666 - Resurgence

Yesterday I attended a small get-together with friends who have been inspired by Resurgence Magazine to try and reconnect with the natural environment. We wrote a poem together by linking phrases we had jotted onto strips of paper, then rearranged like fridge-magnets. It was an attempt to capture something of the tentative start of spring, the first light of the new season.

I walked home afterwards buzzing, but forgot to look up to see whether the Northern Lights were visible.

669 - Anniversary Card

683 - Upstarts

[thanks to http://www.hageprat.com/images/eden/eden-tropical-biome-1.jpg]

As Firefox has it, inviting you to clothe your browser in a chosen skin: Choose your persona.

Christianity is Trinitarian, which in conventional terms has rounded edges. At least, of the three personalities, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each has been assumed to bind in, or at least, mutually support the others.

Jesus, by his life, is seen to have left this family to redeem a fallen humanity: those who choose his path are bound back in, where previously, presumably, they were Hellbound. Heaven is seen as mutually supportive, safe environment; Hell as feral, where the beasts that are bigger than you bite, and those that are smaller burrow. It is possible to read the scriptures as promising universal salvation, but only if you assume the storyteller has a twinkle in the eye when the story is told: Oh , the sheep will get to heaven, but the goats will be cast into outer darkness [*But we know, listeners, that no-one will really turn out to be a goat*]. Christianity has, somehow, to incorporate a fall, even if it is wholly happy with evolution as a concept.

But what if the Trinity were a little more ranging? What if, for example, the Holy Spirit were a bit of an upstart, blowing where it will, including in all the awkward places?

If any of these were true, there might, despite the scriptures, be a cause for believing a person, or people, could exist who were perfectly happy to live their allotted span on the Earth, be called into existance at birth, and out at death. Somehow at the end they might become part of the firmament of Love in which dwell all others: they might for the duration be the Holy Spirit, and explain an anarchic streak in humanity, and perhaps elsewhere.

Such a people might live by pre-fall myths, as Hugh Brody, delicately unpicking Genesis, and interpreting its creation stories as wholly agriculturalist (even Adam starts a gardener, and the first murder is by a herdsman of a farmer) suggests Hunter-Gatherers continue to do. Or somehow they might dwell in myths of the new Jerusalem, with the old heaven and earth passed away already. Or not dwell in myths at all, but in the conscious heart of the universe, expanding despite the odds, or expanding and contracting continuously from and to a point of singularity, as Einstein's scientific poesis defines it.

They might find each other out, or simply recognise each other by the twinkles in their eyes, and know they are somehow one, even though the myths, beliefs and practices they have been shaped by are wildly different, even mutually contradictory. It would be for them to wrestle meaning out of the primordial mud, and watch it sink back again (or not watch, as their senses depart despite themselves).

These people would be neither good nor evil, might dream they are deific, but wake to the demonic (remembering that dreams can occur in waking reality, and waking reality in dreams). Finding enough succour in each other and the anarchic Spirit of Holiness, they might be borne by each other through the hard times, and be blessed in the good, directing their blessings to their friends in the dark till roles are perhaps reversed.

They might find wisdom comes midway through such a life, so that they no longer need rely for absolute being on the support of others, but shine their Spirits, enflamed by Love, for the benefit of all. They might even appropriate the myths of others, but only to enfuse the myths with compassion, expanding them past the realms of feasibility till all are redeemed, so that they need not hand the myths back, because they have already given the fruit of them to those they have taken the myths from. (And these in turn have grown their own myths, with which to feed their anarchic friends.)

A model by which we might see such interactions could be the networked domes of the Eden Project, which contain and make possible the ecosystems within them. You go to see the plants, but you also go to see the star-crossed architecture which makes them possible.

Some may be called, from time to time, to explore each other's worlds. The anarchic trinitarians might lower a friend into the ecosystem, or an archaic Trinitarian might fly a kite to the anarchists. A touch of realism, however: of course (of course) each would return to their kind: Model 2 might be deep sea diving, or aeronautics: no-one could remain anywhere without the support of their fellows. (A network of tetrahedrons, extending upwards and down, might just perform the job.)

In conclusion, beyond the calls demanded by individual religions might be a further call, to each and everyone, to which each and everyone responds. I (who am biased in this) might phrase it thus: Choose your persona. Go and Story!

710 - Family

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.

736 - Cafe Culture, Dance City, Newcastle

Very interesting talk at last night's Cafe Culture event, about reinvigorating society's commitment to informal education - the sort you might find in an evening class or a youth club, or simply from the guitarist you know down the street.

Chiefly memorable for me because:
1. I walked into a granite seat on the way to the meeting.
2. I grabbed a seat with no legroom or place for my oversized coat and scarf, which I shoved down the coat sleeve.
3. I bought an expensive latte and then knocked it all over the floor (see above).
4. I was joined on the row by four women who bridled when I tried to smile and make eye contact.
5. I found the handkerchief I had beautifully ensured would be in my coat pocket on the bedside cabinet, instead, when I got home, my nose having dripped through the meeting.
6. I left the meeting at the interval, not before trying to shove my arm down the sleeve with the scarf in it, and getting stuck half way, and pulling the scarf out the other end like a magician doing a rubbish trick.

If I'd stayed, maybe I'd have suggested there might be mileage in exploring the way social networks can co-ordinate informal learning, especially because my old class at primary school is getting in touch with one another, and I'm finding all kinds of things out about where they are now. It'd be great, starting from a shared educational experience, to explore the areas of life we feel we missed at eleven, and fill them in. Great research project for an educationalist. One of my fellow pupils, for example, was the son of an avante-garde proto-punk jazz musician. If I'd known such people existed then...?

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.

743 - Due South: St Peter's Church, Oundle, 1/3

First of three photos from Oundle, at Christmas. Three and a half hours south, by Metro, train and car-lift.

749 - As The Year Turns

By way of a late Christmas/Solstice greeting, here's a fragment from our 2009 Christmas Card.

755 - Cats, Pigeons and Christmas Get-Togethers

A paragraph from the excellent and provocative book Spent by Geoffrey Miller, applying kin selection to family parties and the like:

Thus, the healthiest, most attractive individuals in an extended-family clan tend to elicit the greatest attention and fondness from their relatives. They get more cookies from grandmothers and more job offers from uncles. From this viewpoint, family reunions can be seen as periodic rituals for mutual quality displays among genetic relatives: each individual tries to display his or her physical and mental traits in the best possible light to potential familial benefactors, and at the same time tries to assess which relatives are worthy of receiving his or her generosity. Poor families may have public-park barbecues while rich families congregate at estates in Kennebunkport or Balmoral, but in each case, similar social functions are served. Privileges, hopes, expectations, and resources are redistributed according to quality inspections of newborns, marital-prospect assessments of juveniles, and longevity assessments of the elderly. We all want to look worthy to our relatives, to the extent that they can do anything for us.
(p. 101)

As a recipient of profoundly average-sized caches of cookies I find this oddly comforting. It gives me a positive handle on all the tugs and torsions I've resented myself for feeling, whenever I've been at festive gatherings in the past.

This year, grasping at what is going on, Christmas is going to be fun!

763 - One Song To The Tune Of Another

There's an old guy with a Belfast twang who busks in the escalator well at Monument Metro Station. He raises money for the Red Cross.

Alongside hymns like 'Rock of Ages', and songs I imagine go down well at Working Mens Clubs - '(I don't wanna leave) Old Durham Town'; anything by Roy Orbison - occasionally he places a more modern song in the mix.

Today you've about got it if you can imagine Ian Paisley singing 'Blowing In The Wind' with a heavy nod to 'An English Country Garden'. I kind of think Bob Dylan would have been proud.

769 - Wedding Pic

I'd totally forgotten drawing this...!

It was for a couple of friends I'd met at Whitley Bay Baptist Church, whose daughter was getting married. Each item of luggage references something about her or her husband-to-be.

Not a brilliant image: just a point-and-click camera, but you can pick out some of the details, including Sarah's favourite childhood game.

But man! That took more brainpower to recollect than I care to mention!

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...

781 - ...And You My Star

For E; the inscription reads:

A star for you
and you my star

791 - Fish Legs

One of five fish I've drawn for my friend Marianne, who is putting together a book of children's poetry on Lulu (or similar).

The poem this illustrates, about creepy fish running on land, has a pleasingly shivery Southern Gothic feel.

I drew the fish on holiday with my in-laws. My four-year-old nephew was amazed I took so long on something so small. He decided to draw a fish with legs too, and filled it up with dots, but as he explained to me, it was at least four times as big, and took much, much less time to complete!

815 - Pink Lane Poetry and Performance Night

Second time I've attended this: a good vibe in the Jazz Club in Newcastle's Pink Lane. I was on my own for the first hour, so I took along my drawing pad.

From now on I'm hoping to post a couple of drawings a week. Click on the picture to see a larger version.

Oh and by the way, I've just been stung by a wasp for the very first time. Live the danger! (Ow.)

818 - Deliberate Life Footprint Calculator

My favourite Canadian sustainable living and home education blogger, Nic, has a thoughtful footprint calculator here.

She's tied in sustainable living with wellbeing, so that you give yourself points for proactively engaging in green activities, rather than a guilt-trip for not cutting back on a consumer lifestyle.

Make your own furniture? That's twenty points. Make your own clothes? That's ten. Actually wear them? Another five...

I really, really like this. In fact, I like her whole site. I love the idea that you can build your own culture from scratch, without anyone telling you not to. Niche construction at its finest and most free.

Do check it out.

828 - Today's Found Objects

So I'm out for five hours this morning, and my haul includes:

1. A tiny glade of grass next to the Metro between Jesmond and West Jesmond: surrounded by trees and undergrowth, and covered with beer cans, but definitely a glade.

2. A moment spent with two former colleagues over coffee in Starbucks. They were about to present a bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund: Seven Stories want to create something of an oral history of Children's Literature, contextualising the books within the life stories of their readers. Francis Spufford tried something similar in his fine memoir The Child That Books Built. But this sounds like it's on a different scale. Warm and brilliant. I hope the HLF buy it.

3. A female thrush, no more than two feet away, at waist height, still for a second or two. I said 'Hello matey' and she flew back into cover.

4. The brick underarch of a Metro Bridge, from above. Roadworks had uncovered it beneath a foot of tarmac and rubble. It rose, counter to the camber, unseen perhaps for fifty years or more. Something spiritual about the way it shaped the space beneath into a hump. Brickwork can feel soft, flank-like.

5. A yellow rose bursting out of a laurel bush.

6. A realisation: how each found object I speak of stands in place of the warmth I feel for the people I am passing. I wonder why I don't speak of them instead?

7. As I plan to copy a Google-book into Word, typing - a Herculean task my guilt at the dubious legitimacy of which is only mitigated by my knowledge that the Publishers are sat on a stash of thirty hardbacks, at extortionate price, and are unlikely to reprint in paperback until they've sold the rest - a memory of my primary school teacher, Mr Preston, who used to spend his afternoons copying William stories one by one, by hand, on to Banda sheets, for comprehension tests. Mr Preston merits a blog post (at least one), so I won't say any more about him here.

8. A modicum of mellowness.

9. Time a series of found moments.

10. Whitley Bay.

856 - Easter Early

In case I don't blog over the weekend, I'm wondering if I can give you an Easter gift early.

And this is good: from Susan Blackmore's new book Ten Zen Questions (Oneworld, Oxford, 2009), which - to my great joy - has been classified by the publishers, on the ISBN info-panel on the jacket, as "Gift/ Zen/ Popular Science", in that order -

This brings us to a modern version of the mind-body problem, called the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness: that is, how can objective, physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience? Neuroscientists are making tremendous progress in understanding the objective brain processes; with brain scans, implanted electrodes, computer models, and all sorts of other ways of investigating how the brain works. We can measure the electrical firing of neurons, the chemical behaviour in synapses, the processing of information, and the mechanisms of vision, hearing, and memory. We can see how information flows in through the senses, and how responses are coordinated and actions carried out.

But what about me and my conscious experiences? Where do I fit into this integrated system of inputs, outputs and multiple parallel processing systems? The strange thing is that I feel as if I am in the middle of all this activity, experiencing what comes in through the senses, and deciding what to do in response, when in fact the brain seems to have no need of me. There is no central place or process where I could be, and the brain seems capable of doing everything it does without any supervisor, decider or inner experience. Indeed, the more we learn about how the brain works the more it seems that something is left out - that very thing we care about most of all - 'consciousness itself'.

(pp. 25-6)

In other words, the Good Friday question: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). Why am I just flesh and blood? Where is the transcendence? Where is the poetry? How can I fail to die? What guarantees me? Where is Your place in the world, if we are just neurons and synapses and information transactions?

To which, the Christian I was would have said, "Wait until Easter: that's the point - He rose again. He thought He was abandoned by God, but He wasn't."

And the librarian I became would have said, "That's just a story: one among many. It's a category error to apply the dynamics of the Easter story to hard science. But don't worry. Science, and Easter, say that when I die, the library remains."

(And probably Christianity is just a story, and we are an illusion spun out of molecules. Probably there is no absolute reason why, having defined each other as bundles of interacting neurons, we should not proceed as a society to marshall each other efficiently and unpoetically, like books on a shelf, to the convenience of the greatest number and the shallowest thinking. Perhaps scare stories about challenges by the State to our fundamental identity are alarmist nonsense - they must be if our identity doesn't exist.)

But the artist I am says, "The greatest miracle is that story and science combine at Easter to create something new. And consciousness is neither a spirit, nor a synapse: it is a season. What we choose to do in that season is limited only by our imagination."