838 - Multiplicity

is the title of last year's book by Rita Carter exploring the phenomenon of multiple personalities. Not multiple personality disorder, but the idea that, if one's personality at any given time is a neural map of memories related to a particular situation, and if the situations one is exposed to are sufficiently distinct from one another, one might develop several distinct personalities, to a greater or lesser extent aware of one another, as a normal, indeed adaptive, response.

Rita Carter's argument is that this is normative in today's globalised society. We are parent, student, worker, bully, pleaser, lover, clown, and so on, and the personality we show, say at a party or at work, is simply one of several responses we could call upon. Today's society is transfixed both by role-playing and by celebrity personalities. So identity is defined by obsessive tick-boxing, but also by the philosophy that given the opportunity we'd all shine uniquely in the spotlight. And these influences, together with the freedoms given to us by new technologies, city anonymity, and exposure to multitudes of people, drive us, now more than ever, individually to create and refine new personalities - somewhat in the manner, I guess, that living things specificate as genetic populations.

Wow. That's controversial. Of the book, then, by way of validation: ‘A tour de force -- a compendium of anecdote, research and speculation that is quite breathtaking’ NEW SCIENTIST.

I am interested in this thesis for many reasons. Here are a few:

1. As someone with an interest in theology, I notice that religious myths fluctuate between monotheisms and polytheisms. A God will be fixated upon, raised to the status of Sky God, then left to drift away, to be replaced by a pantheon, out of whom a new Sky God will in time be chosen. It intrigues me that as Christianity loses favour in the West, it is replaced by neo-pagan pantheons. This is happening at just the point in history that our concept of a unique self, to the fulfilment of which we are enjoined to work, may be replaced by the concept of multiple selves.

2. For me, the journey into multiplicity began when, on leaving Church, I was approached one day by a man who struck me on the arm and said (speaking, I felt, of the voices within as much as outside himself) "You are now one of us." I have blogged about this, and my conviction, as it happened, that I had dreamt of the event months before, here. So untangling the meaning of what happened has for me a prophetic aspect to do with my vocation as a post-Church leader. If increasing numbers of us experience an increasingly diverse sense of self/selves, and if this is natural, one would expect those of us pastoring in such communities to have a positive experience of the same phenomenon.

3. Multiplicity, if true, strikes a mortal blow to any hope that we might be able to encapsulate the essential facts about a person's nature on a database, let alone an ID card. This isn't an argument against or for ID cards - just a recognition that the facts they could contain would be limited, and could not dependably state anything categorical about personality or criminal tendencies. Some might find that relief enough to assent to the process of state identification, whilst others might see in it the potential for huge miscarriages of justice, the definition of which we are only beginning to find words for, let alone legal case history.

4. The book Multiplicity explores some of the raw materials out of which the art of storying is fashioned. Storying, as I imagine it, is the conscious creation of narratives of one's own choosing out of the stuff of one's life. At one end of the spectrum such a narrative might be seen to have unfolded over a lifetime, but at the other one might choose to create a narrative over a day, or even over the course of a chance encounter, split second, in a street. Personality, character, is precisely where such storymaking starts: 'Once upon a time there was a boy called Jack.... '. And if multiplicity is true, then the calling up and shaping of a new personality, or refashioning of an old one, might be approached with the same degree of artifice a painter might bring to painting technique, a poet to choices of word and form, and a free-runner to cityscape acrobatics. A storyer would deal in neural networking the way a draughtsman deals in pen and ink, or an actor in script (or its absence).

865 - Aardhox

In honour of the Whitley Bay Festival of the Great Ox (day late), here's a bit of genetic engineering.

The aardhox is a cross between an aardvark (that's the snouty, anteater bit), a horse (that's the general quadruped physicality of the thing), and an ox (that's the sentimental, got-to-tie-it-in-somehow bit)....

The beast can be found splashed on tarmac at the other end of the prom to the Five-Legged Space Rabbit.

886 - Graphic

In tribute to the Hernandez Brothers, whose transcendent punk graphic magic-realism Latin American tales are collected under the title Love and Rockets, my one-day-to-be-written comic about the North East Coast will be called Coves and Coquet...

914 - 42 Days To Ox Mass

Plans for the Whitley Festival of the Great Ox are probably taking shape. There's a newspaper report here (which I referred to in Post 942), and a little publicity in the ether.

The Whitley Bay Chamber of Commerce are planning the event for 28th March. An ox sculpture based on a sketch by Thomas Bewick, framed in iron and decorated with flowers, will be paraded through town. Poetry competitions will run alongside.

I think it's a great idea. And mischievously I've suggested the Space Rabbit - a splash of paint that just happens to look like, well, ... - should caper, Lord of Misrule-ishly, around its heels. But I'm wondering if the Chamber of Commerce know quite what they are doing.

Karen Armstrong writes very powerfully about myth-making. Last year she won a TED Prize for her work on religion and the need to take it seriously. I'm reading her 2006 book, The Great Transformation, in which she suggests that the most powerful myths arise to help people make sense of the times they are passing through. Arise? More than that, are created, by poets, storytellers, artists, priests, everybody.

She identifies a hole in our myth-making. The grand Western myth of Christianity has largely been abandoned in the face of technological advance and a hard-nosed critique of its claims. It needs radical reworking if it is to satisfy a multicultural world, traumatized by world wars and environmental rupture. And I can't help but feel that Whitley's festival is an attempt to do something similar, on a local scale.

Think about it. It's not just that it's a bit Wicker Man, in a kitsch way. Its institution by the Chamber of Commerce and their choice, as core symbol, of an ox fattened for sale and slaughter on land belonging to the lord of the manor, fits perfectly as a myth about successful capitalism. It is easy to see that a town in need of regeneration could turn to such a festival in the hope that its drawing-power might hoist us out of economic and cultural gloom. And if it does so, great.

But, as Karen Armstrong points out, myths that don't serve their purpose get subverted, abandoned. The Eastern Mediterranean, between four and three thousand years ago, was home to a pastoral civilisation whose rituals were peaceful and celebrated life, agriculture and pageantry. Then the civilisation collapsed. Greek myths, birthed in the turmoil that followed, are darker, full of the vagaries of fate. They expressed the experiences of their time far more effectively than processions and fatted calves. Was this a bad thing? Perhaps not, because out of the trauma, over the next five hundred years, grew the Greek civilisation that inspires us today.

My question to the Whitley Chamber of Commerce is, does the current climate look like one in which a myth about successful capitalism is going to ring true? If it does, then proceed with the procession, flowers and poetry, undaunted. It will be a popular success. But if it sounds a bit hollow, then consider reworking the myth a little. Straining against people's sense of the true state of things is poor quality witch work. Put a bit of dark in, a bit of chaos, like the Greeks did. In the long run it will be more effective.

936 - Nursery Rhyme

Hey Whitley diddle
Two bids in the middle
The Great Ox jumped over the Dome
The Five-Legged Rabbit
Laughed "Art ain't just 'grab it':
It's passion and freedom to roam."

940 - Five-Legged Creative Commons

Most definitely, as a found splash of paint with a happy lapine likeness, the Five-Legged Space Rabbit of Whitley Bay hops under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

That means anyone is free to share it or adapt it for any use whatsoever - even commercially.

No attribution to me, by name or in any other way, of the original concept, is necessary. Check the licence out for all the details.

Because the Five-Legged Space Rabbit is a soft anarchist, a trickster and transformer, and really wouldn't have it any other way. Probably.

I'm umm-ing and er-ing over the degree of creative commons licence I wish to apply to my other work - photos and stories, including the characters Wind Boy and Sloth Man - and will make the whole thing clear when my cogitations have stopped.

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? ]

964 - Space Rabbit!

988 - On the Five-Legged Space Rabbit

...who leapt down to Earth like a splash of luminous paint just beyond the Boardwalk Cafe on the promenade, and is preserved as a jpeg here.

The point being that His Five-Leggedness is starting to leap about in my head. I reckon there are a few adventures to be had. I reckon Whitley Bay has not heard the last of him. At the very least, he's wonderfully scrawlable.

There are one or two other characters hanging around the more imaginal corners of Whitley. Sloth Man hangs under the occasional Security Camera, waiting for crimes to occur beneath his shaggy bulk, whereupon he'll slip his grip and thwart, with the help of gravity, the muggings and Attempts at World Domination underneath.

And Wind Boy, a blast of innocence from a golden age, Ariel to Sloth Man's Caliban, with a touch of Fotherington-Thomas threatening to break through.

Maybe I'm being unkind to Wind Boy. I made up Wind Boy when I was seven or eight. At the foot of the track past our old allotment there was a tip, bound up with brambles, mattress frames, and bicycle wheels. The kind of place you can walk across without touching solid ground, and only minimal scratches. I climbed a tree there which swayed in the wind, and pretended I was Wind Boy. I suspect he has the kind of Teflon naivety that adult cruelty cannot touch.

If they've started to turn up now, and I suspect, in my sketchbook, they'll take some shape, perhaps Whitley's in for a Gotham City makeover.

991 - Five-Legged Space Rabbit of Whitley Bay