Yesterday I attended a small get-together with friends who have been inspired by Resurgence Magazine to try and reconnect with the natural environment. We wrote a poem together by linking phrases we had jotted onto strips of paper, then rearranged like fridge-magnets. It was an attempt to capture something of the tentative start of spring, the first light of the new season.
I walked home afterwards buzzing, but forgot to look up to see whether the Northern Lights were visible.
Showing posts with label Green. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Green. Show all posts
Friday, 18 February 2011
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Friday, 26 March 2010
716 - Greenbelt Festival, Cheltenham, 2009 1/3
Greenbelt is described by Mona Siddiqi as Radio 4 in tents. It's an arts festival, run primarily by (and it has to be said, for) Christians, but with a commendably open and searching approach. I feel at home there. I had plans to draw a massive doodle, but ran out of time. Here's the first of three thumbnail sketches, inside a tent, with a panel discussion, possibly about psychogeography, going on. There were more than three other people present!
Monday, 9 November 2009
761 - Flowerbed
These pansies are planted on Roxburgh Terrace, alongside another bed rather more abandoned in appearance. How do I feel about them? Tear-tugged by their scrawniness, cheered to a mini-nova by their aspirations.
I guess the Council gardeners could have planted them, but why then only one out of the two flowerbeds? So part of me wants to believe it's one of the shopkeepers.
Last I heard, the gardeners all get the shove the month before Christmas, before being taken back on every February. I understand the Council (Labour at the time) were using short term contracts as recently as two years ago to this effect, which doesn't sound very legal to me. But maybe that situation's changed.
I was a gardener briefly, sixteen years ago. Vested interest maybe. If I had my way the gardening teams would be tripled in size, and the beds they planted up similarly. They'd be full of perennials, edible at that - massive herb gardens. And the brownfield sites lying idle, they could become allotments, or pocket parks, or communal gardens.
Meantime, I salute the pansies, the weeds that grow between them, the shopkeepers, and the North Tyneside council gardeners. Thank you. Thank you.
Monday, 14 September 2009
785 - Transition Towns Revisited
[The blog's heading for a year old, so I'm getting all Janus-headed. The 'J' is of course kind of important here.]
So 201 posts ago I was pondering about Transition Towns. Could Whitley Bay become one? They're communities (towns, villages, cities, even an island or two) who come together to start addressing our long-term addiction to oil. Norwich is one, Totnes another. In fact, Totnes is where it started. Their latest initiative is an 'Energy Descent Plan', by which they'll coordinate their drop in energy usage over the next twenty or so years, so that, for example, energy shortages and oil price spikes don't spring any nasty surprises on them.
As the joint-owner of a patch of concrete, I'm particularly inspired by land-share schemes, whereby people who are not cultivating their gardens allow others without garden space to tend it for them, and the produce from the land is split. There are as many ideas as there are people creatively involved. Lewes, in the South East, developed its own currency, to encourage people to keep their money local (Whitley Bay Chamber of Trade please take note!). And best of all, though individuals retain their political convictions, the movement itself is deliberately non-partisan.
Who's organising this? Although increasingly councils have been getting involved (Lewes, Norwich and the towns around North Norfolk, for example), the impetus has always been bottom-up. Individuals getting together. Last Wednesday the local Transition groups hosted a meeting at the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle, where a documentary about the movement was shown. I learned there that North Tyneside is in the process of forming its own group.
If you are interested, you could join the Transition Towns WIKI, which is what I'm off to do right now.
So 201 posts ago I was pondering about Transition Towns. Could Whitley Bay become one? They're communities (towns, villages, cities, even an island or two) who come together to start addressing our long-term addiction to oil. Norwich is one, Totnes another. In fact, Totnes is where it started. Their latest initiative is an 'Energy Descent Plan', by which they'll coordinate their drop in energy usage over the next twenty or so years, so that, for example, energy shortages and oil price spikes don't spring any nasty surprises on them.
As the joint-owner of a patch of concrete, I'm particularly inspired by land-share schemes, whereby people who are not cultivating their gardens allow others without garden space to tend it for them, and the produce from the land is split. There are as many ideas as there are people creatively involved. Lewes, in the South East, developed its own currency, to encourage people to keep their money local (Whitley Bay Chamber of Trade please take note!). And best of all, though individuals retain their political convictions, the movement itself is deliberately non-partisan.
Who's organising this? Although increasingly councils have been getting involved (Lewes, Norwich and the towns around North Norfolk, for example), the impetus has always been bottom-up. Individuals getting together. Last Wednesday the local Transition groups hosted a meeting at the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle, where a documentary about the movement was shown. I learned there that North Tyneside is in the process of forming its own group.
If you are interested, you could join the Transition Towns WIKI, which is what I'm off to do right now.
Monday, 6 July 2009
803 - Orange Hat
Windermere YHA, late evening, Saturday week. Completed in Starbucks today. E bought this hat at the start of the holiday. Fairtrade hemp and felt. She's written a poem about it which is rather good.
[See how I disguised E's right hand, the drawing of which I cocked up, by sticking a glass in front of it?]
Sunday, 28 June 2009
809 - Small Showers In The Lake District
My tribute to Alfred Wainwright (on balance, the long arrows from the subtitle to the shower and my head labour the point.... CyberTypex needed.)
Friday, 19 June 2009
810 - Whitley Playhouse
The old playhouse saw Ken Dodd and Abba tributes, local am-dram and arthouse cinema. It was a must-play stop-off for big name bands in the seventies and eighties.
The new building (which houses the stage of the old, with the rest of the infrastructure re-built around it) opens in September.
This is taken across the meadow that has sprung from the former site of the Marine Park First School, an oasis of beauty in the town that, I reckon, would make a great nature reserve - the Coquet Avenue Pocket Park?
Thursday, 11 June 2009
818 - Deliberate Life Footprint Calculator
My favourite Canadian sustainable living and home education blogger, Nic, has a thoughtful footprint calculator here.
She's tied in sustainable living with wellbeing, so that you give yourself points for proactively engaging in green activities, rather than a guilt-trip for not cutting back on a consumer lifestyle.
Make your own furniture? That's twenty points. Make your own clothes? That's ten. Actually wear them? Another five...
I really, really like this. In fact, I like her whole site. I love the idea that you can build your own culture from scratch, without anyone telling you not to. Niche construction at its finest and most free.
Do check it out.
Wednesday, 3 June 2009
823 - Monkey High Soft Play Area
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Did you guess right?
Monkseaton High School is sponsored by, among others, Microsoft. I use Microsoft. As it has a de facto monopoly on workplace and home software, I don't have a choice. It's okay, usually, but it's not brilliant.
So to see its branding scattered over the top of a school, where the bright colours and excess make it look like a fairy-cake decorated by a hyperactive five-year-old, packs a visceral punch. Unless it is toned down, this architectural statement says to me: you've got no choice in the brave new world we're building. Get used to it. You're globalised brand-fodder.
I guess it's not realistic, if Microsoft have put such money into the project, for no acknowledgement of their generosity to be made. I'd hate for local councillors to have to exercise their courage and actually stand up to the business. Who stands for genuinely unbiased education nowadays anyway?
But think of the scale of the branding. Not just how out of place it looks on top of a genuinely impressive new building, but how it lies across our field of vision, seventy or so feet up, as we look across green fields towards the coast, or out of our beds as we recuperate at North Tyneside NHS Hospital, or from miles around as we travel on the Metro to and from Newcastle. The only scale on which such an outsize logo could possibly seem appropriate is the one offered by the Google Earth Satellite. Oh. Maybe I see.
But look, Microsoft UK. You're shooting yourself in the foot. Do you really want to present yourself as perpetrators of an exercise in local disempowerment? Particularly when it's a school, with kids, for heavens's sake? Take a screen-grab from your own software. I'm looking at the Windows logo at the foot of my screen. It's tiny. It's plenty big enough to remind me whose software I'm using. But any bigger and it would get in the way.
Therefore, by all means leave four coloured blocks on top of Monkseaton High School to remind us of your investment - one red, one green, one yellow, one blue. But paint the other twenty or so grey, in keeping with the rest of the school. For enlightened self-interest, if nothing else.
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
824 - Monkseaton High School
Which global computing software company do you suppose has sponsored the building of this new school?
Thursday, 7 May 2009
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
839 - Reclamation of Fenwick Spoil Heap as a Memorial for Hartley
This rears up out of the fields behind Backworth and Earsdon. It's the former coal mining spoil at Fenwick and Eccles. There are distant sounds of quadbikes, and old tyres and deadwood like animal corpses. North Tyneside has promised for years to reclaim the land, but locals have suspected that the clay required to make it good was to come from a controversial landfill proposal, at present abandoned, for a site down the road.
Whitley News Guardian published a letter making this claim last month: we stumbled upon the spoil heaps on our walk on Saturday. And all this has got me wondering.
Earsdon itself is a beautiful village, and home to a sombre memorial to 200 dead men and boys in a pit disaster at Hartley. That disaster might have been the Somme, visiting fifty years early on the work force of a North East mining village. Contemporary accounts compared it to 'a vast Golgotha'.
The 150th Anniversary of the disaster will take place in 2012 - three years time. A terrible, terrible indictment if the only memorial Northumberland, North Tyneside and SITA saw fit to raise was a fresh trench at Seghill. And a far more fitting memorial if the reclamation of the spoil heaps went ahead as promised.
More about Sita here. And an opportunity to contact North Tyneside Council about the reclamation here.
Wednesday, 22 April 2009
850 - Whitley and the Regeneration Myth
Many moons ago I wondered whether it would be possible to tell the story of Whitley Bay according to the various genres listed in Robert McKee's book Story.
But I've been wedded to the idea that, whatever happens, Whitley must regenerate. Only now, reflecting on the possibility of wild and multiple plotlines, do I begin to ask, Does Whitley have to regenerate after all?
John Gray, in Black Mass, argues that the political pursuit of utopian visions is just the tail-end of apocalyptic religion. The regeneration of Whitley Bay is nothing if not a political football. Regeneration is about the death and rebirth of a town, newer and better than it was in its prime. The big myth it is incarnating is the Christian vision of a new Jerusalem. That myth's as bred in our Western European political bones as any.
But there are other myths, perhaps as powerful, perhaps more appropriate.
The myth of Pandora's Box. The myth of Order out of Chaos. The myth, encapsulated in evolution, of unending growth, variation, consolidation, regrowth and replacement.
Regeneration implies a crisis, and, whilst it is easy to imagine Whitley as having undergone a crisis, especially when the crisis is talked up by opposition politicians, over the years, of both hues, the idea is emotive, and can obscure a million mini miracles, growing all the while the Spanish-City-Saurus dies.
The point, perhaps, being that regeneration is too backward-looking a term - too re-, not enough new.
Just as we wee furry buggers were in no way the regeneration of the great reptiles, I wonder if the true inheritance of Whitley Bay won't be measurable in rebuilt playhouses and swimming pools, thriving commercial centres and sheer bulk of people, but something else, unexpected, entirely?
How's about, for instance, letting the grassland on the site of the old Marine Park First School, between Coquet Avenue and Marine Gardens, keep growing into a piece of meadowland. You could call it the Coquet Avenue Pocket Park. Then knock down more old buildings and replace them with allotments?
Or what else? Suggest something!
But I've been wedded to the idea that, whatever happens, Whitley must regenerate. Only now, reflecting on the possibility of wild and multiple plotlines, do I begin to ask, Does Whitley have to regenerate after all?
John Gray, in Black Mass, argues that the political pursuit of utopian visions is just the tail-end of apocalyptic religion. The regeneration of Whitley Bay is nothing if not a political football. Regeneration is about the death and rebirth of a town, newer and better than it was in its prime. The big myth it is incarnating is the Christian vision of a new Jerusalem. That myth's as bred in our Western European political bones as any.
But there are other myths, perhaps as powerful, perhaps more appropriate.
The myth of Pandora's Box. The myth of Order out of Chaos. The myth, encapsulated in evolution, of unending growth, variation, consolidation, regrowth and replacement.
Regeneration implies a crisis, and, whilst it is easy to imagine Whitley as having undergone a crisis, especially when the crisis is talked up by opposition politicians, over the years, of both hues, the idea is emotive, and can obscure a million mini miracles, growing all the while the Spanish-City-Saurus dies.
The point, perhaps, being that regeneration is too backward-looking a term - too re-, not enough new.
Just as we wee furry buggers were in no way the regeneration of the great reptiles, I wonder if the true inheritance of Whitley Bay won't be measurable in rebuilt playhouses and swimming pools, thriving commercial centres and sheer bulk of people, but something else, unexpected, entirely?
How's about, for instance, letting the grassland on the site of the old Marine Park First School, between Coquet Avenue and Marine Gardens, keep growing into a piece of meadowland. You could call it the Coquet Avenue Pocket Park. Then knock down more old buildings and replace them with allotments?
Or what else? Suggest something!
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
Monday, 20 April 2009
853 - Hubble Bubble
Storying: the conscious creation and pursuit of a storyline as a means of expressing one's identity. Follow the tags and you'll see what I have written on it so far.
Anyway, the idea has caught hold of me, and is shaping my reading. I've focussed on narrative so far, on plotting. Christopher Booker's 'Seven Basic Plots' and Robert McKee's 'Story'. The big ideas across religious continents, the ways they shift, with the help of books by Karen Armstrong. The way we construct our identity out of the activities we perform together, and therefore, the way that the activities we choose can be suited in different ways to a 21st Century public and/or private identity. Tensions between alternative modes of living - hunter-gathering and farming, as detailed by Hugh Brody. Re: the Whitley Bay angle, this has meant that I have focussed my thinking on the story arc of decay and regeneration.
Recently, however, I've begun to realise plot-construction is not the only tool in the toolbox. Simon Beaufoy made this point explicitly at the Story Engine Conference I attended in February. Because it was true - narrative is not enough to make a story - I ignored him. Sometimes it takes a while for my brain to take on board a new idea. Simon was pressing for less action, more character exploration. My ostrich-instinct was to protest: how can you make a truly gripping story out of character alone? (Though, of course, he wasn't suggesting character alone.)
Then I dug up Jay Griffith's first book, on the wildness and fecundity of time. And Susan Greenfield on the environmental pressures that determine, at least in part, how our brains change. And Norman Doidge on neuroplasticity. The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology on niche construction. Lastly, Rita Carter on Multiplicity of personality - the theory that we can possess more than one personality, at different levels of development, as a valid response to external and internal pressures, if our neuroplastic knitting accretes around several behaviours, memories, beliefs, instead of just one.
All of which links, like this: where the commerce of Hollywood drives for straightforward action plots, wild time allows for the development of multiple plot-lines, like rampant vines in a rainforest. Wild plotlines suit multi-character explorations, complexity, the partial or full development of a story - allowing nature to abort unviable exercises in cultural niche construction, whilst those that thrive, spread. The tangle of a vibrant rainforest is the lush environment of neural networks thriving in a stimulated brain. And as the plotlines grow, so do the personalities within our minds, in response to new stimuli - technologies, ideas, pressures and seductions - from the world around us. As I continue to read Rita's book, and explore the personalities that make up me, I will also be learning how to shape them, even create them. And I will begin to 'get' that storying is as much about personality as circumstance.
[Hubble bubble, because each of Shakespeare's characters is formed in some degree this way, by playwright, actors, and audience, and as an exercise in fecundity, Shakespeare's canon is hard to beat. From witches on a wild heath, through Lear to Prospero, and courtly, commercial, martial dramas, and the transcendance of A Winter's Tale, his work truly is himself time and again, looped, spooled and knit through our culture and natures both, in breadth and height and depth.]
Anyway, the idea has caught hold of me, and is shaping my reading. I've focussed on narrative so far, on plotting. Christopher Booker's 'Seven Basic Plots' and Robert McKee's 'Story'. The big ideas across religious continents, the ways they shift, with the help of books by Karen Armstrong. The way we construct our identity out of the activities we perform together, and therefore, the way that the activities we choose can be suited in different ways to a 21st Century public and/or private identity. Tensions between alternative modes of living - hunter-gathering and farming, as detailed by Hugh Brody. Re: the Whitley Bay angle, this has meant that I have focussed my thinking on the story arc of decay and regeneration.
Recently, however, I've begun to realise plot-construction is not the only tool in the toolbox. Simon Beaufoy made this point explicitly at the Story Engine Conference I attended in February. Because it was true - narrative is not enough to make a story - I ignored him. Sometimes it takes a while for my brain to take on board a new idea. Simon was pressing for less action, more character exploration. My ostrich-instinct was to protest: how can you make a truly gripping story out of character alone? (Though, of course, he wasn't suggesting character alone.)
Then I dug up Jay Griffith's first book, on the wildness and fecundity of time. And Susan Greenfield on the environmental pressures that determine, at least in part, how our brains change. And Norman Doidge on neuroplasticity. The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology on niche construction. Lastly, Rita Carter on Multiplicity of personality - the theory that we can possess more than one personality, at different levels of development, as a valid response to external and internal pressures, if our neuroplastic knitting accretes around several behaviours, memories, beliefs, instead of just one.
All of which links, like this: where the commerce of Hollywood drives for straightforward action plots, wild time allows for the development of multiple plot-lines, like rampant vines in a rainforest. Wild plotlines suit multi-character explorations, complexity, the partial or full development of a story - allowing nature to abort unviable exercises in cultural niche construction, whilst those that thrive, spread. The tangle of a vibrant rainforest is the lush environment of neural networks thriving in a stimulated brain. And as the plotlines grow, so do the personalities within our minds, in response to new stimuli - technologies, ideas, pressures and seductions - from the world around us. As I continue to read Rita's book, and explore the personalities that make up me, I will also be learning how to shape them, even create them. And I will begin to 'get' that storying is as much about personality as circumstance.
[Hubble bubble, because each of Shakespeare's characters is formed in some degree this way, by playwright, actors, and audience, and as an exercise in fecundity, Shakespeare's canon is hard to beat. From witches on a wild heath, through Lear to Prospero, and courtly, commercial, martial dramas, and the transcendance of A Winter's Tale, his work truly is himself time and again, looped, spooled and knit through our culture and natures both, in breadth and height and depth.]
Sunday, 29 March 2009
864 - Free Seas Freeze?
First thoughts...
June 8th is World Ocean Day. North Tyneside is planning a coastwide weekend of events, and a whole bunch of artists and other creatives (but hey, we're all creatives, right?) have been approached by North Tyneside's Artistic Director, Keith Barrett, for ideas.
There are likely to be competitions, street performers, public outdoor artworks, maybe music and dance, up the coast from North Shields to Whitley Bay and beyond. It may be that many communities beyond North Tyneside will be taking part.
The idea I'm wanting to pitch I imagined, initially, as some form of flash mob activity. I pictured a crowd converging on a pre-arranged spot along the coast, for example on the beach below Rendezvous Cafe, and, for five minutes or so engaging in some kind of coordinated activity, before dispersing. The best example I found online was a Big Freeze at Grand Central Station, New York.
But I think the idea's evolved. World Ocean Day exists to raise our respect for the oceans, and our awareness of the need to protect world oceans from global warming, pollution and exploitation. What if, rather than a self-selecting group of a hundred or so flash mobbers (might still work this way, though?), North Tyneside promoted the participation of everyone at the coastal festival in a two-minute (say) Big Freeze - a Free Seas Freeze.
Creating a free seas frieze, a kind of time-limited 3D postcard along Tynemouth Long Sands, Cullercoats Bay, Whitley Bay and up to St Mary's Lighthouse. There could be some kind of time signal, a flare, cannon burst or fog-horn. Everyone who wanted to would stop still. And after two minutes we'd unfreeze.
That's my pitch, anyway. At present.
June 8th is World Ocean Day. North Tyneside is planning a coastwide weekend of events, and a whole bunch of artists and other creatives (but hey, we're all creatives, right?) have been approached by North Tyneside's Artistic Director, Keith Barrett, for ideas.
There are likely to be competitions, street performers, public outdoor artworks, maybe music and dance, up the coast from North Shields to Whitley Bay and beyond. It may be that many communities beyond North Tyneside will be taking part.
The idea I'm wanting to pitch I imagined, initially, as some form of flash mob activity. I pictured a crowd converging on a pre-arranged spot along the coast, for example on the beach below Rendezvous Cafe, and, for five minutes or so engaging in some kind of coordinated activity, before dispersing. The best example I found online was a Big Freeze at Grand Central Station, New York.
But I think the idea's evolved. World Ocean Day exists to raise our respect for the oceans, and our awareness of the need to protect world oceans from global warming, pollution and exploitation. What if, rather than a self-selecting group of a hundred or so flash mobbers (might still work this way, though?), North Tyneside promoted the participation of everyone at the coastal festival in a two-minute (say) Big Freeze - a Free Seas Freeze.
Creating a free seas frieze, a kind of time-limited 3D postcard along Tynemouth Long Sands, Cullercoats Bay, Whitley Bay and up to St Mary's Lighthouse. There could be some kind of time signal, a flare, cannon burst or fog-horn. Everyone who wanted to would stop still. And after two minutes we'd unfreeze.
That's my pitch, anyway. At present.
Thursday, 26 March 2009
867 - Wild Money
I'm riffing on Jay Griffith's books, Pip Pip (which I've just started) and Wild (which was a beautiful and formative read a year back). Also a post I wrote near the start of the blog, and the pressure I place myself under, from time to time, to justify what I do in monetary terms - which is a question to do, I think, with identity.
In Pip Pip Jay writes about cultural perceptions of Time. She juxtaposes the abstract measurement of time favoured by the West, all clockwork and binary, with the innate sense of time we carry within us. The sense that is wild, and therefore of a piece with the rest of Nature, that monitors where we are in time by our hunger patterns, the impact of light on skin, the buzz and birdsong of other lives around us. Abstraction, she argues, seems thin by comparison.
Much of what she argues is concerned with the politics of cultural driving forces, and therefore that other abstraction, money. She quotes the 'miserable' Benjamin Franklin, who made the link explicitly: "time is money". And what I'm wondering is (and probably in her book she gets to this, but I've not read it yet), is there, therefore, such a thing as wild money?
I like my idea about money being a work battery, abstracted from the sheer sweaty bulk of a sack of produce (or the time taken to harvest it) to the point where it can be contained as a row of imprints on a magnetic strip, a line on a bank account. I also like the insight that all it requires to sustain the meaningfulness of that line is a massive social contract, in the same way that batteries store energy, but only if you keep them in optimum condition.
Spelling it out further: just as it takes energy to store electric energy in battery form, it takes energy to store kinetic energy in monetary form, so that all one does, by maintaining a viable financial system, is shift the burden of work from the harvester to the gold-miners, accountants, IT people, forgery prevention units, till manufacturers, wallet-makers, educators, nutritionists (because it takes wits to remember all those pin numbers) and yes, defense establishment, who perpetuate the systems of symbols that a successful financial transaction rides on. And if, in the end, all we are talking about is the reallocation of energy expenditure from one area to another, isn't it fair to say that money, as much as anything else in nature, is ultimately subject to the laws of conservation of energy?
I think this prepares the ground. If we have a spectrum of increasing abstraction, with graft at one end and financial currency at the other, and if we also recognise that neither end is more or less energy efficient than the other, we can begin to argue that exchange can legitimately occur anywhere along that line. We can proceed to argue that anything that involves the reciprocation of effort for effort is worthy of the term 'money', and that the imposition of one form of currency on a people is an act of cultural imperialism. We can start to celebrate the varieties of moneys available to us, just as Jay celebrates the varieties of time. Indeed we can start to talk meaningful of 'worth' across peoples, and even species, holistically.
I don't think this is to say, necessarily, that modernism 'got it wrong' - just that there is no reason to proceed as if modernism is the only right there can ever be. Richard Kearney, postmodern philosopher and Irish peace-broker, among other things, is right on this: Postmodernism, which gets a bad press in some quarters, is surely about the recognition that modernism is only one of many many cultural, indeed personal, stories open to us. It is therefore truly wild. So it would seem entirely reasonable if, just as postmodernism has led to the rediscovery of diversity and paganism at the heart of our cultural and religious systems, so too we should be rediscovering our place within a cosmically wild economy.
In Pip Pip Jay writes about cultural perceptions of Time. She juxtaposes the abstract measurement of time favoured by the West, all clockwork and binary, with the innate sense of time we carry within us. The sense that is wild, and therefore of a piece with the rest of Nature, that monitors where we are in time by our hunger patterns, the impact of light on skin, the buzz and birdsong of other lives around us. Abstraction, she argues, seems thin by comparison.
Much of what she argues is concerned with the politics of cultural driving forces, and therefore that other abstraction, money. She quotes the 'miserable' Benjamin Franklin, who made the link explicitly: "time is money". And what I'm wondering is (and probably in her book she gets to this, but I've not read it yet), is there, therefore, such a thing as wild money?
I like my idea about money being a work battery, abstracted from the sheer sweaty bulk of a sack of produce (or the time taken to harvest it) to the point where it can be contained as a row of imprints on a magnetic strip, a line on a bank account. I also like the insight that all it requires to sustain the meaningfulness of that line is a massive social contract, in the same way that batteries store energy, but only if you keep them in optimum condition.
Spelling it out further: just as it takes energy to store electric energy in battery form, it takes energy to store kinetic energy in monetary form, so that all one does, by maintaining a viable financial system, is shift the burden of work from the harvester to the gold-miners, accountants, IT people, forgery prevention units, till manufacturers, wallet-makers, educators, nutritionists (because it takes wits to remember all those pin numbers) and yes, defense establishment, who perpetuate the systems of symbols that a successful financial transaction rides on. And if, in the end, all we are talking about is the reallocation of energy expenditure from one area to another, isn't it fair to say that money, as much as anything else in nature, is ultimately subject to the laws of conservation of energy?
I think this prepares the ground. If we have a spectrum of increasing abstraction, with graft at one end and financial currency at the other, and if we also recognise that neither end is more or less energy efficient than the other, we can begin to argue that exchange can legitimately occur anywhere along that line. We can proceed to argue that anything that involves the reciprocation of effort for effort is worthy of the term 'money', and that the imposition of one form of currency on a people is an act of cultural imperialism. We can start to celebrate the varieties of moneys available to us, just as Jay celebrates the varieties of time. Indeed we can start to talk meaningful of 'worth' across peoples, and even species, holistically.
I don't think this is to say, necessarily, that modernism 'got it wrong' - just that there is no reason to proceed as if modernism is the only right there can ever be. Richard Kearney, postmodern philosopher and Irish peace-broker, among other things, is right on this: Postmodernism, which gets a bad press in some quarters, is surely about the recognition that modernism is only one of many many cultural, indeed personal, stories open to us. It is therefore truly wild. So it would seem entirely reasonable if, just as postmodernism has led to the rediscovery of diversity and paganism at the heart of our cultural and religious systems, so too we should be rediscovering our place within a cosmically wild economy.
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
868 - Pip Pip Quote
This, on the fourth page, probably sums up Jay Griffith's book (but thankfully there are 314 more joyously to read):
"The Karen always know the time. Living with them for six months it became clear to me that the only person with a watch and the only person who could never tell the time was, well, myself. To the Karen, the forest over the course of a day supplied a symphony of time, provided you knew the score. The morning held simplicity in its damp air, unlike the evening's denser wet when steam and smoke thickened the air. Backlit by sun a huge waxy banana leaf at noon became green-gold stained glass, cathedralizing time. Barely one of my hours later, it was just a matt, bottle-green leaf, useful verdure, a plate for rice, a food-wrapper. Birds sang differently at different hours and while the soloists of life are always with us, the whole orchestra of the forest altered, shifting with the sun's day, all the noisy relations between birds, animals and insects, making chords of time played in all the instrumental interactions. Western time seems a thin, thin reedy peep of a thing by comparison."
Monday, 2 February 2009
916 - Orange
Samuel Coleridge got Xanadu when he dreamt a poem. I got this:
This is an orange
In a white cardy,
Eating eel pie
And feeling mardy.
Go figure. (Found image here.)
Though actually the muffling of a perfectly round, freshly scented fruit in a white wool fash-catastrophe would make anyone feel mardy. I sense I am dreaming I just need to let me be...
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