“you know they are Catholics not even real Christians”

Well I just had a properly depressing conversation. I went outside the building where I have an office and entered into conversation with two young men of Pakistani origin. The elder of them, 32 years old, had spent seven years in prison and was bitter and frustrated at not being able to find work. His language was liberally sprinkled with references to “the Zionists” who were controlling everything. This led him to talk about the situation in the Ukraine and the Russian annexation of Crimea. It was the Russians standing up to America and the Zionists who want to control everything. Russia was populated, he said by orthodox Christians, they didn’t have a poke or anything like that and they were real Christians. Unlike, he was keen to tell me, the Catholics, who were like devils. The Catholics believed that God was a woman he told me. Did I know why all of the Slovakians were here? What was worse he said was that they were all Catholics. Hitler wanted to kill the Catholics after he killed the Jews. The world is going down Hill and we will all end up in concentration camps. This will start in America.

 It always depresses me to have conversations with people whose views are so distanced from my own. Both young men were smoking weed and the elder of them told me that his main occupation was trying to give up weed which was completely burning out his brain.

 The gulf that separates us from each other can appear to be so deep. If anything it was his weakness that gave me some proximity to him.

 These are writings from somebody not from where they are. In such an encounter I meet somebody from where I am who is not from where I am which further complicates things.

 

 

on not being stuck

I took my youngest child to school this morning and as I turned the car around in a small side street I saw a woman whose children attend the same school. This is somebody I have spoken to on and off for probably six or seven years now. She is a very nice person as far as I know but somebody who brings out the bad side of me. I feel irritated and/or insecure when I see her.

 

The point I want to make about this is not connected to a direct account of why I have negative emotions in this respect. It is rather that as I looked at her I imagined myself 10 or 15 years in the future, still living in the same area, and still occasionally crossing paths with this particular person. I moved into this area with no idea what it would lead to. However as the children grew up I have become embedded in the area and now have spent longer in this house than anywhere else I have ever lived and now cannot really see myself leaving this area until the children are grown up and even then I imagine we will be based here.

 

This was a decision that we have all made piecemeal as time has passed. We wanted our children to grow up with something neither of us had which was somewhere we came from, somewhere we belonged. By moving from where you live as a child and then continuing to shift again and again you easily leave behind people like the woman I saw this morning. By moving on you no longer see their faces and with that you don’t have too experience the same emotional negativity. Changing location gives you freedom from that and even if relationships will tend to be repeated over a period of time, in other words you can’t escape from yourself, you repeat the same circumstances in a new place, it may take time that they return. However, it does take time before these feelings do return and this morning I was acutely aware that this time round I wouldn’t be moving on and I would have two live with the mistakes I have made, as well as the positive.

St Antimo 1999

st antimo

1.

 

The tomb is always empty

It cannot be otherwise

I am here

Such lamentation there will be when I rise.

 

2.

 

Always we approach the White Hart

And always he retreats

So with stealth we approach

And still he flees.

To touch him

He must die

 

3.

 

Great silence

Is the rule

Until spoken to

And then all manner

Of speech is

Permitted

clergy and heritage

Today I walked in to Sheffield Cathedral where extensive work has been done to remodel the entry and the interior of the nave. I was walking around and I could hear somebody reading from the Bible and was surprised to see that although there was no visible congregation other than one two people sitting reflectively on the pews of a large Cathedral. The voice continued to be heard all around the cathedral relayed by speakers. I wondered briefly if it was a recording. Then passing in front of the choir I noticed a man in full regalia at a lectern speaking into a microphone.

 

I simply wondered to myself what would be the reaction of that man if I were to wander underneath and look at the woodwork inside the choir? There would be some discomfort in this I imagined. I assumed it might be considered rude. Also I realised that there were more people looking at the building than were listening to the reading but that the man in robes was carrying out a duty of the clergy which was not affected by the number of people present.

 

This led me to consider the relationship between the restructured building and the clergy. I’m not sure if this is a new feature of the cathedral but at the end of the nave on the inside of the upper stone wall two earlier roof lines are visible. These have been left as witnesses to the history, the heritage of the cathedral. To what extent are the clergy able to act as heritage markers and still maintain their own sense of Christian mission? Of service? Why can I not walk below the lectern only paying heed to the reading from the Bible as if it were a soundtrack to the building rather than something to which I owe some form of immediate respect?

 

Church work would become a job in the heritage sector. People without religious conviction could take on the ritual roles of the clergy. Interestingly enough it would be possible to argue that when the church was powerful and the population effectively tied into its liturgical cycle, the amount of corruption and irreligious behaviour amongst the church leaders, might be a rather unfortunate example of what the church could do when the struggle to embody right action in ritual practice is ignored.

volunteer missionaries

I have noticed over the last 10 years when I have been involved in increasing amounts of voluntary work that I encountered a number of people who have been brought up in families where parents or grandparents were missionary workers. Statistically such people do not account for the large numbers but nevertheless it is quite clear that there is a relationship which I have avoided thinking that between what I might call “domestic aid work” and the missionary position so to speak.

 

So in what way is voluntary activity in the United Kingdom with disadvantaged groups to be considered akin to missionary work in, for example, Africa in the first half of the 20th century? There is the structural, a formal relationship, whereby embodying the kingdom of heaven on earth brings you quite organically into such a supporting role. The direct notion of conversion, of bringing the word of God to those living in darkness perhaps, is less valid but the practice of Christian values through voluntary charity can clearly be seen to have expression through earlier forms of missionary work.

 

More broadly than that relationship between the two, there is a sense in which the same inadequacies that we currently perceive in missionary work are being mirrored in contemporary (in)volunteering. One of the salient points in regards to missionary work is the notion that there is an implicit devaluing of an already coherent culture. Another, equally leveled at ethnographic writing, is that even ethically-based missionary work is a form of cultural extension (into the spiritual realm) of the material constraints of Empire and capitalism more broadly.

 

It is in this sense that contemporary voluntary activity might be placed. Just as the missionaries continued to place themselves in the path of those apparently in need of help volunteers deliberately place themselves to encounter such individuals and communities in the modern world. Not necessarily, though at times the case, preaching the word of any God, volunteers do embody complexes of ethical and political positioning which they wish to pass on, in the very basic sense of setting an example, demonstrating the value and existence of such action.

 

Despite the fact that the legal and political system is the one which, for example, leaves asylum seekers destitute for extended periods of time, voluntary action largely works to ameliorate conditions rather than challenging the status quo itself. There is indeed an implicit relationship between voluntary work and a form of socially acceptable pacifism or nonviolent action. It is unlikely that you would find yourself volunteering for a group committed to active destabilisation of a political regime.

 

So this doesn’t take me very far but Zizek’s point about charitable works being effectively part of the ideological framework within which cruelty and alienation are structurally embedded is borne out by an exploration of the relationship between missionary work and current volunteering practices.

 

 

for Coco

So I will try and gather my thoughts from what I was speaking about the other day. It won’t be easy because it is rare that I can see this particular concept as clearly as I did on that day. In death we stop existing. Our bodies fail then stop functioning and everything that we experience as ourselves ends. There is no Rosie to experience herself and she literally exists in memory or eventually in material remains of a variety of sorts. However what I was suggesting is that there is a misrecognition by us of who we are. The complex mental processes and physical and emotional jolts which go to make up “Tim” are completely dependent upon the existence of other people to whom “Tim” relates and upon what we perceive as a long history of humanity and earlier than that purer perhaps animality. There is a way in which we only exist as social creatures and what we perceive as ourselves, “Tim”, belongs as much to everybody else as it does to us. We also therefore are equally part of everybody else. I do not intend this as a spiritual understanding but a material one. We misrecognise our particular perspective on (excretion of!) the totality of human existence as being us having an individual life separate from other lives. Whilst Dwaine’s body may have stopped and he is certainly not there in a personal fashion to express anything about this fact, it remains quite evident to you and to others that life and the experience of existence, of consciousness, of self awareness, continues. We live under the assumption that once we are removed from the equation, once our bodies cease to work, that for other people consciousness will continue. There is a sense in which everything only exists in the moment. We are encouraged by some forms of thought to “live in the moment” as if there were something of direct value in direct experience of the moment. When we are in love, when we experience grief we live in the moment and time can expand exponentially. In this moment consciousness is always present and the removal of any individual, of any “Tim” does not impact upon this. So I understand that whilst sadness will prevail upon death that in a very real sense consciousness itself of which we as individuals are nothing other than its crystallisation, its expression, continues. The misidentification of the individual with their experience of consciousness rather than with consciousness itself as something which is shared by all is at the root of this. It does not mean that there is no point in experiencing grief or love as they are both part of life and consciousness is nothing other than bits of life bumping into each other and avoiding each other. So as this is a short note I believe that we misidentify ourselves as individuals.

Capsules and Violence

Wandering through Birmingham I’m struck, as I was last time I was here I think, by Birmingham feeling edgier, more violence around.  I walked past an entrance to Debenhams and there were store security guards, dressed exactly as bouncers do, protecting the doors and looking as if they were waiting for some trouble or had come from trouble.  It is a Saturday so a football day and Aston Villa fans are in the town centre which might affect this.  Also the way that Bull Ring pulls in everything shiny, literally gleaming which the rest of the town centre is gloomy and drab.  This sits violence, perhaps the real in this case, outside.

It becomes, the Bull Ring, a privatised public space. A bubble, capsule in a capsular society (Sloterdijk, Zizek, Zaera Polo).  However rather than the idea being that the capsular society produces some sort of permanent provincial state, where we are all living in the province of the capsule, the Bull Ring is the Capital, not of Birmingham or the Midlands but the Capital, a sort of dimension of the Capital which is de-territorialised and manifest in these public-private globes of shopping with their security forces who keep the real from erupting.  Inside.  Outside the real bubbles away.  I saw a woman standing in a door way, her arms looked like they were reduced, as if thalidomide had worked its course.  She beckoned with a crooked finger into a doorway and beyond lay something lost in time.
Then there is the mad mixture of peoples in Birmingham town centre.  Nothing new there I know.  I just strikes me again and again how much it is how it should be.  We – the British – got so rich on the labour and materials of the rest of the world. We didn’t do it alone.  We could not.  We took at first and then we sold back to them what we made.  Now the world comes to this little place.  This town like many others and it is always already something we all made together.

Tea

It is almost as if I always have to have something to do which has absolutely no value other than my own pleasure and of course some form of associated commercial transaction.  In other words as my parents always said to me and I’ve not heard said since: money burns a hole in your pocket.   Well right now it’s tea.  I first enthused about tea in the very early 1980s when, yes agonising but true, I went up to Cambridge, to the University that is. John Cordeaux – I think he spelled it like that – used to drink tea each morning and made a mixture of Earl Grey and a standard black tea which I drank with huge pleasure with milk and sugar.  It was made in a teapot and drunk not necessarily from tea cups.  It was a revelation and I spent hours browsing loose leaf tea shops, reading books from libraries, filling containers with loose black teas, green teas, herbal teas much to the amusement of my mother who listed them all as smelly teas and refused to be drawn in to my tea world.  She’d been brought up on tea and rejected it from some point in the mid 1950s in favour of coffee which must have smelled of beat poetry and not being boring and predictable.  There must have been a difficulty of access to coffee as well in those days and tea had always been common, not as a derogatory term, but simply ubiquitous.

My tea crusade lasted perhaps a year, I doubt it even that long and but I never lost a respect for tea from that day onwards.  Some years later I still had the last vestiges of the love affair in dried teas at the bottom of dusty tins inside some stored boxes that I finally lost.  Some years later, the mid 1990s I met an author on a walk in Italy who had written an account of the journey of tea through history and through our sitting rooms and kitchens.  This rekindled a tea love briefly inspired by knowledge and stories of spies smuggling tea plants from China, first and second flush Darjeerlings and endless lovely anecdotal stories.

Now, for a reason I will try to recall, tea has returned and I am in a tea shop in Birmingham tasting a Darjeerling Himalaya Blend (apparently a very similar second flush to the Darjeerling Margaret Hope but in Nepal where the Indian Govt cannot own the name and thus cheaper); a Ceylon Pekoe Lovers Leap and another nice Nepalese Darjeerling style, Maloom.  They are all very stimulating and I feel quite wired after drinking them with the odd sensation of sweetness that keeps coming from the back of my mouth.  There is the ritual, there is the sight of the leaf tips resuscitated from being steeped.  The second flush Darjeerling has the nicest leaves!  The Ceylon an almost wooded flavour, musky.  The Darjeerling the most alert.

What brought me to loose leaf tea this time was a brown betty tea pot I bought in Pwllweli in the summer of 2012.  I used it since even though the glaze was poor and recently a good friend Kim gave me another brown betty, much finer in form as a gift.  How nice.  Then there are my maternal Grandmother’s tea cups of course but that’s another story.

I ponder so intensely over whether to treat myself to a couple of their loose leaf teas to take home and I do buy two and a glass tea pot with infusion basket – I feel so spendthrift and then I realise a bit later that a pack of tea was not even the cost of a pack of fags and I smoked for thirty years and didn’t agonise over the money.  Partly that I realise is that tobacco was bad for me so in a sense it served me right.

Circuses and Sochi

The idea of bread and circuses. What does that mean always works in my mind. There is the idea that it was wrong to offer bread and circuses, to dupe a population by letting blood. Somehow also we just don’t really understood the blood lust and sit with the notion that it was also something bad asking people to forget the suffering of their lives by a spectacle that somehow buys their acquiescence. However the idea emerges, in the face of Sochi that there is something eventually good in the Roman model, no matter the ‘evil’, the bad which we acknowledge in Russia (anti – gay etc), we will take the pill of the games and forgive – provided nothing happens, provided the games are not interrupted. That there is no eruption of the real (gay demos with injury; bombings). Just give us the bread and circus (making money NOT giving it away as we thought bread meant – and Olympic athletes).  We’ll forgive it because it makes money, fits in and maintains the system, entertains and burps us back out again into the night.

Gravity (the film)

Not exactly a well thought out review. I really didn’t like the film Gravity at all. It is four or five weeks since I went to see the film so my initial anger has subsided. In retrospect I can see the attraction of the visuals but at the time I was overwhelmed by the vacuous nature of the film.  It was not just that nothing happened it was that what happened was what had already happened in endless films before. Somebody succeeds against all the odds, in fact an impossible mission is achieved, and heroically they return home. The faithful horse replaced by the space vehicle. A cowboy film without any of the character which more finally worked cliché might have evoked. The metaphor of the vacuum can be extended, as well as being empty of meaning, the film sucked out all possible discussion by doing nothing other than repeating the trope that hope/faith/love conquers all. Where is the space for political analysis in such a greedy vacuous universe? One of my friends who is a documentary film maker with a particular interest in popularising complex scientific notions, found the film very satisfying because it took complex science and used it to make a film. In the sense that the film demonstrated the eventual impotence of science to affect the human subject I might agree. However the issue with science and with technological change in general is that it does change the subject. It is frustrating to see such great expense for so little return. I like the brave captain floated out into space early on and did not return.