock, and is edged on the far side by mile-high cliffs. A strong wind picks up and carries the water flow, driving it faster, if this were possible. There's a sense, which I had the day I dreamt it, that the other side of the river is beyond this life, and for another time.
Then, at university, caught in the expectation that a Christian God brings truth in dreams, I decided, in 1992, to talk about a couple to friends, when they seemed particularly sharp (the dreams, though the friends were, too, of course...) and when I had nothing else to say. The two I spoke about were, first, of a print of a portrait of the queen - this one, I think - in a student common room, with a presentation label beneath it from a particular reverend gentleman; second, of two trees - one a mural dessed in handprint leaves, and the other, small, of fir-cones stacked three or four high, tied with red ribbons, and held stable by an arrangement of wooden struts which criss-crossed one another at the tree's base. The handprints and the ribbons had names written on them.
What was remarkable was that, on each of the two occasions, subsequently, that I spent a night in communities I had never been to before, expressly to determine whether I might join them for a while, I found these objects where I was staying. The portrait was hidden at the back of a wardrobe in the disused former student's room I was given prior to an admissions interview at St John's College, Nottingham, in 1994. When I turned it around, I found on the back a label, with presentation details and the name of the donor written on it. The tree mural and the fir-cones were both used by L'Arche Zacchaeus, a house in Bognor Regis, to symbolize, firstly, all the current and former members of the whole L'Arche Bognor community, and secondly, specifically, those of the members in the house where I was staying, current in the summer of 1992.
Finding these objects, in the context of a religious decision-making process, was, on both occasions, uncanny, but it seemed sensible for me to take them to mean that, whatever decision I made about whether to join the communities or not, I was at least, at point of decision, at the 'right' place. And on both occasions, subsequently, I chose to join the communities.
I didn't always tell my dreams to others. One freaky dream, which unrolled just as I dreamt it, was of a young male stranger, arms swinging, who walked up to me on Barnet High Street, thumped me on my arm, said something like 'You're one of us now', and walked on. This chilled me. I had just walked away from Church. It was 1995. I was in something of a trance-like state as I searched for some sense of normality in the weeks following that decision. Joan Didion, I think, captures the state beautifully in the title of her book, on grieving, 'The Year of Magical Thinking': I was thinking magically. Then this event - dreamt of, again, a long time previously - manifested itself like a moment of real and fearful magic, out of the blue in broad daylight. After years of evangelical thinking, it seemed to me that the young man, in some form of insanity, was mouthpiecing demonic voices to me, pressing the consequences of my decision to walk away from Church upon me. And I kept walking.
And finally an inconsequential dream, of Doctor Who books in a newsagent, glossy covered, in sharp focus. Doctor Who was a childhood hero and I'd collected all the Target books as a boy. This was in the early 90s, after the series had been discontinued, and the stories were no longer fresh in my mind. Again, in the weeks after leaving Church, I came across a run of these books - new ones, freshly covered, written by fans perpetuating the myth, and looking just as I had dreamt them. Kind of embarrassed, I didn't know what to make of such a dream, though perhaps, now that the series is continued again, and my passion for narrative and deliberate myth-making awakened, the story's power to inspire, and the nature of the Doctor as a strange embodiment of kindness and infinite possibility, gives this experience of dream and twinned event greater resonance. Dunno. ;)
Actually there was another dream, I think - though because I spoke to no-one about it I am less sure - more recently, of a trip to a mattress factory and a high building with tropical plants growing up its centre. Of me and E and peacocks amongst the plants. On our trip to Majorca last year we stayed in this building - a hotel - and were invited as part of the holiday package to just such a factory. This time, trusting that there was no right or wrong decision a God might be asking me to make, and not unduly concerned I'd be missing a demonstration of mattress-construction, I decided not to talk E onto the trip. Instead we walked to a high promitory, overlooking the resort, and I read Marina Warner on Signs and Wonders as E slept in my lap.
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
925 - Love Memes and Data Leaks
In Post 932, I started to pull some ideas together about Love. I defined it as the quality of expending oneself for another, with no thought of cost to oneself. I wondered why it was not explored in greater depth by neuroscientists, by which I guess, I meant, I wondered why I had not heard more reference made to it in the books on neuroscience, anthropology and evolutionary and positive psychology that I enjoy reading.
Well, there's at least one book: Why We Love, by Helen Fisher, an anthropologist. Richard Dawkins refers to it approvingly in The God Delusion. I'd like to hunt it down.
Dawkins is making the case that in the same way that romantic love tips us head over heels, so does religion. He wonders if religion is a result of our capacity to love one another misfiring in response to the wrong stimuli. In fact, a whole barrowful of misfirings, in response to a barrowful of the wrong stimuli, not just those related to love.
He proceeds to describe in detail how units of cultural inheritance may perpetuate themselves, by natural selection and random drift, in the same way that genes do. These units are, of course, memes. Religions might be collections of memes, replicating themselves the way viruses do, riding on the firings and misfirings of our neural networks, without necessarily bestowing benefits upon ourselves. My ears pricked up as I read Dawkins' exceptionally clear summary of memetics. When I started to write about data, at the beginning of the week, I was on meme territory.
If data are the raw components of information out of which culture is formed, memes are specific collections of data organised to replicate themselves within that culture. If all data leaks, or in Dawkins' expression, drifts, then no mere meme-barrier is sufficient to firewall an idea against change induced from the outside. Just as a virus can insert itself through a cell-wall into the DNA of that cell, so can a meme within a fundamentalist ideology.
I like Richard Dawkins, a lot. But where he is unremittingly negative about religion, using his insights I reckon I can be a bit more positive. The definition of Love I started with is a cultural unit. In that it defines one's highest fulfilment as the fulfilment of the needs of others, it bestows a sense of purpose and well-being on oneself. A community behaving in such a way acts reciprocally, and everyone's needs are, as far as the environment renders it possible, met. The cultural unit at the heart of such a culture is passed on. Therefore it is a meme.
If Love, so defined, is a meme, it is closer to the DNA of an optimally functioning human being than to a self-interested virus riding piggy on the DNA's back. But just as genes don't work in isolation, nor do memes.
Central to Dawkins' idea of genetic transfer is that genes that can co-opt elements in their environment to work for them stand a better chance of survival than those that are exposed to attack on all sides. So genes have evolved to build a casement around themselves - the phenotype - us. And if the environment fluctuates, the gene that can create a responsive phenotype is the one that succeeds. Draw a direct parallel: memes that survive exist within cultural phenotypes, the most successful of which can respond to changes in their environment. Sometimes a gene can ditch most, if not all, of its phenotype. Major geological catastrophes result in the decline of huge numbers of species, but result in subsequent speciation of the survivors to fill newly available environmental niches. Why should we not expect the same thing to happen culturally?
Here's a theory. Religions such as Christianity have evolved as cultural phenotypes designed to perpetuate the Love Meme. No meme is more successful than this, because no meme satisfies its host psychologically at the same time as he or she is satisfied physically (by the efforts of others loving the host, and by the host's efforts, seeking to remain healthy in order best to love others back). Christianity is a fairly successful phenotype, but if all it is is the co-option of various cultural values and stories designed to carry and protect the core value of Love, then, should those accretions no longer prove useful, they may be ditched and replaced by others without harm to the Love Meme itself. Given the vast and incremental weight of cultural (including scientific) achievement gathered over two millenia, it would actually be surprising if new cultural phenotypes were not to be tried and found successful. The language and culture of genes and memes may well furnish just such a new phenotype. I hope so.
The question remains, is Christianity (for instance) any more than the Love Meme in Judaeo-Roman cultural clothes? What of its claim to be a revelation of God? Here the hard question must be asked by Christians, if John was content to define God as Love, and if Love is defined as that which gives all without thought of itself, then is there any need to explain spirituality as anything other than one's subjective experience of a loving reality? Though a hard question might also be asked by atheists: if subjective reality includes a genuine experience of the divine, even if understood in terms of a cultural phenotype, provided it does not contradict the core message of the Love Meme, should it really be dismissed out of hand?
Speaking dualistically for a moment, Spirit might be something different to the material world, I guess, but if its essence is Love, materially expressing itself in that world, then miracles and other funny stuff can only ever be an added bonus.
I've made it my business to understand the way Love works. It's really all my business. If it is a key phenomenon of humanity, time spent developing new ways of talking about it, celebrating it, passing it on, cannot be a wasted activity, can it? If it really doesn't meet our core needs for survival, we should know about it, sooner rather than later. If it does, then the more of it around, the better. I guess that makes me a vicar of sorts, but at this stage in our cultural development I don't think the endorsement of a particular religion is helpful. Probably ever thus. Somebody will pay me for what I do, if I ever need the money.
Well, there's at least one book: Why We Love, by Helen Fisher, an anthropologist. Richard Dawkins refers to it approvingly in The God Delusion. I'd like to hunt it down.
Dawkins is making the case that in the same way that romantic love tips us head over heels, so does religion. He wonders if religion is a result of our capacity to love one another misfiring in response to the wrong stimuli. In fact, a whole barrowful of misfirings, in response to a barrowful of the wrong stimuli, not just those related to love.
He proceeds to describe in detail how units of cultural inheritance may perpetuate themselves, by natural selection and random drift, in the same way that genes do. These units are, of course, memes. Religions might be collections of memes, replicating themselves the way viruses do, riding on the firings and misfirings of our neural networks, without necessarily bestowing benefits upon ourselves. My ears pricked up as I read Dawkins' exceptionally clear summary of memetics. When I started to write about data, at the beginning of the week, I was on meme territory.
If data are the raw components of information out of which culture is formed, memes are specific collections of data organised to replicate themselves within that culture. If all data leaks, or in Dawkins' expression, drifts, then no mere meme-barrier is sufficient to firewall an idea against change induced from the outside. Just as a virus can insert itself through a cell-wall into the DNA of that cell, so can a meme within a fundamentalist ideology.
I like Richard Dawkins, a lot. But where he is unremittingly negative about religion, using his insights I reckon I can be a bit more positive. The definition of Love I started with is a cultural unit. In that it defines one's highest fulfilment as the fulfilment of the needs of others, it bestows a sense of purpose and well-being on oneself. A community behaving in such a way acts reciprocally, and everyone's needs are, as far as the environment renders it possible, met. The cultural unit at the heart of such a culture is passed on. Therefore it is a meme.
If Love, so defined, is a meme, it is closer to the DNA of an optimally functioning human being than to a self-interested virus riding piggy on the DNA's back. But just as genes don't work in isolation, nor do memes.
Central to Dawkins' idea of genetic transfer is that genes that can co-opt elements in their environment to work for them stand a better chance of survival than those that are exposed to attack on all sides. So genes have evolved to build a casement around themselves - the phenotype - us. And if the environment fluctuates, the gene that can create a responsive phenotype is the one that succeeds. Draw a direct parallel: memes that survive exist within cultural phenotypes, the most successful of which can respond to changes in their environment. Sometimes a gene can ditch most, if not all, of its phenotype. Major geological catastrophes result in the decline of huge numbers of species, but result in subsequent speciation of the survivors to fill newly available environmental niches. Why should we not expect the same thing to happen culturally?
Here's a theory. Religions such as Christianity have evolved as cultural phenotypes designed to perpetuate the Love Meme. No meme is more successful than this, because no meme satisfies its host psychologically at the same time as he or she is satisfied physically (by the efforts of others loving the host, and by the host's efforts, seeking to remain healthy in order best to love others back). Christianity is a fairly successful phenotype, but if all it is is the co-option of various cultural values and stories designed to carry and protect the core value of Love, then, should those accretions no longer prove useful, they may be ditched and replaced by others without harm to the Love Meme itself. Given the vast and incremental weight of cultural (including scientific) achievement gathered over two millenia, it would actually be surprising if new cultural phenotypes were not to be tried and found successful. The language and culture of genes and memes may well furnish just such a new phenotype. I hope so.
The question remains, is Christianity (for instance) any more than the Love Meme in Judaeo-Roman cultural clothes? What of its claim to be a revelation of God? Here the hard question must be asked by Christians, if John was content to define God as Love, and if Love is defined as that which gives all without thought of itself, then is there any need to explain spirituality as anything other than one's subjective experience of a loving reality? Though a hard question might also be asked by atheists: if subjective reality includes a genuine experience of the divine, even if understood in terms of a cultural phenotype, provided it does not contradict the core message of the Love Meme, should it really be dismissed out of hand?
Speaking dualistically for a moment, Spirit might be something different to the material world, I guess, but if its essence is Love, materially expressing itself in that world, then miracles and other funny stuff can only ever be an added bonus.
I've made it my business to understand the way Love works. It's really all my business. If it is a key phenomenon of humanity, time spent developing new ways of talking about it, celebrating it, passing it on, cannot be a wasted activity, can it? If it really doesn't meet our core needs for survival, we should know about it, sooner rather than later. If it does, then the more of it around, the better. I guess that makes me a vicar of sorts, but at this stage in our cultural development I don't think the endorsement of a particular religion is helpful. Probably ever thus. Somebody will pay me for what I do, if I ever need the money.
Friday, 19 December 2008
943 - Welcome and Recap
I was monologuing my mum about the point of this blog. Came up with half a dozen reasons. As you might be reading this because we've bludgeoned the address your way via our Christmas Card and newsletter - you are so brave! welcome! - E suggested that I ought to break you in, gently, with a recap as to why I'm doing it.
So here are the reasons, in no particular order:
First, practice: I've written and drawn stuff since I was little, but this is the first time I've had a go at producing something substantial. At the same time, each post is a fresh page in a virtual notebook. I want to get better.
Second, investment: relocating to somewhere with an identity as strong as the North East is for the long term, and for all the joy, can be hard work. Here's a bit of upfront investment in Whitley Bay: "I don't know you, but I want to get to know you, and this is my way of saying so."
Third, experiment: what happens as I get to know Whitley - the people, the culture, the contexts? And what happens as I engage with what I find out? This is entering the realm of psychogeography; starting to tiptoe around questions of spirituality. It's taking ideas about the impact of the Information Society (from my librarian days) and mixing them with a dose of creativity (as an artist). Does mythologizing a place help it to find a meaning otherwise hidden to itself?
Fourth, incarnation: I've elected to move, in adult life, through a naive Christian evangelicalism, and a period of rejection of all things religious, finally to a tentative re-engagement with the Big Questions. And I guess what I admire about the church I've left is the belief that stuff happens not when you believe it, but when you start to embody it. You take the risks; you say and do foolish things. I believe in love, in the meaning it gives to lives. I want to make a difference. I believe writing does this, and art, and engagement with people. Blogging is one way I incarnate what I believe is important.
Fifth, communication: publishing online gets my thoughts out there. Well, publishing and then then publicising it all. I've read loads these past four years, and ideas are beginning to resonate with one another. I think I'm onto something; now I want a dialogue about it. Something about story-making and psychology, evolution and spirituality, anthropology and present day cultural change. A blog is something that doesn't require the endorsement of a formal institution before it is listened to. If people like it, they stick with it: if they don't, it's cheap and they can leave it behind. It gets its validity from its personal usefulness, its likeability; not its permanence or pay-roll number.
Sixth, evidence: I'm leaving tracks. For instance, I don't get money: I don't get money. But maybe, one day, E and I will role-reverse and I'll need to bring in the cash. Here's me saying to all my lovely potential employers, hey, I can stick at something. I can make it happen. I can dream, and take a risk, and come up with something a bit special. I'm not prepared just to sit around. What do you mean, everyone has a blog? Well, yo, I'm with it. I'm funky.
And there's a seventh: celebration. 'Cos Whitley Bay is great. It's a bugger, but it's a beautiful bugger. Weekends we go down to the beach and can look out to sea twenty odd miles, no interruptions. Great shops. Good food. Fantastic people. Self-esteem, at times, lower than the Mariana Trench.... And the pride of a princess.
So here are the reasons, in no particular order:
First, practice: I've written and drawn stuff since I was little, but this is the first time I've had a go at producing something substantial. At the same time, each post is a fresh page in a virtual notebook. I want to get better.
Second, investment: relocating to somewhere with an identity as strong as the North East is for the long term, and for all the joy, can be hard work. Here's a bit of upfront investment in Whitley Bay: "I don't know you, but I want to get to know you, and this is my way of saying so."
Third, experiment: what happens as I get to know Whitley - the people, the culture, the contexts? And what happens as I engage with what I find out? This is entering the realm of psychogeography; starting to tiptoe around questions of spirituality. It's taking ideas about the impact of the Information Society (from my librarian days) and mixing them with a dose of creativity (as an artist). Does mythologizing a place help it to find a meaning otherwise hidden to itself?
Fourth, incarnation: I've elected to move, in adult life, through a naive Christian evangelicalism, and a period of rejection of all things religious, finally to a tentative re-engagement with the Big Questions. And I guess what I admire about the church I've left is the belief that stuff happens not when you believe it, but when you start to embody it. You take the risks; you say and do foolish things. I believe in love, in the meaning it gives to lives. I want to make a difference. I believe writing does this, and art, and engagement with people. Blogging is one way I incarnate what I believe is important.
Fifth, communication: publishing online gets my thoughts out there. Well, publishing and then then publicising it all. I've read loads these past four years, and ideas are beginning to resonate with one another. I think I'm onto something; now I want a dialogue about it. Something about story-making and psychology, evolution and spirituality, anthropology and present day cultural change. A blog is something that doesn't require the endorsement of a formal institution before it is listened to. If people like it, they stick with it: if they don't, it's cheap and they can leave it behind. It gets its validity from its personal usefulness, its likeability; not its permanence or pay-roll number.
Sixth, evidence: I'm leaving tracks. For instance, I don't get money: I don't get money. But maybe, one day, E and I will role-reverse and I'll need to bring in the cash. Here's me saying to all my lovely potential employers, hey, I can stick at something. I can make it happen. I can dream, and take a risk, and come up with something a bit special. I'm not prepared just to sit around. What do you mean, everyone has a blog? Well, yo, I'm with it. I'm funky.
And there's a seventh: celebration. 'Cos Whitley Bay is great. It's a bugger, but it's a beautiful bugger. Weekends we go down to the beach and can look out to sea twenty odd miles, no interruptions. Great shops. Good food. Fantastic people. Self-esteem, at times, lower than the Mariana Trench.... And the pride of a princess.
Monday, 24 November 2008
962 - What I Believe May Be Happening
[Advance warning - too many words in this post!]
A Whitley Bay Thousand is a local blog, but I'm using it to explore a big idea.
This, in a nutshell, is that we are moving beyond the dichotomies by which we've been living as agrarian and hunter-gatherer civilisations, into a new assimilation of the two.
If, in broad strokes, hunter-gatherer societies have known their ecosystem before they have changed it, and farmers have changed their ecosystem before they have known it, it is also true that both philosophies have brought benefits and damage. In no sense can we say, unequivocally, that one is better than the other.
But we can say that enormous and immediate pressures are influencing us, as civilisations, to change the ways we live. Population growth, and what appears to be an increasingly unsustainable pace of consumption, are depleting the biodiversity and mineral resources of the planet. Or, at least, rearranging them in ways that are starting to boggle our minds. Scientific models predict a boggling in reality too, in ways that may compound one another; in ways that, through complexity, become more and more difficult to anticipate.
At the same time, and perhaps as a response, some of our big ideologies are starting to change. Christianity, for example, with which I am perhaps most familiar, is seeing a rejection of traditional forms of church in favour of new, 'emerging' structures. These are increasingly open to ambivalence, doubt and equivocation, not, as the stereotype would have it, because the core of Christianity is rejected, but because it is actually seen to be a celebration of such attitudes from the very beginning.
Simultaneously, the most cutting-edge science, that which it is quite easy to portray as antithetical to Christianity, is itself embracing ambivalence, doubt and equivocation in the pursuit of the greatest precision. A case in point might be psychology, which increasingly understands consciousness, and all its emotional and cognitive underpinnings, in terms of homeostasis - our preservation, as minds and bodies, of optimum internal and external survival conditions - for sound evolutionary reasons.
Homeostasis is about the middle ground, neither too hot nor too cold, too pressured nor too free, too drunk nor too sober, too extreme in any direction. To use a Christian image, it is the narrow gate, not the walls stretching out on either side. It is the passage through life, rather than the graffiti about what that life might be. It is perhaps, were the choice to be required, a preference for the event, the experience of life, over a definition of that event, together with an understanding that defining life can only ever be the most provisional part of coming to know it.
Once again, Brody puts it well: "Everyone must pay close attention, be careful, use every faculty to be aware of the land and all that it may hold....There is a profound and intelligent uncertainty. No one knows what is going to happen or which decisions about any part of life will turn out to be correct. Hence the importance in [the Inuit language of] Inuktitut, for example, of expressing caution and qualifications of all kinds. The analogue nature of myth mirrors a sense that the world itself defies digital ways of speaking. " The Other Side Of Eden, p.246
If we are seeing a renewed commitment to this core truth on a societal as well as personal level, it makes sense to celebrate it in public. How best to celebrate it? Perhaps in story and myth, made relevant by its expression in local and relevant idiom. Hence my attempt to know the place I live, know the land around Whitley, and to celebrate it in words and images.
A Whitley Bay Thousand is a local blog, but I'm using it to explore a big idea.
This, in a nutshell, is that we are moving beyond the dichotomies by which we've been living as agrarian and hunter-gatherer civilisations, into a new assimilation of the two.
If, in broad strokes, hunter-gatherer societies have known their ecosystem before they have changed it, and farmers have changed their ecosystem before they have known it, it is also true that both philosophies have brought benefits and damage. In no sense can we say, unequivocally, that one is better than the other.
But we can say that enormous and immediate pressures are influencing us, as civilisations, to change the ways we live. Population growth, and what appears to be an increasingly unsustainable pace of consumption, are depleting the biodiversity and mineral resources of the planet. Or, at least, rearranging them in ways that are starting to boggle our minds. Scientific models predict a boggling in reality too, in ways that may compound one another; in ways that, through complexity, become more and more difficult to anticipate.
At the same time, and perhaps as a response, some of our big ideologies are starting to change. Christianity, for example, with which I am perhaps most familiar, is seeing a rejection of traditional forms of church in favour of new, 'emerging' structures. These are increasingly open to ambivalence, doubt and equivocation, not, as the stereotype would have it, because the core of Christianity is rejected, but because it is actually seen to be a celebration of such attitudes from the very beginning.
Simultaneously, the most cutting-edge science, that which it is quite easy to portray as antithetical to Christianity, is itself embracing ambivalence, doubt and equivocation in the pursuit of the greatest precision. A case in point might be psychology, which increasingly understands consciousness, and all its emotional and cognitive underpinnings, in terms of homeostasis - our preservation, as minds and bodies, of optimum internal and external survival conditions - for sound evolutionary reasons.
Homeostasis is about the middle ground, neither too hot nor too cold, too pressured nor too free, too drunk nor too sober, too extreme in any direction. To use a Christian image, it is the narrow gate, not the walls stretching out on either side. It is the passage through life, rather than the graffiti about what that life might be. It is perhaps, were the choice to be required, a preference for the event, the experience of life, over a definition of that event, together with an understanding that defining life can only ever be the most provisional part of coming to know it.
Once again, Brody puts it well: "Everyone must pay close attention, be careful, use every faculty to be aware of the land and all that it may hold....There is a profound and intelligent uncertainty. No one knows what is going to happen or which decisions about any part of life will turn out to be correct. Hence the importance in [the Inuit language of] Inuktitut, for example, of expressing caution and qualifications of all kinds. The analogue nature of myth mirrors a sense that the world itself defies digital ways of speaking. " The Other Side Of Eden, p.246
If we are seeing a renewed commitment to this core truth on a societal as well as personal level, it makes sense to celebrate it in public. How best to celebrate it? Perhaps in story and myth, made relevant by its expression in local and relevant idiom. Hence my attempt to know the place I live, know the land around Whitley, and to celebrate it in words and images.
Sunday, 16 November 2008
968 - Whitley - The Movie (1)
Robert McKee delivers a seminar about Story. His homepage states that some 50,000 screenwriters, actors, directors, novelists and journalists have attended in the 15 years it has been running. Former students have written WALL-E, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Enchanted, Scrubs; have won 27 Academy Awards and 141 Emmys. You get the picture.
His book (from which I've been quoting already) expands on the thesis of the seminar. What you realise, pretty soon, is that it is not just about screenwriting - it's about the ways we make sense of life. This from his website:
Religions realise this - traditional Christianity is the invitation to participate in a massive story arc, one of cosmological as well as personal scope. So too Islam, Hinduism, a myriad others. Though it would be a truism to say that, realising this, we live in a post-religious age.
Still, we cannot avoid seeing life in terms of story. The regeneration of Whitley Bay is a story. Here's a pitch: tiny seaside town blossoms as pleasure resort, but internal and external pressures conspire to see it fade. Will it succomb? When all seems lost, it rediscovers its heart. Belief returns. A newer, braver, wiser Whitley rises.
Robert McKee charts twenty five movie genres - twenty five basic pitches: love story; horror film; modern epic; western; war genre; the coming-of-age story; redemption plot; punitive plot; comedy; biography; animation; fourteen others. It'd be very fun to pitch 'Whitley - The Movie' in terms of each of these. Then, having selected a pitch, to make the movie by living it.
His book (from which I've been quoting already) expands on the thesis of the seminar. What you realise, pretty soon, is that it is not just about screenwriting - it's about the ways we make sense of life. This from his website:
in ALL creative work, everything works in the shadow of classic story design.So if community development is creative, then it is story. If taking reponsibility for your life is creative, then it is story.
Religions realise this - traditional Christianity is the invitation to participate in a massive story arc, one of cosmological as well as personal scope. So too Islam, Hinduism, a myriad others. Though it would be a truism to say that, realising this, we live in a post-religious age.
Still, we cannot avoid seeing life in terms of story. The regeneration of Whitley Bay is a story. Here's a pitch: tiny seaside town blossoms as pleasure resort, but internal and external pressures conspire to see it fade. Will it succomb? When all seems lost, it rediscovers its heart. Belief returns. A newer, braver, wiser Whitley rises.
Robert McKee charts twenty five movie genres - twenty five basic pitches: love story; horror film; modern epic; western; war genre; the coming-of-age story; redemption plot; punitive plot; comedy; biography; animation; fourteen others. It'd be very fun to pitch 'Whitley - The Movie' in terms of each of these. Then, having selected a pitch, to make the movie by living it.
Monday, 10 November 2008
976 - Money is a Work Battery
This is just a cool idea. Not sure if I can tie it in to Whitley Bay. Not sure if that matters!
So we've got this thing called money, and nearly everyone uses it. Friend I spoke to at the weekend told me it was used by his managers to try to entice him back into a Big Company, when all the reasons he left are about morale and values, not financial reward.
They assumed the inherent good, or at least inevitability, of money. They were so sure it was all they'd be able to motivate him with, that they were unable to develop an alternative strategy to keep him. And he's good.
But is money inevitable?
I asked myself what money does, and I decided you could call it a work battery. It stores up work done previously, ready for discharge when you need it, to reciprocate for work done for you now. It's a handy size. It fits in your pocket, or a handful of digits on a computer. It retains the core ethos of community - reciprocity. I can imagine it developing out of the need to survive like this:
In a trusting community, work by one is 'repaid' by work in kind. But where no such repayment is possible, the produce of earlier work may be offered. A harvest of potatoes perhaps, or a metal it has taken much effort to find or extract. And in time, rather than humping your produce around with you, you might choose, within your community, a symbol to represent such produce, which is printed on paper, and portable.
So here's the rub: a battery carries a charge, but it takes energy to store the battery under the right, dry and cool, conditions - energy which is unaccounted for by the battery itself. And in the exact same way, maintaining the environment within which money works requires energy. It requires stability, the freedom to flow, an investment of trust within the community using the cash. The bigger the community, the greater the investment. And that investment cannot come from the money itself, or the money is drained of its usefulness.
What this extended thought helps me to do is tie money right back into hard physics. It is the physics of effort expended, which is about burning the calories we consume, which are subject to universal laws like the conservation of energy. We are survival machines, and 'work' is ultimately what we do to survive. If money is simply one, rarified and highly developed, tool for survival, it is no more (or less) useful than any other tool. Screwdrivers are useful, but not to pump up bicycle tyres. Generating money is no more (or less) valuable than anything else that helps the community survive.
Another tool might well, under certain circumstances, be preferable. I wonder if, credit crunching, now might be such a time.
So we've got this thing called money, and nearly everyone uses it. Friend I spoke to at the weekend told me it was used by his managers to try to entice him back into a Big Company, when all the reasons he left are about morale and values, not financial reward.
They assumed the inherent good, or at least inevitability, of money. They were so sure it was all they'd be able to motivate him with, that they were unable to develop an alternative strategy to keep him. And he's good.
But is money inevitable?
I asked myself what money does, and I decided you could call it a work battery. It stores up work done previously, ready for discharge when you need it, to reciprocate for work done for you now. It's a handy size. It fits in your pocket, or a handful of digits on a computer. It retains the core ethos of community - reciprocity. I can imagine it developing out of the need to survive like this:
In a trusting community, work by one is 'repaid' by work in kind. But where no such repayment is possible, the produce of earlier work may be offered. A harvest of potatoes perhaps, or a metal it has taken much effort to find or extract. And in time, rather than humping your produce around with you, you might choose, within your community, a symbol to represent such produce, which is printed on paper, and portable.
So here's the rub: a battery carries a charge, but it takes energy to store the battery under the right, dry and cool, conditions - energy which is unaccounted for by the battery itself. And in the exact same way, maintaining the environment within which money works requires energy. It requires stability, the freedom to flow, an investment of trust within the community using the cash. The bigger the community, the greater the investment. And that investment cannot come from the money itself, or the money is drained of its usefulness.
What this extended thought helps me to do is tie money right back into hard physics. It is the physics of effort expended, which is about burning the calories we consume, which are subject to universal laws like the conservation of energy. We are survival machines, and 'work' is ultimately what we do to survive. If money is simply one, rarified and highly developed, tool for survival, it is no more (or less) useful than any other tool. Screwdrivers are useful, but not to pump up bicycle tyres. Generating money is no more (or less) valuable than anything else that helps the community survive.
Another tool might well, under certain circumstances, be preferable. I wonder if, credit crunching, now might be such a time.
Tuesday, 28 October 2008
984 - Knowing Whitley
Following on from yesterday's post, I read this in Hugh Brody's book, 'The Other Side of Eden', which is about hunter-gatherers and farmers.
Material well-being depends on knowing, rather than changing, the environment.
I think what I am trying to do is to know Whitley. Which is a community in transition. Know the culture of it, but also its roots as a small fishing village on a bleak coast, between the great monasteries at Lindisfarne and Jarrow, and up from the priory at Tynemouth; bearing the infrastructure of its late nineteenth, mid twentieth century kiss-me-quick blossoming; fighting shy of the anonymity that a future as a dormitory town would bring.
When the blossom falls, the fruit swells.
When the fruit falls, the seed takes root.
When the tree falls, its daughter rises.
Material well-being depends on knowing, rather than changing, the environment.
I think what I am trying to do is to know Whitley. Which is a community in transition. Know the culture of it, but also its roots as a small fishing village on a bleak coast, between the great monasteries at Lindisfarne and Jarrow, and up from the priory at Tynemouth; bearing the infrastructure of its late nineteenth, mid twentieth century kiss-me-quick blossoming; fighting shy of the anonymity that a future as a dormitory town would bring.
When the blossom falls, the fruit swells.
When the fruit falls, the seed takes root.
When the tree falls, its daughter rises.
Monday, 6 October 2008
995 - A Toolkit
Late this afternoon, on the beach, I picked up a piece of polished sea-glass. It's from the base of a bottle, dark green and pitted to give a sheen of white, like crushed sugar, over the surface.
Found glass is part of my toolkit. The functional object shattered, then made smooth and more beautiful by the action of sea and sand. It reminds me of me, and when I'm feeling mordant gives me hope for Whitley. Two years ago I made fourteen figures out of wire, twisting the wire around pieces of found glass and leaving them throughout the town.
I left one on a perch above Whitley Bay Metro Station, sat above the flow of people into and out of the town, where it remained until work began on the front of the building and a steel and glass canopy, to the original station blueprint, was fixed into place. Someone took down the wire and glass figure, but maybe it wasn't needed any more...
My toolkit is a bit unorthodox: poetry and theology; photography and random acts of kindness; eye contact and walks about town; hard science, soft anarchy, and storytelling.
Mostly storytelling.
Found glass is part of my toolkit. The functional object shattered, then made smooth and more beautiful by the action of sea and sand. It reminds me of me, and when I'm feeling mordant gives me hope for Whitley. Two years ago I made fourteen figures out of wire, twisting the wire around pieces of found glass and leaving them throughout the town.
I left one on a perch above Whitley Bay Metro Station, sat above the flow of people into and out of the town, where it remained until work began on the front of the building and a steel and glass canopy, to the original station blueprint, was fixed into place. Someone took down the wire and glass figure, but maybe it wasn't needed any more...
My toolkit is a bit unorthodox: poetry and theology; photography and random acts of kindness; eye contact and walks about town; hard science, soft anarchy, and storytelling.
Mostly storytelling.
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