Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Thursday, 9 December 2010
672 - TV
Just wondering to what extent TV schedules throw up festival experiences in place of real life carnivalling. Participation in watching and water-cooler moments afterwards could be distant cousins to shared feast-days and acts of revelry like apple-bobbing or wassailing.
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
718 - Whitley Bay Memories
"But kindly lower your gaze to the lone car. It is a Vauxhall 14 and it is parked outside 7 The Links, my old home. Despite being 16 years old it was the coveted company car of my dad, Eric, works manager for a firm that made concrete lamp standards at the old Cramlington Airship Shed." (Colin Henderson)
From a short collection of Whitley Bay memories submitted by users of the Francis Frith website - worth a read!
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
720 - Art; Cosmologies; Bill Thompson
All at Cafe Culture Newcastle last night.
Bill Thompson is a new media critic, a self-described early adopter and technology addict - from last night, quote, 'the way I'm addicted to breathing'. On-line he bases himself here and among other places, here.
He was talking about the digital revolution as one of only a handful of civilization-changing events in human history. It's on a par, he says, with the discoveries of fire and agriculture. As with learning to read (he plugged Proust and the Squid heavily) it is an event which requires the brain to be rewired in new ways. So it raises profound questions about the ways we perceive and structure our identity.
This resonates with controversial works by Rita Carter and Susan Greenfield, which I've blogged about here and here. Not to say that Bill Thompson would agree with them (he would find Susan Greenfield, I suspect, unnecessarily alarmist). But he would find them rather interesting.
Bill sees himself, as an early adopter of technology, as one of a small but significant group of people who define their identities, in part at least, through their life on the web. He defines identity as a loose and provisional 'make-do' response to the essentially random experience of human existence. If the building of this identity should come to include networks of friends on-line, at the expense of those off-line, and if it should include multiple or single avatars, and a growing sense of what is normative, socially, for behaviour on-line, then that's just evolution. It's exciting, anyway.
I asked him what kind of art we might expect to see created through this and other identity-shifting technologies. I've a few ideas already (storying: life-story manipulation as an artform in its own right). He had his own insights.
He could see, he said, in five years' time, interactive user-generated art displays on every surface in the cityscape. Some kind of crowd-sourced imagery, some expression of bottom-up, swarm intelligence, perhaps. He defined art as a manipulation of the technology, to see how far it might go, what beauty could be made from it. I liked that - and it chimes with ideas from evolutionary psychology about art being a demonstration of one's mastery of symbolic thinking, or a demonstration of one's personality, one's openness, for example, and one's intelligence. (More on this another time.)
This was his second answer, however. I liked his first, too, offered provocatively and not pursued. He suggested we should see the network as the artform - the shimmering artform, he called it. The technology to be the artform, and as such, appreciated, untouched, for what it is.
This resonates with me for two related reasons. First, I suspect that if by network he means not just the technology, but the identity shift that accommodating the technology requires, he is providing an image by which I can expand my thinking on storying. Having considered how one can begin to manipulate one's own identity, I now want to explore questions of shared identity. Few stories, after all, concern just one person. Bill Thompson's 'network' will include his friendship network, as well as the hard/soft ware that supports it. Perhaps it can be demonstrated that the proper way to think about networks (including even the inorganic ones) is through narrative.
Second, my ears pricked up at his use of the word shimmering. This is the language of spirit and transcendence. It is religious. Only holy things are pristine. Stars shimmer in the night sky. I remembered the way Steven Johnson started his book, Emergence:
I suspect that for Bill Thompson, the network is such a shape. And if so (and the word was used last night), perhaps he is engaged in building a network-shaped cosmology.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce are archaeologists with an interest in what ancient cultures can tell us about the generation of cosmologies. Their book Inside the Neolithic Mind argues that it is a fundamental of human consciousness that new technologies arise alongside imaginative conceptions of the world and humanity's place in it. Sometimes it appears that the cosmology drives the technological advance, in contrast to materialist theories which have argued that new cosmologies come about only as a response to environmental and technological change. If religion's supernatural accretions are separated from its basis in human consciousness, they argue, it can be harnessed by science as a cradle for technological advance. The book focuses on the Neolithic or agricultural revolution - in other words, it is about the second civilization-changing event in human history. To reiterate, Bill Thompson holds that we are witnessing in the digital revolution a third.
On a personal note, I've already expressed my wish to work within a natural world view, this despite personal experiences it is hard not to label supernatural. I'd rather be scientifically rigorous about interrogating such experiences. Any supernatural conception of Love worth supporting has, in my book, to allow us the experience of a totally natural universe, however much else could be going on. If something unscientific, unnatural, happens, then I'd rather redefine science to include it than create a second domain that science cannot touch. That statement might mean my own position is hopelessly untenable (time will tell, I guess), but it does at least allow me to advocate the conclusions of Lewis-Williams and Pearce as a scientifically-literate way forward into the digital age.
Bill Thompson is a new media critic, a self-described early adopter and technology addict - from last night, quote, 'the way I'm addicted to breathing'. On-line he bases himself here and among other places, here.
He was talking about the digital revolution as one of only a handful of civilization-changing events in human history. It's on a par, he says, with the discoveries of fire and agriculture. As with learning to read (he plugged Proust and the Squid heavily) it is an event which requires the brain to be rewired in new ways. So it raises profound questions about the ways we perceive and structure our identity.
This resonates with controversial works by Rita Carter and Susan Greenfield, which I've blogged about here and here. Not to say that Bill Thompson would agree with them (he would find Susan Greenfield, I suspect, unnecessarily alarmist). But he would find them rather interesting.
Bill sees himself, as an early adopter of technology, as one of a small but significant group of people who define their identities, in part at least, through their life on the web. He defines identity as a loose and provisional 'make-do' response to the essentially random experience of human existence. If the building of this identity should come to include networks of friends on-line, at the expense of those off-line, and if it should include multiple or single avatars, and a growing sense of what is normative, socially, for behaviour on-line, then that's just evolution. It's exciting, anyway.
I asked him what kind of art we might expect to see created through this and other identity-shifting technologies. I've a few ideas already (storying: life-story manipulation as an artform in its own right). He had his own insights.
He could see, he said, in five years' time, interactive user-generated art displays on every surface in the cityscape. Some kind of crowd-sourced imagery, some expression of bottom-up, swarm intelligence, perhaps. He defined art as a manipulation of the technology, to see how far it might go, what beauty could be made from it. I liked that - and it chimes with ideas from evolutionary psychology about art being a demonstration of one's mastery of symbolic thinking, or a demonstration of one's personality, one's openness, for example, and one's intelligence. (More on this another time.)
This was his second answer, however. I liked his first, too, offered provocatively and not pursued. He suggested we should see the network as the artform - the shimmering artform, he called it. The technology to be the artform, and as such, appreciated, untouched, for what it is.
This resonates with me for two related reasons. First, I suspect that if by network he means not just the technology, but the identity shift that accommodating the technology requires, he is providing an image by which I can expand my thinking on storying. Having considered how one can begin to manipulate one's own identity, I now want to explore questions of shared identity. Few stories, after all, concern just one person. Bill Thompson's 'network' will include his friendship network, as well as the hard/soft ware that supports it. Perhaps it can be demonstrated that the proper way to think about networks (including even the inorganic ones) is through narrative.
Second, my ears pricked up at his use of the word shimmering. This is the language of spirit and transcendence. It is religious. Only holy things are pristine. Stars shimmer in the night sky. I remembered the way Steven Johnson started his book, Emergence:
Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods.... These shapes are... a way of evoking an era and its peculiar obsessions. For individuals living within these periods, the shapes are cognitive building blocks, tools for thought.
(p.22)
I suspect that for Bill Thompson, the network is such a shape. And if so (and the word was used last night), perhaps he is engaged in building a network-shaped cosmology.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce are archaeologists with an interest in what ancient cultures can tell us about the generation of cosmologies. Their book Inside the Neolithic Mind argues that it is a fundamental of human consciousness that new technologies arise alongside imaginative conceptions of the world and humanity's place in it. Sometimes it appears that the cosmology drives the technological advance, in contrast to materialist theories which have argued that new cosmologies come about only as a response to environmental and technological change. If religion's supernatural accretions are separated from its basis in human consciousness, they argue, it can be harnessed by science as a cradle for technological advance. The book focuses on the Neolithic or agricultural revolution - in other words, it is about the second civilization-changing event in human history. To reiterate, Bill Thompson holds that we are witnessing in the digital revolution a third.
On a personal note, I've already expressed my wish to work within a natural world view, this despite personal experiences it is hard not to label supernatural. I'd rather be scientifically rigorous about interrogating such experiences. Any supernatural conception of Love worth supporting has, in my book, to allow us the experience of a totally natural universe, however much else could be going on. If something unscientific, unnatural, happens, then I'd rather redefine science to include it than create a second domain that science cannot touch. That statement might mean my own position is hopelessly untenable (time will tell, I guess), but it does at least allow me to advocate the conclusions of Lewis-Williams and Pearce as a scientifically-literate way forward into the digital age.
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
811 - Woden's Day
...is the name of this year's Tynemouth Pageant.
It dramatises life on the Northumbrian coast fifteen hundred years ago, as Northumbrian culture flowered, and ends with the stirring recitation of an Anglo-Saxon battle hymn. As a student of Anglo-Saxon poetry I can tell you you don't, you really don't, get that every day!
Three more performances in the grounds of Tynemouth Priory at 7.30 tonight, tomorrow and Saturday.
For a fascinating example of myth-making, with a good sense of community history (and a bit of Rick Wakeman), I heartily recommend it.
Woden chased the clouds away for the wednesday performance, so that, after a late-afternoon storm, the evening was dry and warm when we arrived. Pink-gold sun on the honeyed Priory stonework, and a rainbow rocket-roaring into the sky over South Shields, as we left.
It dramatises life on the Northumbrian coast fifteen hundred years ago, as Northumbrian culture flowered, and ends with the stirring recitation of an Anglo-Saxon battle hymn. As a student of Anglo-Saxon poetry I can tell you you don't, you really don't, get that every day!
Three more performances in the grounds of Tynemouth Priory at 7.30 tonight, tomorrow and Saturday.
For a fascinating example of myth-making, with a good sense of community history (and a bit of Rick Wakeman), I heartily recommend it.
Woden chased the clouds away for the wednesday performance, so that, after a late-afternoon storm, the evening was dry and warm when we arrived. Pink-gold sun on the honeyed Priory stonework, and a rainbow rocket-roaring into the sky over South Shields, as we left.
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.
840 - Cometh The Hour...
Closed my book on multiple personalities before reading the synopses of creative persona, and went to Morrisons instead.
On the way back I bumped into a guy I worked with at Seven Stories, digitising old reel-to-reel tapes. He told me he'd just completed an oral history project in Suffolk, for which he'd bought a CD robot, capable of cutting individual disks, and printing them with unique labels.
He is planning to use the machine, in his musician's guise, with musician friends, one of whom is his teenage daughter, a guitarist. He told me about the group - how they span thirty-three years; how he is proud that his daughter, when school allows, can tour with them. He says they are anti-rock (the way, I think, punk or radical folk can be anti-rock: something uncategorisable, new). Sometimes they'll gig as slow as possible, like a slow-bike race, I guess.
We talked about awakening creative energy. Now's time for a fresh burst of it. Like King Arthur, he said: when England needs him, he's there waking up.
Rough times ahead, however you view it, if the seventies are back economically, and the eighties, around the corner ready to plunder and despoil what's left. Good to know King Arthur and his bards and battlers are already shaking free of the soil: grassroots against intolerance and the dead hands of exploitation and bigotry.
On the way back I bumped into a guy I worked with at Seven Stories, digitising old reel-to-reel tapes. He told me he'd just completed an oral history project in Suffolk, for which he'd bought a CD robot, capable of cutting individual disks, and printing them with unique labels.
He is planning to use the machine, in his musician's guise, with musician friends, one of whom is his teenage daughter, a guitarist. He told me about the group - how they span thirty-three years; how he is proud that his daughter, when school allows, can tour with them. He says they are anti-rock (the way, I think, punk or radical folk can be anti-rock: something uncategorisable, new). Sometimes they'll gig as slow as possible, like a slow-bike race, I guess.
We talked about awakening creative energy. Now's time for a fresh burst of it. Like King Arthur, he said: when England needs him, he's there waking up.
Rough times ahead, however you view it, if the seventies are back economically, and the eighties, around the corner ready to plunder and despoil what's left. Good to know King Arthur and his bards and battlers are already shaking free of the soil: grassroots against intolerance and the dead hands of exploitation and bigotry.
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.]
Thursday, 26 March 2009
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."
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
879 - Two Quotes on Identity and Civil Rights
The first from Susan Greenfield:
The second from David Lewis-Williams, and anthropologist writing about Upper Paleolithic cave painting
The two authors are writing about the same subject, creativity interacting with community, but Greenfield writes about the 21st century, Lewis-Williams about the 120th century BC. Both recognise the potential for social discrimination in the way creativity is handled.
Three things chill me about Greenfield's analysis.
The first is that, although she herself does not advocate the suppression of creativity (explicitly, she chooses 'a different tack', though not before sketching the social engineering that would be necessary in order to limit the number of creative people to a minority), other policy makers, more pragmatic and less ethically motivated, might.
The second is that I strongly suspect that her partition of life into four equal mindsets - creative, individualist, community-minded and full of wild abandon - is simply wrong. Rather, it seems to me, creativity expresses itself through the other mindsets, allowing us to transcend them. Categorising creativity on a par with the others implies that there are times when creativity is not appropriate, but, say, drudgery for the common good is. But doesn't this remove the imagination that could transform the drudgery, through hope of better times, subversive humour, and inventiveness? Leading rapidly to a situation where those that are privileged are able to remove themselves from the need to slog, at the expense, by default, of those - the identity-poor? - whom they legislate to stay in place, keeping an unequal society ticking over.
The third is that Greenfield assumes that only thanks to technology do we have the ability to shape a fully integrated human life. This theory hobbles us, tying us to tools that only the rich, individually and as nations, can afford. It belies the evidence of evolution and extant hunter-gatherer communities, as Lewis-Williams' quote implies, as well as those creatives who we let ourselves celebrate, but maintain are dysfunctional, forgetting that their dysfunctionality is as likely to be a product of the suppression of creativity elsewhere in post-agricultural society as it is a personal disability. If only technology can fix it, we have a license for physical intervention and legislation. But if it is part of our humanity to be creative, such restriction can at best challenge us, at worst harm us.
What would it actually be like to have a community where everyone was fired up, excited by the act of revelation and discovery, with such a strong and robust sense of self that each was impervious to the needs or reactions of others?...
One answer might be to limit the number of those in society who were creative...
[Or] lets take a different tack. Perhaps the answer might lie, not in contriving different stereotypes, but in drawing on the advantage that each offers to society.... All four scenarios - Someone, Nobody, Anyone and Eureka - have their place in the narrative of a human life story, as well as in enabling a fully functional and successful society. The problem until now has been that the balance hasn't been right - neither for the individual nor for the particualar society in which they live. But now, for the first time in human history, the technology is there to enable us to have not just the technological toolkit but also the time and space to shape a world that creates an environment where all four personas can be developed into an integrated portfolio....
(Greenfield, i.d., pp. 290-1)
The second from David Lewis-Williams, and anthropologist writing about Upper Paleolithic cave painting
Here I examine interaction of mental activity and social context: how, I ask, do notions about human experience that are shared by a community impinge on the mental activity of individuals and how does socially controlled access to certain mental states become a foundation for social discrimination?
(Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, Thames & Hudson, 2002, pp. 9-10)
The two authors are writing about the same subject, creativity interacting with community, but Greenfield writes about the 21st century, Lewis-Williams about the 120th century BC. Both recognise the potential for social discrimination in the way creativity is handled.
Three things chill me about Greenfield's analysis.
The first is that, although she herself does not advocate the suppression of creativity (explicitly, she chooses 'a different tack', though not before sketching the social engineering that would be necessary in order to limit the number of creative people to a minority), other policy makers, more pragmatic and less ethically motivated, might.
The second is that I strongly suspect that her partition of life into four equal mindsets - creative, individualist, community-minded and full of wild abandon - is simply wrong. Rather, it seems to me, creativity expresses itself through the other mindsets, allowing us to transcend them. Categorising creativity on a par with the others implies that there are times when creativity is not appropriate, but, say, drudgery for the common good is. But doesn't this remove the imagination that could transform the drudgery, through hope of better times, subversive humour, and inventiveness? Leading rapidly to a situation where those that are privileged are able to remove themselves from the need to slog, at the expense, by default, of those - the identity-poor? - whom they legislate to stay in place, keeping an unequal society ticking over.
The third is that Greenfield assumes that only thanks to technology do we have the ability to shape a fully integrated human life. This theory hobbles us, tying us to tools that only the rich, individually and as nations, can afford. It belies the evidence of evolution and extant hunter-gatherer communities, as Lewis-Williams' quote implies, as well as those creatives who we let ourselves celebrate, but maintain are dysfunctional, forgetting that their dysfunctionality is as likely to be a product of the suppression of creativity elsewhere in post-agricultural society as it is a personal disability. If only technology can fix it, we have a license for physical intervention and legislation. But if it is part of our humanity to be creative, such restriction can at best challenge us, at worst harm us.
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?
Sunday, 15 February 2009
904 - A Resolution
After my last post I found myself caught in a bit of a dilemma. It's probably fairly typical. In simple terms, how autobiographical did I want this blog to be? I want to talk about experiences I've had that could make me sound potty. I want to explore where they lie according to criteria such as religious orthodoxy, mental health, and probability. Then, maybe, to ask whether and how they might occur communally (that is, to a group of people, a town even) as well as personally.
Eventually I want to ask under what circumstances, if any, and if it is possible, it could be considered positive action to precipitate them.
It seems to me that the risk of being shot down in flames is worth taking. So over the next three posts (taking the blog to its hundredth entry) I'm going to present some seeming
'inexplicabilities' which are core to my sense of identity. Future posts to refer to them, these posts simply to present them, as I experienced them, as concisely as possible. But I want, over the long term, to be ruthless with myself, scientifically rigorous.
Not sure what I'll conclude (that's half the excitement!), but all comments and input welcome.
Eventually I want to ask under what circumstances, if any, and if it is possible, it could be considered positive action to precipitate them.
It seems to me that the risk of being shot down in flames is worth taking. So over the next three posts (taking the blog to its hundredth entry) I'm going to present some seeming
'inexplicabilities' which are core to my sense of identity. Future posts to refer to them, these posts simply to present them, as I experienced them, as concisely as possible. But I want, over the long term, to be ruthless with myself, scientifically rigorous.
Not sure what I'll conclude (that's half the excitement!), but all comments and input welcome.
Thursday, 12 February 2009
907 - The Art of a Library
There's an autobiographical book by Francis Spufford called The Child That Books Built. Books built me, too. And now I am building a library.
In fact, books built my family - both sides. My mother's family was, and still is, involved in publishing. Long ago they opened one of the first public lending libraries, in Glasgow. My father's double great grandfather was a poet (not a great one) in Blackburn, and, for a while, was Librarian at Blackburn Mechanics Institution. A contemporary described his home as being 'literally wainscotted with books'.
So it's in the blood, I reckon; in the genes, though I wonder what exactly that might mean. My earliest play memories are not of books, but Stickle Bricks. But from mid-childhood onwards I surrounded myself with books; camped behind the sofa with them; carried them with me on holiday, and to university (where someone perceptively suggested I was addicted to them); fashioned them into my professional life as a librarian.
A book, for me, is a shared space, where the tracks of my mind cross the tracks of another. Though the words themselves, and the surface meanings (and the texture, and white spaces, and weight) are objects, they are objects in relationship, and it is that relationship that gives the experience of reading its intimacy and wider meaning. The longer you read, the closer you and the author of your book get, till you share the same experience, and in some sense are of one mind.
A library, gathered over time, and partially or wholly read, is therefore the node of a community, speaking in analogue, the way that the Web can be a digital community. On my shelves I place Steven Pinker, William James and Karen Armstrong, alongside Clive James and Naomi Klein. Perhaps they talk in other forums too, face to face (though this is hard across generations and social divides), but when I read them alongside one another, at least in my mind, they speak together for me. And when I add my words to theirs, and place them in some accessible form, like this blog, or a conversation I have with friends, the community is perpetuated, and opened up to feedback and new voices.
A library is steam-punk cyberspace.
Whitley has a public library, forty years in temporary accommodation. Its coastline extends north to the home of the Lindisfarne Gospels. Its cycle-tracks and waggonways cut inland to Newcastle, where the Lit and Phil was set up as a private library, to serve the same mechanics and worthies as the Blackburn library my triple-great grandfather served in. Newcastle has webcammed a bold new library, due to open Summer 2009. Back in Whitley, the local library is set to move, away from its site in Whitley Park, the park where Thomas Bewick drew his Great Ox, the Ox set to be commemorated in poetry by school kids and adults at the end of March.... You can walk from Whitley to Newcastle, Whitley to Lindisfarne, sure of company much of the way. And the great readers, if neurologists and anthropologists are to be believed, have always been great trackers: they use the same mental capacities.
Not sure where this is leading. Save to suggest that Libraries, like walking and the growth of civilisation, are an art and an organic thing, and seamless with our past and digital future together.
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
918 - Pride and Sympathy
We keep a visitors' book, and ask our friends to write a note in it when they come to stay. This is from Lucy, included with her permission because it's honest and a little bit of town history:
"...We came up to see E and Steve and stay with them for the first time, but we also came to take a little peek into my ancestory. My Gran grew up in the Station Hotel where we had a beverage or two [on Saturday night] and my dad spent his early years growing up on North Parade, a terraced street that my great grandad built. Being proud of my family I was probably biased in my opinion of Whitley Bay, which I feel is a beautiful seaside town in need of sympathetic regeneration to bring it back to the busy resort I visited as a child..."
E and I are incomers. Another twenty years and we still won't be local. But we already feel a similar mix of pride and sadness when we show the town off.
It's fading on our watch. But the true value of it all is the community held by and holding the town, and Lucy and Pat reminded us of that at the weekend, both by their enthusiasm for the history, and by their company. Thank you, both of you. It's been great to get to know you better. And to learn the rules of meshi-mishi (sp?). Rematch!
"...We came up to see E and Steve and stay with them for the first time, but we also came to take a little peek into my ancestory. My Gran grew up in the Station Hotel where we had a beverage or two [on Saturday night] and my dad spent his early years growing up on North Parade, a terraced street that my great grandad built. Being proud of my family I was probably biased in my opinion of Whitley Bay, which I feel is a beautiful seaside town in need of sympathetic regeneration to bring it back to the busy resort I visited as a child..."
E and I are incomers. Another twenty years and we still won't be local. But we already feel a similar mix of pride and sadness when we show the town off.
It's fading on our watch. But the true value of it all is the community held by and holding the town, and Lucy and Pat reminded us of that at the weekend, both by their enthusiasm for the history, and by their company. Thank you, both of you. It's been great to get to know you better. And to learn the rules of meshi-mishi (sp?). Rematch!
Friday, 23 January 2009
922 - On Love [Working note 3]
Everything can be described in terms both of its acme and its opposite. Pick your opposite.
White is an overload of colour, and a negation of black; the removal of pigment from a white light, or the switching of that light on.
Love is a selfless giving, which promises, thereby, self-fulfilment. Therefore its pursuit is pure selfishness and selflessness both.
So the Love Meme possesses two contradictory definitions. Both are in themselves satisfactory: together they create a tension which can only be resolved by appealing to the experience or event of love. This is what it is, because it is what it is.
There's something about intention in the examples I give, perhaps because intention is about a viewpoint. It depends where you are looking from as to whether the interrogation light illuminates or blinds. And only an objective viewpoint allows for light, defendant and inquisitor in clear and co-equal display.
I guess there are two equal and opposite ways to achieve objectivity. The first is to step outside the experience: to become an observer. The second is to so step in that one becomes embodied in each aspect of the experience. One feels the fulfilment of love and also its full expense.
Perhaps the rhetorics of science and religion represent, in this way, a deliberate shuttling to and fro between objective and subjective experience of life (this is, I think, what Mary Midgley is articulating in her book Science and Poetry). They start from opposite poles, and it is not that they meet halfway, so much that each learns to describe itself, both in its own terms, and in the terms of its opposite.
White is an overload of colour, and a negation of black; the removal of pigment from a white light, or the switching of that light on.
Love is a selfless giving, which promises, thereby, self-fulfilment. Therefore its pursuit is pure selfishness and selflessness both.
So the Love Meme possesses two contradictory definitions. Both are in themselves satisfactory: together they create a tension which can only be resolved by appealing to the experience or event of love. This is what it is, because it is what it is.
There's something about intention in the examples I give, perhaps because intention is about a viewpoint. It depends where you are looking from as to whether the interrogation light illuminates or blinds. And only an objective viewpoint allows for light, defendant and inquisitor in clear and co-equal display.
I guess there are two equal and opposite ways to achieve objectivity. The first is to step outside the experience: to become an observer. The second is to so step in that one becomes embodied in each aspect of the experience. One feels the fulfilment of love and also its full expense.
Perhaps the rhetorics of science and religion represent, in this way, a deliberate shuttling to and fro between objective and subjective experience of life (this is, I think, what Mary Midgley is articulating in her book Science and Poetry). They start from opposite poles, and it is not that they meet halfway, so much that each learns to describe itself, both in its own terms, and in the terms of its opposite.
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
928 - The Bay and Homi Bhabha
Homi K Bhabha writes controversially about globalisation and multiculturalism. A snap sentence from the back of his book The Location of Culture (2nd ed. 2004) says that he argues 'that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent and transgressive'. An interview online, by W.J.T. Mitchell, says of him that 'he has told people exactly what they didn't want to hear, at the moments they didn't want to hear it, in a way that has been impossible to ignore'.
This is interesting, from his preface to The Location of Culture, about the writer V.S. Naipaul:
He quotes Naipaul on
I may be reading too much into him, but his ideas strike a chord. They help me make sense, first of my own cultural journey, and second, of Whitley, to which I was attracted because of its edgy seaside town location.
My own journey has taken me into Evangelical Christianity and back out again. Although I found acceptance and comfort in its monoculture, I wasn't prepared to give up my identity to it. I left, struggling with enormous issues of guilt, in despair, and believing I'd committed an unforgivable sin. It took me many years to accept that a loving God (if one exists) has no problem with guilt or cultural rejection. Bhabha would say, I suspect, that my experience of Christianity was one of cultural colonisation on an individual level. Gradually I let myself be colonised, until, at the last, I protested. But by that stage I was complicit in the process of colonisation, and had let go of any sense of an alternative culture I might measure myself by. I experienced fragmentation, followed by a gradual redefinition of identity, in a manner I instantly recognise in Bhabha's analysis of Naipaul's characters above.
I also recognise, in his analysis, commonalities between the postcolonials he describes and the mature, softly anarchic, arctic tribespeople described by Hugh Brody. And I wonder, therefore, whether the process encouraged by the early Christians, of commitment to an impossible story, till one is forced to allow the shattering of one's reliance either on one's newly adopted or one's prior culture, is calculated precisely to bring one to a recognition of one's hunter-gatherer mind, in the sense that this is, in Brody's words, "humanity's most sophisticated combination of detailed knowledge and intuition" (The Other Side Of Eden, p.306).
Which brings me to Whitley Bay. Though predominantly white and working class, it too, like the India Bhabha comes from, has experienced waves of cultural colonisation, many of which it has enjoyed and conspired in. Adopting the long-term role offered to it of a thriving seaside town, in the early half of the twentieth century, it also allowed physical colonisation by holidaymakers on a week by week basis. Now, however, this adopted identity has been withdrawn, to be replaced by one defined by the harsher, and as yet, poorly understood cultural pressures of globalisation. Does it hold tight to the vestiges of seaside glory; or recognise its power-base is gone, and seek a new identity as a dormitory town serving Newcastle? Or is a third, 'hunter-gatherer' option open to it?
Bhabha and Naipaul might indicate there is. One that admits to despair, but proceeds 'towards a life that may be radically incomplete but continues to be intricately communitarian, busy with activity, noisy with stories, garrulous with grotesquerie, gossip, humour, aspirations, fantasies'. That sounds like the Whitley I sense around me. A survivor's tale, profoundly spiritual, anarchic, natural and new. It would not be so easily managed from outside, but it would be truer and more valuable to the wider region because of it.
This is interesting, from his preface to The Location of Culture, about the writer V.S. Naipaul:
It was the ability of Naipaul's characters to forbear their despair, to work through their anxieties and alienations towards a life that may be radically incomplete but continues to be intricately communitarian, busy with activity, noisy with stories, garrulous with grotesquerie, gossip, humour, aspirations, fantasies - these were signs of a culture of survival that emerges from the other side of the colonial enterprise, the darker side. (pp. xii-xiii)
He quotes Naipaul on
the Trinidadian.... a cosmopolitan.... a natural anarchist, who has never been able to take the eminent at their own valuation. (p. xiii)
I may be reading too much into him, but his ideas strike a chord. They help me make sense, first of my own cultural journey, and second, of Whitley, to which I was attracted because of its edgy seaside town location.
My own journey has taken me into Evangelical Christianity and back out again. Although I found acceptance and comfort in its monoculture, I wasn't prepared to give up my identity to it. I left, struggling with enormous issues of guilt, in despair, and believing I'd committed an unforgivable sin. It took me many years to accept that a loving God (if one exists) has no problem with guilt or cultural rejection. Bhabha would say, I suspect, that my experience of Christianity was one of cultural colonisation on an individual level. Gradually I let myself be colonised, until, at the last, I protested. But by that stage I was complicit in the process of colonisation, and had let go of any sense of an alternative culture I might measure myself by. I experienced fragmentation, followed by a gradual redefinition of identity, in a manner I instantly recognise in Bhabha's analysis of Naipaul's characters above.
I also recognise, in his analysis, commonalities between the postcolonials he describes and the mature, softly anarchic, arctic tribespeople described by Hugh Brody. And I wonder, therefore, whether the process encouraged by the early Christians, of commitment to an impossible story, till one is forced to allow the shattering of one's reliance either on one's newly adopted or one's prior culture, is calculated precisely to bring one to a recognition of one's hunter-gatherer mind, in the sense that this is, in Brody's words, "humanity's most sophisticated combination of detailed knowledge and intuition" (The Other Side Of Eden, p.306).
Which brings me to Whitley Bay. Though predominantly white and working class, it too, like the India Bhabha comes from, has experienced waves of cultural colonisation, many of which it has enjoyed and conspired in. Adopting the long-term role offered to it of a thriving seaside town, in the early half of the twentieth century, it also allowed physical colonisation by holidaymakers on a week by week basis. Now, however, this adopted identity has been withdrawn, to be replaced by one defined by the harsher, and as yet, poorly understood cultural pressures of globalisation. Does it hold tight to the vestiges of seaside glory; or recognise its power-base is gone, and seek a new identity as a dormitory town serving Newcastle? Or is a third, 'hunter-gatherer' option open to it?
Bhabha and Naipaul might indicate there is. One that admits to despair, but proceeds 'towards a life that may be radically incomplete but continues to be intricately communitarian, busy with activity, noisy with stories, garrulous with grotesquerie, gossip, humour, aspirations, fantasies'. That sounds like the Whitley I sense around me. A survivor's tale, profoundly spiritual, anarchic, natural and new. It would not be so easily managed from outside, but it would be truer and more valuable to the wider region because of it.
Sunday, 21 December 2008
941 - Rabbit!
...And around the time he was marvellously and meticulously engraving the Whitley Great Ox, Thomas Bewick met, for the first time, the Five-Legged Space Rabbit of Whitley Bay.
It's impossible to know whether it was the Rabbit itself who inspired him to leave behind his boxwood and engraving tools and try random splashes of paint instead. (Though it probably wasn't.)
But a fruitful dialogue undoubtedly ensued.
How the banter must have resounded, to and fro, between the three figures in Whitley Park: Bewick, naturalist, observer and Geordie through and through; Great Ox, cud-chewing capitalist grazer, bountiful and brutish, and Space Rabbit, five-footed, fleet-witted lord of misrule....
The kind of banter that'd look good illustrated in pen and ink....
The kind that, from time to time, post-Christmas travels, might find its way, through a scanner darkly, here.
[Some idle first thoughts about the Space Rabbit and Thomas Bewick. Why else would Bewick have chosen so insistently to call his book A General History of Quadrupeds, if not as a rebuke to the rambustious and contrary Quintroped? What relationship, if any, might the Space Rabbit have with his American Trickster Brother? What better symbol of the discovery, in postmodern times, of a farm-wise hunter-gathererdom, than the Astronaut Coney on Whitley Links, whose scions can still be found, wild and resilient, cocking a snook at the over-developed Townies across the way? And how tasty might the Space Rabbit find all those flowers with which they're about to gild the Great Ox? ]
Saturday, 20 December 2008
942 - Ox
'The Festival of the Whitley Great Ox'. Saturday March 28th next year.
According to yesterday's News Guardian, a life-size model of Whitley's Great Ox is to be created out of flowers and, on the day, paraded through the streets to the ground where, in the 1780s, it used to graze. The Ox was famous in its day. Thomas Bewick drew it.
In the run-up to the festival, school children are being asked to compose poems about the Ox. Michael Rosen, the Children's Laureate and poet, will judge the poems. And the children will be drawing scenes of the procession too. Keith Barrett, an environmental artist charged with directing art projects around North Tyneside, has been instrumental in guiding the development of the festival. More information about the festival, and the fabulous illustration above, can be found in the News Guardian here (from whose site I've filched the picture).
I love this. It's doing what I want to do - taking a true story and mythologising it to celebrate the meaning at its heart. Using that meaning to bring a community together, to create new stories in its wake.
Letting imagination run wild, in three hundred years' time think what such a festival could have become! I'll be following this story with very great interest.
Sunday, 14 December 2008
950 - Wagonways
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View down one of the wagonways, this one built in 1813, I think, that criss-cross North Tyneside. Several venture into Whitley Bay, though this doesn't - it carves a line down the back of the Freeman Hospital; a particularly icy line on Thursday, when I took the photo.
The wagonways were used to transfer coal down to the Tyne. They have been redeveloped as a network of walking- and cycle-ways (skate-ways, Thursday), with information boards picking out historic information. A case of an old story, retold in a new context.
At one time, as wagons rumbled laiden by, the story might scarcely have been told at all, so evident it was (like bothering to relay the adventure of the 308 bus from Whitley to the centre of Newcastle).
Then told by the retired miners - "This was the clart I dug year in, year out. And here's the track that led it, horse-drawn, then steam-drawn, to the docks at Wallsend."
Now, told again, but in a fresh story - the drive to get people walking again, the urge to reconnect with the land around, with people and the past.
A bird flew by as I took the picture, two old boys and a dog just before. Behind the hedge on the left, the Freeman's new car park.
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