688 - A Fair Deal

It seems to me a fair deal that a seer should spend half their life mad. A civilization at the birth of itself has no knowledge, certainly no medical terminology. Observation would perhaps have led to the understanding that humanity, like 'pigness' or 'oakness', is its own value, separable from the distortions it suffers through growth in a restricted (or overly rich) environment. Long before DSM IV, the American diagnostic manual for mental disorders, the seer would observe, internally as well as externally, the mechanics of consciousness, and, from their location within the community, offer testimony that others undergoing fluctuations of sanity, with all that entails, were still wholly human (neither devilish nor divine).

The seer, then, performed a vital role within a group of social animals, and if his or her watch really promoted the integrity of the herd, it is not hard to see how such qualities as 'seer-dom' might evolve naturally, in the same way that symmetrical features evolve, and strength, and other aspects of physical health.

Perhaps we are all seers to a greater or lesser extent. And perhaps civilization, if it fails to acknowledge that we are all as mad as we are sane, is blind to the possibility that it is possessed, intrinsically, of the same divide. Divide? If it is located in the ebb and flow of consciousness, as David Lewis-Williams and others suggest, this is perhaps an artificial distinction. As Daniel Everett, in Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes points out, at least one tribe in the Amazonian jungle, the Piraha, sleep a maximum of two hours at a time, and talk through the night. At a recent seminar on sleep that E attended, it was reported that one in ten of us are naturally nocturnal.

Myths arise out of our experiences in altered states of consciousness. The clarity of science allows for certainty that the twin poles of deepest sleep and wakefulness coexist but do not impose on each other. In the same way, perhaps, the experience of a myth fulfils the same function, from the opposing pole. Karen Armstrong and others divide cultural discourse into two streams, one logos, one mythos. Their work teases at the implications this division has for societies, religious and secular, as they grow and split.

The division of action, and its precursor intentions, into good and evil, is another artificial distinction. Perhaps it is relevant solely in our waking domain, and maybe not even there. In any case, if there is no useful distinction we can make (even religious texts that accept the dualism, like Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43, leave the judgement to God), perhaps it is better to abandon talk of morality for talk of mental health, and of mental health for the flow of consciousness?

In such a transition, the role of seer is as relevant as ever, be it one that we all share , or one that some undertake on behalf of others, or a bit of both. Either that, or we all act, waking, alone, and dream in silence. That might be possible, too, though whether, given an evolutionary basis for see-ing, it would achieve anything apart from a massive exercise in repackaging, is debateable, and perhaps, therefore, better left undebated?

695 - Whirred

[photo by giuss95]

Notwithstanding The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker, that we are essentially a-verbal suggests to me that we can become, perhaps already are becoming, post-verbal.

This, wryly, from Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence: "'Communication' (which always means talk) is the sine qua non of 'good relationships'. 'Alone' and 'lonely' have become almost synonymous; worse, perhaps, 'silent' and 'bored' seem to be moving closer together too.' (p.3)

I was at a discussion at which Sara Maitland spoke, and one of us who had come to listen argued that we are a noisy species, that we survive because of noise - warnings and attraction calls and the like - and that not speaking is therefore unnatural. But I wonder (following Maitland) if it is not quite as simple as that.

I follow Pinker's ideas that our relationship with language, indeed the whole of culture, is sustained through our having evolved brains that can comprehend and develop it; that, to the extent that it is evolutionarily desirable to be fluent, those of us who have an optimum capacity to handle words will, over eons, have passed our capacities down, through genes and culture, so that this generation is likely to be the most fluent ever.

And yet two thoughts intrude. First, what is evolved is the capacity to handle language, rather than language itself; second, verbal communication is incredibly effective, but not necessarily in all (even, perhaps, most) evolutionary niches.

I'll take these in turn (and I know I am using words to do so). It is true that we do, by and large, all speak, but we are not born speaking. What gets us speaking is exposure to parents and peers who can teach us. So whilst there might be a thirst to learn to speak, as there is a hunger for food, what this reveals is a brain fine-tuned to apprehend and adopt words, as a mouth can suck a teat. If every word was suddenly expunged, we would continue to be born with brains to listen for words, at least until evolution had worked its winnowing magic and replacement expressions of life, taking advantage of the distress our word-thirst placed us in, started to prevail.

Therefore a question arises: if our brains' verbal apprehension, creation and distribution technologies were combined with other neural technologies, to effect new communication (or wider than that, life) tools, might we not allow these to grow in place of modern human verbosity. Because not to do so would be to restrict our humanity. This is what has happened with the spread of reading, after all, which co-opts the brain's visual system into working with its language systems. Arguably something similar is happening as text-based communication widens into virtual reality - a phenomenon that neuroscientists are engaged in documenting.

But modern life throws more at us than electronic interfaces. Not least it continues to throw big questions from past eras about our capacity, for example, to adapt to new physical environments. Speech is great, but it'll never work, unmediated, underwater or in space or, perhaps, in noisy, jam-packed cities, where we preserve our personal space only by raising walls through which conversation cannot effectively pierce. And there is always the potential for us to create new neural technologies and subsequently to identify the niches where they can take us, for the sheer joy of it.

Evolutionary niches like cityscapes or wind-swept deserts are presently on the increase. There is no guarantee that the optimum conditions under which our language instinct evolved should continue to prevail. This drives us back to consider what the essence of humanity is. Our modern culture is, certainly, word-based; our post-modern culture less so. Perhaps it becomes more important for us to read one another's emotions projected alongside and concurrent with the brands we are wearing.

Or to adopt opportunities offered by our growing genetic or environmental awareness. If understanding is defined simply as the act of engaging with information packaged and sent between each other, and if we can package that information with greater dexterity and beauty in the form of a butterfly than a word, then our future conversations might be lepidoptic, rather than auditory.

With the hum of insect wings, in future days, words may have whirred into obsolescence.

700 - Haiku! (Bless you.)

This night I last the
Longitudes round, zero to
Zero, northern lit.

705 - Can Do

On the seat opposite me, a can of energy drink, empty. Could get stressed, but the branding grabs me. I've been thinking about the nature of humanity, and in cheap coke fashion, this captures the point.

First the name, which seems a bit overblown for a Red Bull substitute. I mean, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was sweat from the brow of Jason Statham. Carbonated. But we are a bit relentless, really. All drives: sex, hunger, status, vigour, nurture. Strangest of all, perhaps, a drive to create.

Creation is what the font says to me. It's a bit gothic, a bit spiky, somewhere between vampire and cyber punk. And it's a bit 'the force that through the green shoot drives the flower' (Dylan Thomas). Like our daily work is somehow driving a lifeforce through the aluminium can itself, causing it to curl out in fish-hook shoots and fractal serifs, a thousand memes lodging in our brains and into those we are hoping to pull.

Finally, completing the design, the logo is stamped against (into?) the anatomical drawing of a head. It's deeply corporeal, quite unsexy, unless you're catching what the drawing is hinting at: that this drink, this relentlessness, goes beyond the surface. It's non-dualistic in the same way that vampires are non-dualistic, because there's a spiritual edge to the relentless cadaverousness: the promise is that this drink, feeding your head-flesh, will directly inspire your thoughts. That's very, very now, psychologically. The curl of the aluminium, the tang of performance-boosting chemicals, joins with your body cybernetically, affording a glimpse of your transhuman future.

Which is what I've been reflecting on: the way that imagination, a tool, is also a sense, like sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, proprioception. Our vision, for instance, gives us the impression of three dimensions, but as Steven Pinker indicated in How The Mind Works, it's a bit of trickery: all we see are surfaces, and experience gives us the information to be able to round them into full and solid objects. By filling out what is insensible by other means, our imagination supplies vital information: it is the sense that senses the insensible. Because it is working with what is not directly there, it has to create - answers, perspectives, images. It reaches out of itself, to what is otherwise known, what can be supplied from sources, such as people, and sews it into new possibilities, creating technologies, art forms, cosmologies.

What is true for the rest of biology must also be true for the imagination. Just as sight has been honed by evolution, so too must image-making. And just as evolution suggests that sight contributes to our forward capacities for survival and reproduction, answering the 'where do we go from here?' questions as well as the 'where have we come from?' kind, so that we know that sight of a steep drop will induce vertigo, and a buxom or buff torso, sexual stimulation, so, we should expect, is imagination similarly directed.

In short, whatever we are able to imagine has evolutionary value, and should be treasured as such.

Something more. Imagination, reliant on shared information, has an intricate relationship with the objects we create - far closer, arguably, than the other senses with which we perceive those objects. It is imagination that puts the objects out there, or appreciates them when proferred by others. It is not, perhaps, too much of a stretch to suggest that culture, which is the combined results of human imagination, is itself a part of the imaginative sense - a collective tongue extended to taste the fall of future snows.

The minute we begin to think of our creations as a part of ourselves - and this implies a closer than conventional relationship with the tools we make, I'd argue, and a more open-ended, organic one - we are acknowledging ourselves to have evolved already into cybernetic beings. Perhaps the essence of humanity is our relentless pursuit of creative participation in the wider ecosystem. Perhaps we cannot understand fully our relationship with our ecosystem unless we appreciate that we are half-hardwired into it, and actively involved in increasing its and our diversity.

706 - Analysing Dreams

A line of thought developed in conversation with E last night. It must have worked because I slept smiling and woke at 2.30am with an idea for a great new card game. Calling it Aseco, and played it this morning with E, who offered great spousal support: "I hate to admit it, but this is really quite good!"

I'll post the rules and a sketch later in the week - lots happening to do with board games, etc, which it'll be fun to let you know about.

In the meantime, line of thought:

1 Our life, linearly through time, proceeds from sleep to waking to sleep to waking, so on and so on.

2. Therefore, one source of information for a particular night's dreaming is the events of the day preceding it.

3. And one outcome of a night's dreaming is information expressed in the way we live the following day.

4. People for whom, in given circumstances, this process occurs more beneficially are more likely to survive and pass their genes on.

5. Therefore, because we are here, we are likely, unless circumstances change, to find processes 1 to 3 beneficial to us.

6. Elaborating on the processes, information from one period of waking is likely, during the subsequent period of dreaming, to be well-integrated with previous experiences of waking and sleeping.

7. Similarly, information from this subsequent dream period is likely to inform not only the following day, but days and nights (waking and dreaming periods) beyond.

8. All this will tend towards a positive outcome, given reasonably constant physical (health, environmental etc) parameters.

9. Not only will a smooth process of waking and sleeping, with little or no conscious analysis of preceding and subsequent states, tend towards a beneficial outcome, but also disruptions to that process, such as a sudden wakening, and hence memory of dreaming, or induced slip into an altered state of consciousness.

10. Waking strategies to deal with disrupted sleep states will inform the waking and sleeping processes following their implementation, as these will be a part of the greater body of wake-time information to be processed.

11. Similarly, sleeping strategies to deal with disrupted waking states will inform future life experience.

12. Given that all this tends to the beneficial, one is free to approach dream analysis any way one wants, tried and tested or experimental (or indeed to ignore the process of analysis entirely), confident that subsequent cycles of sleeping and waking will allow one to refine and/or expand that technique, in the same way that any other process of learning evolves.

13. If non-linear time is also allowed, and/or multidimensionality of other kinds, as a source of information for dream or waking states, this too, from the perspective of linear time (and perhaps from all perspectives), can only be seen as an evolving process, and as such, beneficial, or at worst, neutral.

14. In the same manner as dream analysis whilst awake, analysis of waking experience whilst asleep will tend towards the beneficial (at worst neutral), over subsequent cycles, and can therefore begin at any point, and in any way.

15. I am writing this because as of today I wish to recommit myself, and redouble my efforts at, dream and waking analysis.

713 - Nature/ Nurture

I think these three quotes all say the same thing. Do you?

Now here's the pivotal point: the neurology and functioning of the brain create a mercurial type of human consciousness that is universal. And the ways in which that consciousness can be accommodated in daily life by human beings are not infinite, as world ethnography, spanning a multitude of cultures, indeed shows.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce (2005), Inside the Neolithic Mind, p.9

[Our perception of aliens] is to do with the ambivalent nature of consciousness and our uneasy sense of being both within the world and outside it. This is, in part, a commentary on modernity, but also it is about an eternal aspect of the human predicament that has been massively amplified but not created by modernity.... For now, I need simply say that I start from the undoubted reality of aliens. they may or may not exist but they are all around us and they are trying to tell us something, possibly about themselves, but certainly about us. In order to understand what they are saying it is necessary to abandon the usual barriers between fiction and reality. There are many important connections between the aliens in Star Trek, H. G. Wells' Martians, the abductors of Betty and Barney Hill, the cattle mutilators in Montana and the committee of beings known as the Nine who speak through the Florida medium Phyllis V. Schlemmer. These connections form an enormous mirror of ourselves and of our age, through which, like Alice, we can pass and find ourselves in a different world.
Bryan Appleyard (2005), Aliens: Why They Are Here, p.9

What is The Filth?
The Filth contains the active ingredient metaphor.
Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases. Metaphor combines two or more seemingly unrelated concepts in a way that stimulates lateral thought processes and creativity...
What is The Filth used for?
This comic book is used to treat all manner of disorders including Internet pornography addiction, insomnia, grief, "mid-life" crisis, schizophrenia, the ignorance of samsara and the 21st century blues, especially in patients whose millennial anxiety and general paranoia has not yet responded to normal treatments.
When must The Filth not be used?
If your doctor has advised you to avoid the use of metaphor.
If you refuse to acknowledge the mocking laughter of the Abyss.
If you cannot face the fact that your entire immediate environment is a seething battlefield of microscopic predators, prey and excreta and, simultaneously, a rich and complex metaphor.
Grant Morrison (2004), The Filth, opening pages.

I think each of these is saying that culture is by definition fiction, because we make it up. And nature is by definition reality. And to be human, we have to hold the two in tandem. We can't avoid it. It's what we do.

I think what we do, what all of us do with this tension, is make church.

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:

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.

724 - Wrestling

In February I turned thirty nine (or as E helpfully, and forward-thinkingly put it, I am in my fortieth year).

Thirty nine is the same number of years as the Church of England has Articles, which is enough to give anyone a midlife crisis. Mine is brewing and bubbling around the nature of my vocation.

Here's the thing: if I'm voluntarily placing myself outside the institutional church, and deliberately identifying with its anarchic expression instead, does it actually mean anything to speak of a vocation? I realise this will be of extremely limited interest to most people, except that vocation is a very common word.

Teachers, nurses, artists, doctors, soldiers, sportspeople, all are said to have one, in the sense, at the very least, that it explains why they take the rough (and I know it gets very rough) as well as the smooth. If, like my dad, the mid-thirties bring to someone a career change, especially one that results in greater social engagement, they're often described approvingly (and with relief) as finding their vocation.

It was suggested to me at twenty five, with my parents present, by somebody I deeply respect, that I'd be a vicar. Then I left church. When I re-engaged, eight years later, I felt experienced enough to make a claim on this insight, but content enough outside the institution not to want to jump through any church hoops in order to have it endorsed. But something new is happening.

Ten days ago E and I met with our good friends, a couple who, though they cherish their years inside the church, are now on a quest beyond its walls. They had been staunchly evangelical youth workers. He became a vicar. She began work promoting a spiritual approach to teaching. Currently they are resting, reassessing. So I told them that I wanted to take my vocation further. The act of asking their advice felt like stepping off the 'V' of the word, and onto the 'O'.

They suggested I attend a meeting of the forum Spirituality in Mental Health North East (simhne), where I could connect with a friend of theirs who operates as a kind of non-aligned spiritual director and celebrant. Perhaps we could arrange to meet up later - which is what, in fact, we will be doing, in, her suggestion, a coffee-shop.

Anyway, at simhne, last Thursday, I also met an academic with a specialisation in the theology of emotion. The idea she challenges is that a spiritual being, as God is envisaged to be, would somehow be unable to identify with emotions. She uses current philosophy to suggest the opposite. As random meetings do, the chat we had has precipitated a fantastic 'penny drop' moment: what's been missing, what I've been avoiding in my vocation, is that it's about the whole of me, body, mind, emotion, whatever, engaging with the whole of the person I meet. I don't know how at ease an academic would feel about their PhD ministering to someone, but I'm absolutely sure that this is what has happened.

There's something, in particular, about the insight as it relates to anarchy and institution, that removes the distinction between the two. I think it's that once you admit your whole body to the kind of wrestling that you are called to - as human being, never mind the vicar label - there is simply nothing more that you can give. How a given society chooses to frame you, and whether you choose to accept that frame, or hold to a more holistic idea of your place (loaded word!) within humankind, is altogether secondary - outside, entirely, the process of call and answer that the experience of vocation embodies.

Randomly I bought, this morning, a cultural history of Boxing, fantastically reduced in a sale at Blackwells. If Jacob's whole-body experience of angel-wrestling is really where I'm at, this book will be a comfort to me!

729 - Perfect?

There may have been a perfect life - someone who grew up without hurting his or her parents, siblings, friends, others - but the signs were never promising. Even Jesus, who, they say, self-conceived in Mary, to avoid the physicality of a conventional conception, burst out of her the usual way, which no doubt, like the more esoteric messages that came with him in the envelope, she'd held in her heart and pondered.

Say there were more like him - men and women who have been allowed to grow tall, full and unstinted, like oaks in good ground. Still, for most of us, life is about learning that isn't so. Most trees, it seems to me, grow as well as those materials they have been given allow them to be. What unfurls from the acorn takes shape in the soil and grows in wrenching disorder as much as in the order of the world it finds around it.

That, come maturity, we learn is beauty, and enough.

But what after maturity? After enlightenment, which I take to be the same thing, a zen proverb says, chop wood, carry water - just as you did before. I know this is true, but I also know that as I grew up, I hurt people. I punched my mother as I sat on her knee. I scared a young woman older than myself as I sought, self-absorbed, to define for myself the limits of what I felt might be love. A friend of hers gave me the chance to stop before the police were involved. That was the beginning of company. I am grateful to him and to her.

I suppose one has learned that, as a tree in a copse is bowed down by one tree, but supported by another, which in time, daisy-chained around the line, draws support from the wounding first, one is soothing even as one tears open; one is wheat, to quote Matthew 13, even as one is a wild weed. Therefore, in the new wood-chopping and water-carrying, I might hope to build good things alone, but at least I know I build good as I build bad.

It is time to build.

730 - Storytelling and the Natural Living Test

The test is here.

As I read it, I sense that the actions it describes pretty much form the backbone of every folktale I've ever heard told. Here, for instance, are the first eight actions (the point of the test being to note the number of occasions in the previous month you've performed them):

• Rocked a newborn baby to sleep
• Made up a story and told it to a child
• Felt the sunrise warm your face
• Satisfied a genuine hunger by eating ripe fruit
• Satisfied a genuine thirst by drinking cool water
• Shown courage in protecting a child from danger
• Shown leadership and resourcefulness in an emergency
• Shared a meal with parents, siblings, or other close relatives

And here's a tale:

Jack, Jack, born in a shack, skinny legs and crumpled back - but his mother loves him. She rocks him to sleep with tales of his father, the wild man she met by the hawthorn tree, who soothed her heart and tore it open, one and the same time. And she wakes him in sunlight, takes him down the long path to the river, where the orchards grow, and gorges him on damsons, and apples, and once in a while sloes, that so fur your tongue that it blooms like the bloom on the sloe-skins themselves, everything except the fruit of the hawthorn tree.

After feeding him, she gives him water, cupped from the river by her own hand, and as he grows, and wants more, by a wooden bowl, and bathes him, gently over his face and eyes, his back and skinny, skinny legs.

And though by now she's old, day by day he is young, until at last one day he is old enough to turn to her, and hard like boys can be, he says:

"Mu-um, I'm hungry. It's noon already and you're being so slow. Today I'll go to the river by myself."

His mother is strong, but a piece of her heart is still at that door long after he leaves the shack to go down to the water. And as he goes, he passes under the hawthorn tree, and there is a shaking and a trembling, and high in the twigs and thorns above him, there is the sound of a baby crying.

Well, Jack looks up, sharpish! and sure enough, through the pin-cushion thicket, amidst the berries, under the lunch-bright sky, he can just see the chubby pink heel of a tiny, bawling baby boy.

Jack puts down his sack and his water-bowl, and strips his coat from his back, but, though he tugs and pulls at the branches, and, never mind the scratches, hauls himself into the tree, the chubby heel, and the baby bawl, stay stubbornly out of reach. Jack scrambles back down again, puffed, and he looks up, and looks down, and across his face flickers a frown half thwarted, half already a-scheming. "I know!" he thinks, "If I can't get up, perhaps with fruit and water I can get the baby to come down!"

He leaves his jacket, and down to the river he goes, back scratched, cheeks reddened, with his bowl and his sack, a plan in mind, and a tingle with the blood on his skin.

It takes him the afternoon, for he's not strong, but by evening time he's gathered enough good apples, enough sweet damsons, even a handful of bitter sloes. He's washed them in water from the river. And every so often he's hearing the baby cry. Finally he judges he's ready. He scoops a last bowl of water from the river, and dragging the sack behind him, returns to the hawthorn tree.

So the first thing he sees is that the tree seems bigger, and the heel of the baby a little further away. And the next thing he sees is that his jacket - well, it's kind of grown full of the hawthorn twigs. A couple of thickish branches fill out the sleeves, and handfuls of berries hang from the cuffs. The jacket sways and the twigs inside are scraping the cloth. Jack puts down the water bowl, and out of the sack he rolls all the fruit, heaping it up beneath the child in the tree.

"Come down, little boy!" he calls, "Good fruit, fresh water. I can't climb up to you, so you must climb down to me." He's a bit nervous about his jacket, and the baby cries louder, which makes him feel edgy, and he thinks about going back to the house to fetch his mother, but that doesn't seem right, and the light is falling, and he's exhausted, and eventually, despite his apprehension, he thinks, "Maybe, if I just sit here quietly, the baby won't be so scared, and will come down on its own."

A little sniff. Brief struggle. Bare back on the rough bark of the hawthorn tree. Crying in the distance. Thorn-prick of fear. Memory of soft cradling. Head nodding. Sleep.

And in the night, up gets the jacket, sheath-full of the scrub of hawthorn, scratch-footed, tinder-trunked. It tilts towards Jack; it tilts towards the fruit; it tilts towards the tree. Slowly it reaches up, and it is free, on kindling legs. Now it scoops at a fruit. Then, squirrel thorn, tiny bramble squire, it steps over Jack's own legs, creeps past his back, dry-inches up the tree-trunk, through twigs to the baby. There is a moment. Then it uncurls a cuff, and on a palm of hawthorn berries, outstretched to the young child, it offers a perfect round juicy blush of an apple.

Now the baby has the apple and the tears stop. It is in the arms of the jacket of thorns. Slowly, gently, Jack's jacket climbs down the tree. No scratch on the pink heel, no cry from the child, when it is laid beside Jack, and in the morning he wakes.

I could say Jack is now straight-backed, fine, vigorous and happy, but he's still crumple-backed, and his knees remain knotted. But inside he's fine of figure, as maybe he always was. His mother rocks the child, half her torn heart for Jack, half now for this wee fellow Apple. And it seems that's a kind of duet in her, for the pain, when she wants it, is gone. There's a girl, oldest daughter of the piemaker, with an eye for Jack. And the hawthorn tree waits, with the jacket on the thornbush at its side all but worn to threads.

732 - The Natural-Living Test

This is an exercise at the back of Geoffrey Miller's book, Spent, which I heartily recommend. I suspect the exercise has been developed by Miller, but it draws on ideas I've found in other articles and books, so much of the knowledge will be in the public domain. It's not easily traceable on Google (I've not managed, anyway). All of which, and because Miller seems a thoroughly decent chap, and because he's motivated by a desire to get the knowledge out there, and because I'm happy to remove the test if he and/or other authors wish, and because it's a brilliant tool for meditating on, and because this blog's as much an aide memoire for me as anything I expect anyone else to read, and because I want to raise a question at the end, means I'm going to stick it up here in full. Here on in, till indicated, the text is as in Spent (pp.331-2):

This quantifies how closely your life matches that of our happier ancestors. Write down honestly how many times in the past month you have had each of the experiences below:

• Rocked a newborn baby to sleep
• Made up a story and told it to a child
• Felt the sunrise warm your face
• Satisfied a genuine hunger by eating ripe fruit
• Satisfied a genuine thirst by drinking cool water
• Shown courage in protecting a child from danger
• Shown leadership and resourcefulness in an emergency
• Shared a meal with parents, siblings, or other close relatives
• Gossiped with an old friend
• Made a new friend
• Made something beautiful and gave it to someone
• Repaired something that was broken
• Improved a skill through diligent practice
• Learned something new about a plant or animal that lives near you
• Changed your mind about something important on the basis of new evidence
• Followed good advice from someone older
• Taught a useful skill, charming art, or interesting fact to someone younger
• Petted a furry animal such as a dog, cat or monkey
• Worked with earth, clay, stone, wood or fiber
• Comforted someone dying
• Walked over a hill and across a stream
• Identified a bird by its song
• Played a significant role in a local ritual, festival, drama or party
• Played a team sport
• Made a physical effort to achieve a collective goal with others
• Sustained silent eye contact with someone to show affection
• Shamed someone who was behaving badly, for the greater good
• Resolved a serious argument using humour, emotional self-control, and social empathy
• Sang, danced, or played instruments with a group of friends
• Made friends laugh out loud
• Reached a world-melting mutual orgasm with a sexual partner
• Experienced sublime beauty that made your hair stand on end
• Experienced an oceanic sense of oneness with the cosmos that made you think, This is how church should feel
• Applied the Golden Rule by helping someone in need
• Warmed yourself by an open fire under stars

Now, add up all the numbers that you wrote for each item above. If your total score is lower than 100 and you do not feel as happy as you would like, write a five-hundred-word essay explaining why you expect your life to be happy or meaningful if you are not doing anything meaningful for others or feeding your brain any of the natural experiences that it evolved to value and to find meaningful.

[End of text]

My only quibble with this checklist is that whilst all these experiences do, I can see, amount to a very happy life, I'd want to see something about the experience of encountering pain, incomprehension, or the thwarting of a plan or desire. I can accept that we've evolved to cope in such situations, and even thrive, and I can also interpret some of the items on the list as if they addressed such a situation - the repair of something broken; the improvement of a skill through practice; the changing of one's mind, for example. I do, however, feel that peace in the face of rejection is a state one experiences throughout life - ultimate comfort in the face of death - and it isn't referred to here.

As I understand it, it's related to the role of the shaman, who may have had a psychotic episode precipitated by excessive openness, as suggested in Spent (pp.219-221), or who may have experienced at the limits of his or her being a light indistinguishable from eternity, or both, but who is certainly present in early hunter-gatherer communities, with something to offer. Is this simply the sense of oneness with the cosmos referred to on the list? I've experienced that, I think, but I've not yet interrogated my experiences fully. So this is where I must ask myself some tough questions, which I'll do in my next post.

And it certainly is not to detract from the great value of the Natural-Living Test as it stands.

740 - Clive James on Real Adventure

A lovely, long, inspiring quote about what makes a fine life, from his book, Cultural Amnesia (but what to do when every other sentence is worth quoting?):

The usual division [in social life] is to treat our daily job as the adventure and our cultural diversions as a mere mechanism of renewal and repose. But the adventurous jobs are becoming more predictable all the time, even at the level of celebrity and conspicuous material success. Could there be anything less astonishing than to work day and night on Wall Street to make the millions that will buy the Picasso that will hang on the wall of our Upper East Side apartment to help convince us and our guests that we are lucky to know each other? I have been in that apartment, and admired the Picasso, and envied its owner: I especially envied him his third wife, who had the same eyes as Picasso's second mistress, although they were on different sides of her nose. But I didn't envy the man his job. In the same week, I was filming in Greenwich Village, and spent an hour of down-time sitting in a cafe making my first acquaintance with the poetry of Anthony Hecht. I couldn't imagine living better. The real adventure is no longer in the job. In the job we can have a profile written about us, and be summed up: all the profiles will be the same, and all the summaries add up to the same thing. The real adventure is in what we do to entertain ourselves, a truth which the profile writers concede by trying to draw us out on our supposed addictions to shark fishing, fast cars, extreme skiing and expensive young women. But even the entertainment can no longer be adventurous if it serves a purpose. It will be adventurous only if it serves itself. In other words, it will not be utilitarian. It has always been a part of the definition of humanism that true learning has no end in view except its own furtherance.

766 - Samhain Moonpath

Walking home between Cullercoats Harbour and Whitley Bay. This photo's for you.

772 - DIY

A lovely moment this morning when, ringing up for a quote from a Damp Proofing specialist, I overheard, at the call centre, a woman insist down her phoneline, "No, no, we are not the NHS."

And I wondered, do they do damp-proofing on the NHS? For what? And how?

777 - The Brethren of the Free Spirit

I've come across these people before - Wikipedia is good here - but this quote from Black Mass, by John Gray, is pertinent:

...Whether the people they attracted were affected by war, plague or economic hardship, these movements [inspired by millenarian beliefs] thrived among groups who found themselves in a society they could no longer recognize or identify with. The most extraordinary was the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a network of adepts and disciples that extended across large areas of Europe for several centuries. The Free Spirit may not have been only a Christian heresy. The Beghards, or holy beggars, as followers of the Free Spirit were sometimes known, wore robes similar to those of Sufis, who preached similar heterodox beliefs in twelfth-century Spain and elsewhere, and the Free Spirit may also have imbibed inspiration from surviving Gnostic traditions, which were never only Christian. In any event, before they were anything else - Christian or Muslim - the Brethren of the Free Spirit were mystics who believed they had access to a type of experience beyond ordinary understanding. This illumination was not, as the Church believed, a rare episode in the life of the believer granted by God as an act of grace. Those who had known this state became incapable of sin and could no longer be distinguished - in their own eyes - from God. Released from the moral ties that restrain ordinary humanity they could do as they willed. This sense of being divinely privileged was expressed in a condemnation of all established institutions - not only the Chruch but also the family and private property - as fetters on spiritual liberty.

It might be thought that mystical beliefs of this sort could not have much practical impact. In fact, interacting with millenarian beliefs about a coming End-Time, they helped fuel peasant revolts in several parts of late medieval Europe. In the town of Munster in north-west Germany this volatile mix gave birth to an experiment in communism....
(pp. 12-13)

If I'm honest, I feel a lot of affinity with the Brethren, though I'd take issue with any suggestion of exclusivity (as Gray implies) in terms of the experiences that have brought me to this point. Much better in this regard is the approach of Hugh Brody, who has identified a fault line between cultures separating those oriented towards Hunter Gathering and those towards Agriculture - with farming dominant in the 'developed' world, and leading to town and city-dwelling, institutionalism and much of the drive behind politics and technological development. I would therefore situate mysticism not with Hunter Gatherering, but with the realisation that fundamentally different cultural paths are open to anyone, and that therefore, what it means to be human is revealed at a point 'before' such cultural allignments are made.

I reached this realisation after making a six-year adult commitment to Evangelical Christianity, and a subsequent eight-year deconstruction of that commitment. I see no reason why, in the process of growing up, everyone shouldn't pass through some variation of this journey. It need not include passage through an institutional religion. It is probably a natural human process. It might not be tied to a fixed age, though maturity is traditionally recognised as occurring around the thirties - the age at which grandparenting becomes possible, when one becomes less focused on parenting children, and more on parenting the parents they have become; on contributing to village debates; on achieving eldership; on shaping a community's culture, having grown up within it.

What is unusual about periods when groups like the Brethren become visible is that because of culture shifts, different cultural patterns exist in a highly visible way alongside one another. Moreover there may not be an obvious lead towards one pattern above the others. It is not, therefore, surprising to find people stripped of one culture and unalligned to the next. These people may well find themselves nomadic, naked, unaffiliated to institutions and traditional moral formations, and whilst some (but perhaps not all) utopian promises might offer temporary and appealing answers, one can also see that if premature formulations are held out against, maturity might develop, out of which these people can formulate and grow/build wholly new cultures.

We are probably in such a time - the death of old certainties, the reality of environmental degradation, multiculturalism, globalisation, the Nano-technical Information Age. Not surprising then that increasing numbers of us might look and behave like holy beggars, at least until our new cultures grow. I'm guessing this isn't the last we've heard of the Brethren of the Free Spirit.

Oh, and John Gray's from Tyneside.

778 - Gregory Bateson and the Long Professional Game

From the 1999 foreword, by his daughter, Mary Catherine, to Gregory Bateson's 'Steps To An Ecology Of Mind' (Chicago University Press):

It was not clear, even to Gregory, that his disparate, elegantly crafted and argued essays, the "steps" of this title, were about a single subject. But by the time he began to assemble the articles for this book, he was able to characterize that subject, the destination of forty years of exploration, as "an ecology of mind". The remaining decade of his career was spent describing and refining his understanding of that destination and trying to pass it on....

Until the publication of Steps, Gregory must have given the impression, even to his strongest admirers, of taking up and then abandoning a series of different disciplines; sometimes, indeed, he must have felt he had failed in discipline after discipline. Lacking a clear professional identity, he lacked a comfortable professional base and a secure income. He had also become an outsider in other ways. Having been deeply committed to the necessity of defeating Germany and its allies at the beginning of World War II, he had become convinced of the dangers of good intentions. The efforts to oppose the pathologies of Nazism and fascism, which grew out of the distortions of Versailles, had in turn created new pathologies that were played out in the McCarty era and the Cold War, and continue into the twenty-first century. In his postwar work on psychiatry and interpersonal communication, too, he began to see that efforts to heal could themselves be pathogenic. His was , for many years, a lonely and discouraging journey, characterized by a distinctive way of thinking rather than a specific concrete subject matter. It is no accident that a group of the father-daughter conversations he called "metalogues"... stand at the beginning of this volume: Daughter is uncorrupted by academic labeling and becomes Father's excuse to approach profound issues outside of their boundaries...
(pp. viii-ix)

Gregory Bateson has been adopted by Neuro Linguistic Programmers as a key influence, because he tutored the co-founders of this controversial movement, but one can see from the content of his essays that his own interests extended far beyond the modelling of human minds which inspired NLP, into anthropology, politics, ecology, communications theory and cybernetics. What I get from the above synopsis of his working life is how it bore fruit only after forty years of groundwork, how it eschewed labels, and how it rings true even now. It's hopeful and inspiring.

Perhaps in twenty, thirty, forty years time, when Storying is recognised as a phenomenon - artform, expression of personal identity, whatever - there'll be room for a footnote about early slogging in Whitley Bay.

Anyway, you've got to admit that Bateson's battling against the odds, as told above, makes a good story...

779 - Wasting Space And Childcare

Someone asked me recently how I knew I wasn't being a total waste of space. I think his concern was that I'm not earning currency. If I'm not earning, how can I be contributing, to my marriage, and to the public good?

This seems to be at, or near, the heart of the recent ruling by Ofsted that two police officers, who have entered into an informal arrangement whereby each cares for the other's child when the other is engaged in shift work, are somehow doing something illegal.

The story is well covered by the BBC, and is also to do with registration and child protection, but I want to leave that to one side. About the financial aspects of the case, Ofsted says the following:

"Reward is not just a case of money changing hands. The supply of services or goods and, in some circumstances, reciprocal arrangements can also constitute reward. Generally, mothers who look after each other's children are not providing childminding for which registration is required, as exemptions apply to them, for example because the care is for less than two hours or it takes place on less than 14 days in a year. Where such arrangements are regular and for longer periods, then registration is usually required."

The general consensus by children's charities and government ministers is that this is a failed ruling. Their advice is to continue with childminding arrangements until the mess is sorted out. They are recognising that to a significant extent, the work that keeps Britain going - indeed, that in this instance allows two people to earn money - exists outside our formal economic structures.

In other words, it is an example of wild money.

Britain runs on wild money. Banking and business are formalised, and their money is tame - pegged internationally and bound into institutions. But surrounding the official economy is a much larger unofficial one. Eight hours a day a woman may work for cash, but that leaves sixteen hours in the company of others, many of whom are looking out for her. Some of that care she (or he) may pay for in cash, but much is rewarded in kind. This extends far beyond the immediate family, into friendship networks, village communities, groups with shared interests, nationally and even internationally. When the formal economy crashed last year, what sustained us while the pieces were picked up? The informal economy, in which the formal economy is couched.

It works small as well as large scale. That guy who picked up the scarf you dropped today? You'll never meet him again, much less reciprocate (though the smile was appreciated!). But it did cost him to stoop and pick the garment up. That was work. Also work was the vigilance with which he had been reading the street in advance, which enabled him to spot the dropped item, and link it to a retreating figure, and be prepared to bother to contemplate running after you with it.

More sustained (of course), more nearly formalised, is the childminding entered into by the police officers, the charitable work, the concerted engagement with a local community.

I am hearted by the response of the Government minister, who has asked for Ofsted's ruling to be reviewed. Though there is one niggle.

That's that the mistake was made in the first place. It suggests, like the question of my friend, that many people are getting muddled about what the worth of our official currency actually is. I don't mean worth in pounds and pence, I mean, what it is actually for.

Several movements are gaining huge ground in the UK which rely on money being wild. The Transition Towns project, for example, is reliant on local goodwill and the unpaid graft of, let's be honest, the kind of people (like me) who are not that concerned with shareholders or the bottom line. If Transition Towns create for the UK the kind of resilience which enables the country to withstand the vagaries of resource depletion, even without climate change on top, would it not be foolish to undervalue what they have achieved? Conversely, if legislation and institutional expectation limit such movements before they get the chance to achieve anything, would it not be foolish to describe such limitations as anything but valueless and destructive?

If we've learnt anything from the past two years, surely it is that it is time to set our monetary systems free?

781 - ...And You My Star

For E; the inscription reads:

A star for you
and you my star

786 - Derren Brown Quote

I missed the show last night, where he correctly predicted the lottery numbers, and will miss tomorrow's, where he explains how he achieved his act. But I've been reading Derren Brown's 2006 book, Tricks of the Mind, where he makes clear his theory that the magic in a performance occurs after the performance itself, in our increasingly contorted attempts to reconstruct just exactly what happened.

So for my money, the performance is still continuing, and whatever explanation is given on Friday will, at least in part, take into account whatever everyone is saying about Wednesday's show here and now. Perhaps he has several explanations up his sleeve, and will choose to reveal the one, or ones, that have maximum impact on the day....

As he, like me, was a naive Christian at university, and as he, like me, still appreciates the 'still small voice of loveliness' (Tricks of the Mind, p. 8) at the heart of humanity, but is, like me, prepared to ditch absolutely everything that religion has to offer, I've got an awful lot of time for him. He'd probably agree that the way he has structured his performance this week bears more than passing resemblance to the Christian story, which has its people in a 'not yet' phase of believing, after the Christ event and before Judgement Day - in other words, at a point in time where the magic is still being elaborated in the mind of the witnessing community.

But I didn't come online in order to write that, just to record a quote from his book that I particularly like and will want to return to. It's this (pp. 116-7):

It is a shame that mnemonics are not taught in schools. The Renaissance replaced the love of the imaginary with a love of reason, and the art of memory, which had become associated too often with magic, began to die out. Later, during the Victorian period, science and information become paramount, and education became about rote learning and unimaginative repetition. As important as these shifts were towards embracing reason over superstition, they have meant we now have to rediscover memory techniques for ourselves. There is also a notion held by many teachers that education should be about understanding and reasoning rather than memorization, and that the latter is a poor substitute for the former. While that may be true when viewed from some angles, it does not take into account the fact that for a student the ability to memorize information is of essential importance, and the majority of students seem to value it at least as importantly as what might be seen as the 'higher' faculties. Especially in the case of younger children, learning such systems can clearly be an enormous confidence-booster and can make preparation for tests much more enjoyable.

I think this insight applies to storying as much as to memory skills. It's about the role of the imagination at the heart of what makes us tick, to which our current society plays lip-service, but not much more...

Hence the rarity of events like last night's on the telly. But maybe things are changing?

789 - Liturgy (2): Psychogeography

On Cheltenham Racecourse I had a chance to put a question to Iain Sinclair. He's (tangentially, at least) a practitioner of psychogeography. In his books (Edge of the Orison; London Orbital; Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire) he explores the experience of walking through various landscapes, mythmaking with the architecture, people and histories he finds there.

He spoke about the devastation inflicted, unwittingly perhaps, on the poet John Clare, who, unable to acclimatise to London's literary life, sought to return to his labouring family home, only to find that enclosure of the commons had, in the name of progress, privatised the landscape he used to wander freely and which had given him belonging and a muse. Doubly disenfranchised, he spent the latter years of his life in an asylum.

Such enclosure currently finds its echo in the Millenium Dome (a space enclosed with nothing in it) and, now, in the site of the 2012 Olympic Village, where you are being photographed as you approach, but where you have no power to photograph back, on pain of the confiscation of your camera. The site is empty, and the architecture to be built on it modern and uniform, but the crushed stone and life-space confiscated from its previous residents was once rich and full.

Sinclair's talk was powerful, and I, and perhaps others after, asked him how, in the midst of cultural obliteration, one might make a proactive stand for cultural rejuvenation. He writes books. What else could one do?

He gave an interesting answer: "Keep moving. Keep finding new projects."

I cannot help but think that this is the way that Whitley Bay will grow: for its people, and those who come to it, to keep moving, keep on walking, keep dreaming, pushing, and pressing our projects to completion.