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...
Monday, 16 March 2009
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...
Saturday, 14 March 2009
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
888 - Identity is Story
In the wee small hours this sounds profound, so publish and be damned.
The civil right of identity is the right to tell stories.
Tell your life story: it is who you are.
Tell a story about your life;
Tell it how you please;
Tell it in whatever manner you please:
In words,
In pictures,
By your actions,
With explanation,
Embellished,
Plain-spoken,
Fictitious,
Silently,
In contradiction,
Many times and
Ways over.
Tell it quietly, among friends;
Tell it with friends -
Tell stories together:
About your kin,
About your kind,
About humankind,
Kindly.
Tell stories about this world;
Tell them about this world and its kind,
And others not of its kind -
Forge your identity:
Only the unkind could steal it.
My stories are not to be stolen,
Made slave, nor slave master:
I am not to be made victim by stories you tell of me.
I am the master of my own tales -
Director, captain,
Beloved ravisher.
Ariadne taught me to weave:
Like you, I weave well.
The grandest narrative is
No narrative at all
Unless we wish it to be -
As the man once said:
"I am forsaken!" - till he
Claimed his stories back,
Or forged new ones,
To tell on the road to his companions,
Or so they told us -
More than could fill all the books of this world.
Our right of identity is the right to tell stories.
Under threat we will see our stories stolen away.
I will not let my story be stolen.
I will tell my stories
Even if to myself.
The civil right of identity is the right to tell stories.
Tell your life story: it is who you are.
Tell a story about your life;
Tell it how you please;
Tell it in whatever manner you please:
In words,
In pictures,
By your actions,
With explanation,
Embellished,
Plain-spoken,
Fictitious,
Silently,
In contradiction,
Many times and
Ways over.
Tell it quietly, among friends;
Tell it with friends -
Tell stories together:
About your kin,
About your kind,
About humankind,
Kindly.
Tell stories about this world;
Tell them about this world and its kind,
And others not of its kind -
Forge your identity:
Only the unkind could steal it.
My stories are not to be stolen,
Made slave, nor slave master:
I am not to be made victim by stories you tell of me.
I am the master of my own tales -
Director, captain,
Beloved ravisher.
Ariadne taught me to weave:
Like you, I weave well.
The grandest narrative is
No narrative at all
Unless we wish it to be -
As the man once said:
"I am forsaken!" - till he
Claimed his stories back,
Or forged new ones,
To tell on the road to his companions,
Or so they told us -
More than could fill all the books of this world.
Our right of identity is the right to tell stories.
Under threat we will see our stories stolen away.
I will not let my story be stolen.
I will tell my stories
Even if to myself.
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
889 - Storymaker
I bought this bracelet from Lebeado in West Jesmond. You pay by the letter, then string the bracelet yourself.
The idea is snitched from Ira Lightman, who is a friend and conceptual poet - a description he threaded onto a necklace and wears to his performances.
I thought, for my purposes, a bracelet would be more discreet. I wear this around town as a vicar might wear a dog-collar, to express my desire to be a 'storymaker' for people. It's loose enough to slip forward on my wrist if I want to increase the chances of people noticing it, and pokes out of my sleeve coquettishly otherwise.
The only drawback is that sometimes the 's' gets stuck on the fastener, revealing the rather more alarming label 'TORYMAKER' instead.
890 - Moon Over Bourbon Street Tonight...
Full moon tonight.
(Sting's brother used to own the building where the Boardwalk Cafe is now, I heard - )
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
891 - The Civil Rights of Identity
Following this post I've grown more and more certain that there is a fundamental rights issue, concerning identity, related to our freedom, as human beings, to choose to define ourselves by labels, or not.
The civil rights movement has in the past fought for equal rights regardless of sex, race or gender. Totemic battles over voting rights for women, the abolition of slavery, and Gay Pride movements, have come to symbolise wider struggles, some of which have lasted centuries. There is now, in Britain as elsewhere, a battle over our future obligation to carry ID cards. This battle could be a lone stand, or it could be totemic of a wider struggle. I suspect the latter is true.
The following is a quote from Susan Greenfield's book on i.d., about the world she anticipates is breaking upon us as a result of information technology. Note the tone:
The book concerns me, because, as Greenfield herself explains early on in her book (p.ix), as an eminent scientist and a Baroness, she has contributed to debates in the House of Lords with, presumably, the aim of informing Britain's future cultural and legislative direction. And it is worth pausing to consider who would be impacted by any attempt to redress widespread neurologically-related irresponsibility. Over the course of the book, drawing on medical studies, Greenfield provides a list of people prone to recklessness:
1. Children;
2. Schizophrenics;
3. The neurologically damaged;
4. Those in romantic love;
5. Others prone to psychotic episodes;
6. The sleep deprived;
7. The obese;
8. Takers of drugs, such as cannabis, that promote, or replicate dopamine in the brain;
9. Sportsmen and women and others who engage in physical activities that alter temporarily the mind;
10. Future-generation users of screen-based technology;
11. Those genetically predisposed to take risks.
Because I recognise myself in the description above, and also its similarity to the description of hunter-gatherers provided by Hugh Brody in his book, The Other Side of Eden, where the lack of checks and balances recognised by the Western World derives from a fundamentally different set of cultural experiences, to this list I would add:
12. Those who have achieved a degree of maturity, having processed conflicting fundamentalist worldviews,
and
13. Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers and those who endeavour to live inspired by them.
That's a fair few people. And although Greenfield does not treat them all equally, she does define them against a perceived adult norm.
The fundamental problem to me is that Greenfield's 'adult norm', full of checks and balances, and shaped by the twentieth century schooling system, not to mention four-hundred plus years of the printed word, sounds simply like the Modernist worldview. And her list of the reckless (with the inclusion of my two additions) is a combination of everything the Modernist worldview disproves of, from infantilism, to addiction, to wild romanticism, to mental disturbance, to the uncivilised, to the hedonistic, to the not strictly scientifically positivist, to the postmodern and geeky.
We live in a world of tribes, and we currently deal with those we take issue with by labelling them. It's okay, they're not our tribe, so we know they are not like us. We're happy, should someone choose a label for themselves, to consort with them, our own sense of identity intact. We're even happy if others define themselves against the label we give them, like Jimmy Dean, or Doctor Horrible. That's the modernist way.
But I meet, and hear of, growing numbers of people who are not happy to be labelled. There is the teenager on the metro who is uncomfortable with being an '-ist'. I understand this is a common attitude amongst Generation Y. There are Christians in the evangelical tradition who reject the 'Christian' label - I suspect this is true across many religions. There are movements in psychology away from the labelling of syndromes. In an age where work is transitory, growing numbers of people distrust the badge of their profession as the mark of who they are. I know of people who do not like to be defined by their marital status, as most forms in Britain currently require.
I'm not calling for the abandoning of tribes, of identities, of labels. I am calling for the freedom to choose whether to be labelled or not. We were not born pre-packaged. We should be free to choose how we define ourselves, or even if we define ourselves at all.
If this freedom is not fought for, or retained, we set up a world of categories and divisions. Systems like i.d cards will formalise them and restrict... what? Hunter-gatherers may give us a clue. These peoples live in a data-rich, unexplained world - the one Greenfield fears, in the form of new technologies, is coming for us all. And guess what? They evolved - we evolved, because we are they - precisely to be able to do so.
Labels direct our freedom to respond to life, in tune with or counterpoint to it, whatever it throws at us, be it uncommon experiences, the ability to participate in mass movements, the chance to risk all for a dream, or for someone we love, the mass-democratisation and new experiences embodied in screen technologies. But we need, surely, to be free to leave those labels behind, take time out, perhaps permanent time out, to be fully human, because they can also restrict our freedom, or exclude us.
If I am right, a struggle is already in progress between those who seek to identify themselves and others, and those who retain the right to remain uncategorised, and not to categorise others. In fullness of time this civil rights movement will be won by those who admit a way for the two worldviews to live together permanently and peacefully, or for one or the other to fade away naturally. This is about fundamentalists and liberals, in all spheres, and a world where both can co-exist.
May I suggest that one way to circumvent the logic traps of modernist civil rights thinking, which might risk labelling one or other side as 'good' or 'bad', would be to speak in stories, and dreams, like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela?
The civil rights movement has in the past fought for equal rights regardless of sex, race or gender. Totemic battles over voting rights for women, the abolition of slavery, and Gay Pride movements, have come to symbolise wider struggles, some of which have lasted centuries. There is now, in Britain as elsewhere, a battle over our future obligation to carry ID cards. This battle could be a lone stand, or it could be totemic of a wider struggle. I suspect the latter is true.
The following is a quote from Susan Greenfield's book on i.d., about the world she anticipates is breaking upon us as a result of information technology. Note the tone:
Perhaps future generations will live instead, in the fast-paced, immediate world of screen experience: a world arguably trapped in early childhood, where the infant doesn't yet think metaphorically. It's a world, remember, that lacks the checks and balances of the adult mind: reality can blur easily with fantasy, since there is no read-off against past conversations, thoughts or events. It is consequently a frightening, exciting, unpredictable and above all emotionally-charged world - a world of immediate response rather than one of reflective initiative.(p.180)The implication of this passage, as I read it, is that although sensual, deliberately choosing such a life would be irresponsible, unreflective. The word Susan Greenfield uses later is reckless.
The book concerns me, because, as Greenfield herself explains early on in her book (p.ix), as an eminent scientist and a Baroness, she has contributed to debates in the House of Lords with, presumably, the aim of informing Britain's future cultural and legislative direction. And it is worth pausing to consider who would be impacted by any attempt to redress widespread neurologically-related irresponsibility. Over the course of the book, drawing on medical studies, Greenfield provides a list of people prone to recklessness:
1. Children;
2. Schizophrenics;
3. The neurologically damaged;
4. Those in romantic love;
5. Others prone to psychotic episodes;
6. The sleep deprived;
7. The obese;
8. Takers of drugs, such as cannabis, that promote, or replicate dopamine in the brain;
9. Sportsmen and women and others who engage in physical activities that alter temporarily the mind;
10. Future-generation users of screen-based technology;
11. Those genetically predisposed to take risks.
Because I recognise myself in the description above, and also its similarity to the description of hunter-gatherers provided by Hugh Brody in his book, The Other Side of Eden, where the lack of checks and balances recognised by the Western World derives from a fundamentally different set of cultural experiences, to this list I would add:
12. Those who have achieved a degree of maturity, having processed conflicting fundamentalist worldviews,
and
13. Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers and those who endeavour to live inspired by them.
That's a fair few people. And although Greenfield does not treat them all equally, she does define them against a perceived adult norm.
The fundamental problem to me is that Greenfield's 'adult norm', full of checks and balances, and shaped by the twentieth century schooling system, not to mention four-hundred plus years of the printed word, sounds simply like the Modernist worldview. And her list of the reckless (with the inclusion of my two additions) is a combination of everything the Modernist worldview disproves of, from infantilism, to addiction, to wild romanticism, to mental disturbance, to the uncivilised, to the hedonistic, to the not strictly scientifically positivist, to the postmodern and geeky.
We live in a world of tribes, and we currently deal with those we take issue with by labelling them. It's okay, they're not our tribe, so we know they are not like us. We're happy, should someone choose a label for themselves, to consort with them, our own sense of identity intact. We're even happy if others define themselves against the label we give them, like Jimmy Dean, or Doctor Horrible. That's the modernist way.
But I meet, and hear of, growing numbers of people who are not happy to be labelled. There is the teenager on the metro who is uncomfortable with being an '-ist'. I understand this is a common attitude amongst Generation Y. There are Christians in the evangelical tradition who reject the 'Christian' label - I suspect this is true across many religions. There are movements in psychology away from the labelling of syndromes. In an age where work is transitory, growing numbers of people distrust the badge of their profession as the mark of who they are. I know of people who do not like to be defined by their marital status, as most forms in Britain currently require.
I'm not calling for the abandoning of tribes, of identities, of labels. I am calling for the freedom to choose whether to be labelled or not. We were not born pre-packaged. We should be free to choose how we define ourselves, or even if we define ourselves at all.
If this freedom is not fought for, or retained, we set up a world of categories and divisions. Systems like i.d cards will formalise them and restrict... what? Hunter-gatherers may give us a clue. These peoples live in a data-rich, unexplained world - the one Greenfield fears, in the form of new technologies, is coming for us all. And guess what? They evolved - we evolved, because we are they - precisely to be able to do so.
Labels direct our freedom to respond to life, in tune with or counterpoint to it, whatever it throws at us, be it uncommon experiences, the ability to participate in mass movements, the chance to risk all for a dream, or for someone we love, the mass-democratisation and new experiences embodied in screen technologies. But we need, surely, to be free to leave those labels behind, take time out, perhaps permanent time out, to be fully human, because they can also restrict our freedom, or exclude us.
If I am right, a struggle is already in progress between those who seek to identify themselves and others, and those who retain the right to remain uncategorised, and not to categorise others. In fullness of time this civil rights movement will be won by those who admit a way for the two worldviews to live together permanently and peacefully, or for one or the other to fade away naturally. This is about fundamentalists and liberals, in all spheres, and a world where both can co-exist.
May I suggest that one way to circumvent the logic traps of modernist civil rights thinking, which might risk labelling one or other side as 'good' or 'bad', would be to speak in stories, and dreams, like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela?
Sunday, 1 March 2009
892 - This Is Not A Political Blog...
...but what the heck does Harriet Harman mean by this quote about Sir Fred Goodwin and his overwheeningly fat pension?
"And it might be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it is not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that is where the government steps in."
Does the government really govern by rating public opinion over the rule of law? Did it step in over Iraq? Does it over the death penalty? No (I hope) and no and no.
So there is no consistency to this argument at all, and unless it is argued out properly, through parliament and the courts, acting on it could be perceived as an abuse of power.
Not a political blog, but I lean leftwards, just so that you know where I'm coming from.
"And it might be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it is not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that is where the government steps in."
Does the government really govern by rating public opinion over the rule of law? Did it step in over Iraq? Does it over the death penalty? No (I hope) and no and no.
So there is no consistency to this argument at all, and unless it is argued out properly, through parliament and the courts, acting on it could be perceived as an abuse of power.
Not a political blog, but I lean leftwards, just so that you know where I'm coming from.
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