Yesterday, the 3rd August, I was listening to report on radio 4 of the endorsement of Hassan Rouhani by the Supreme Leader. I can’t find the audio file to link to it but there was in the background this extra-ordianary soviet style choral singing going on that seemed so unlike what I would have expected. It was rather Star Wars and very Stalinist, Soviet.
It is Ramadan once again. It is the measure of the year, a movable cycle that is both feast and beast. I met a Welsh convert the Ramadan other day and I asked him how long he had been a Muslim? He replied that this was his fourth Ramadan. I compared it to Christmas in conversation with my closest Muslim friend.
Why? Because I am always looking for similarities, patterns shared between people, groups or even history. So what was Ramadan I keep asking myself? I didn’t feel that it related to Lent in any sense. Lent is both watered down and also celebrated by so few people and a prime function of Ramadan is that it is celebrated by nearly everybody, from the outside it appears that all Muslim people are actively fasting throughout Ramadan.
So searching further for some space of parallel I found myself thinking about Christmas. Partly this is because Christmas appears to demonstrate the exact opposite to Ramadan. Christmas is about eating too much, overeating, about drinking, about gorging, almost about gluttony and some sense. It is about giving things away but also about anxiously receiving things, getting things from other people, spending money. I think Christmas looks strange through the eyes of Ramadan and it was this strangeness, the uncomfortable parallel which started to form a new thought in my mind.
Ramadan carries denial. I’m not suggesting that people are living in a state of denial whilst waiting for food but they are denying themselves food, something they do not do in the formal day-to-day pattern of the annual cycle outside of Ramadan. Ramadan is about celebration around food, the eating of food every evening, the waiting expectantly for food and the gathering together in families, amongst friends, sharing, giving and taking food. There is also some element of suffering and Ramadan, born of the denial there is a necessary privation in Ramadan.
So how do the two relate? Well at Christmas we celebrate. We don’t need to ask questions about the religious context of the event we simply celebrate it. We as a people, the Judaeo-Christian people, take part in Christmas even though the religious events have receded into what becomes effectively a cultural memory of what we did believe, of what somebody else might have believed, whereby we count on other people, possibly, to believe on our behalf. Ramadan is not like this but Ramadan does include everybody. The doubter, smoker, the adulterer, the person who little attends mosque during the year and perhaps not at all even doing Ramadan. It is inclusive and sits as a form of definition of who you are. Whilst God sits there somewhere in the background it is a demonstration to each other and to other people. Christmas similarly doesn’t require God any longer; it has a life of its own.
Beyond that Christmas also evades happiness and includes suffering in a profound way. Western civilisation is rife with notions of the lonely individual, isolated, unable to relate to other people at Christmas. Perhaps at Christmas more than any other time of the year it is considered appropriate to offer solace, to open a soup kitchen, to give and to be generous to other people, the knowledge being clear that people are at their most lonely and at their most vulnerable during a period of intense festivity.
So the three points of comparison which I draw are:
1) They are great festive moments of the year around which the year turns.
2) They are feasts kept by everybody who wishes to be identified and identifies themselves within their cultural religious tradition and which seem undoable to others.
3) They are periods of both privation and denial as well as great festive moments, periods of intense isolation, the giving of gifts, and of a very visceral love of the physical, the flipside of waiting to eat and drink.
A close friend of mine brought one of his closest friends to visit me the other evening. This latter man brought with him his daughter who was 28 years old. The occasion was a shared meal and he had driven up from 100 miles away to have dinner with my friend during Ramadan. Conversation continued and B told a long and very animated story of his trip to New York recently.
He had been warned by his mother that he might be mistaken for a terrorist, B is from an Indian Muslim family. This is exactly what happened and he found himself under interrogation at the airport in America by Homeland Security. He was of course released after some time but during the questioning he was asked “if he was a good Muslim?” Now, B is in fact a weed smoking man of many years vintage. Yet he is a good Muslim. He has been on the Hajj. He is a Muslim. However during his questioning than America in order to diffuse the situation he said “No, I don’t go to mosque”.
Following this his daughter spoke about the trip she had taken where she had been crossing from Palestine to Israel or the other way round. She had been asked the same question. She said something like this:
“Then they asked me if I was a good Muslim and I thought to myself, leave me alone, I’ve got to say yes, it’s the only thing I’ve got left.”
What all this means I can only hazard a guess. What I understood was that this young woman, left to her own devices in a sense, had retained effectively very little of the cultural traditions that were her grandfathers and grandmothers. The one thing that was left was that she was a Muslim, possibly in some sense the good Muslim, the question of being good or bad being very dodgy. So when she was asked this question it produces something else.
No wonder people return to their religion through all these years. It is what they have left?
Here is a selection of clay pipes which I had the pleasure of seeing at a friends house near Barnsley. They are a very small part of an immense collection, not particularly of clay pipes but of minerals, bottles, disease from the industrial past. They have been brought together by a man who coming from a mining background became an accomplished artist specialising in what might loosely be called landscape painting. His collecting, the exhibition of his collections and is artworks are so closely linked that it almost becomes pedantry to separate them. So, these clay pipes were dug from a Barnsley domestic spoil heap. The painting is I was told already present and Yes, the first one is a lady on the loo:
I have volunteered in a Night Shelter for destitute asylum seekers and refugees for five years now. Asylum seekers and refugees often come from countries and situations where their experiences include intense violence, torture, dispossession and, at the least, extremes of fear, where they are escaping from levels of intimidation and lack of personal freedom which are cause enough for their flight.
A, a man from Zimbabwe in his thirties, arrived at the shelter, recommended by the help desk. He was withdrawn, kept himself to himself, avoided conversation and was clearly disturbed and anxious showing all the signs of a severe mental health condition. Over the coming year he returned irregularly to the shelter and often carried the signs of living rough. Other men at the shelter who were sharing the room with him found it increasingly hard to have him there. His hygiene was so profoundly compromised by his state of anxiety and depression that he smelled increasingly strongly. At first he was asked to keep his shoes and socks outside the door but eventually in order to maintain a sense of calm at the shelter he was asked not to come.
Those who have been subject to or witnessed extremes of violence will bring with them often debilitating mental health conditions. Once destitute, often they can not cope with the demands of etiquette that are implicit in taking assistance from either friends or volunteers. These people, who are in a sense the most vulnerable, become those most difficult to help. They are those most damaged by a system that gives a legality to total destitution. Voluntary organisations can not usually cope with mental health problems and are obliged to try and refer such cases to other bodies. Destitution leaves vulnerable people completely isolated. Voluntary groups and peers/friends alike are often unable to cope well with mental health issues and thus the only recourse of the destitute can be removed.
B, a man from Iran, is destitute. He has left Iran because he had the sense to escape before he was tortured and abused. He isn’t a heroic figure who resisted to the point of carrying the scars or his family asking for the death certificate. He ran away, quite justifiably, in great fear from a political/religious situation where he was obliged to lie constantly about himself in order to survive.
Those who are not scarred by their experiences to the point of having severe mental health problems face another set of issues. Their destitution, lasting years perhaps, insists that they remain ‘good’, cheerful, willing to engage with the voluntary groups who offer help, able to manage the human relations that allow them to profit from offers of assistance from their peers, visits to solicitors, regular signings at the Border Agency, occasional detention. And always these people are required to show good will, good nature, not to be aggressive, not to show passion. Such a need to be constantly on best behaviour when such an approach has no legal benefit to the destitute individual, can lead to a sense of confusion, of lack of self which can result in the onset of mental health problems.
C walks around the city always with a dark cloud over him. Working out our own mental health issues is hard enough but when you might have to mix understanding how to regulate your moods with just surviving is unbelievably hard. D is always ready to help, to assist, he is a good man ready to offer his time to others. His situation requires that he remains sane, doesn’t lose his temper, stays stable when he is alone and frightened in a foreign country that forces him to be destitute.
The destitution of asylum seekers and refugees turns some, the most vulnerable, into suffering figures unable to manage their situation. Another element, in order to maintain their sanity, are trapped in a cycle of being gooder than good, when of course, they are asylum seekers and refugees, not saints. Being a refugee or asylum seeker does not make you good, it makes you vulnerable and arises from vulnerability. Destitution alienates further those in most need and puts impossible demands on those more able to cope.
Starting from the premise that the film makers are aware of what they are doing but that still they are tracing a shape whose contours are formed by the ideological sub-strata of our society. This is the ‘big other’ of Zizek and via his work Lacan, something to which reference is made implicitly in all works, the form of which is accessible not by looking directly at representations but by looking at what those varied forms do, how they relate to the material world in which they have existence.
What is the ideological form of which Skyfall is the clothing or as my sister called it the lichen, morphing lichen? So if I look at material conditions of the film, those events outside it that allow it to be, give it shape, what are they? To take one; it is referring to Julian Assange as the baddy saying firstly that the world of real politics and death is the proper subject of a film. It might be seen as saying that in the end death, war and destruction, torture are possibly also just elements of entertainment. The work with Assange doesn’t fall into real politics and get dirty. The baddy is like Assange, sexually ambivalent and potentially dangerous. He has unresolved issues with mother and is a laugh at therapeutic roles and practice. His downfall is that set of issues and not the meat of his crimes in themselves for which he is un-attackable, he only loses through his personal weakness. His crimes stay free of any comment, only existing as the perfect geek’s unaccountable, impersonal actions. His normal yet extreme complexes are his downfall and the final crime is his resolution of that complex of emotions. These are the boring old ones of rejection, lack of love and punishment and betrayal. This followed by torture which leads to bitterness. So Assange is subsumed into entertainment, a sort of mainstream Woody Allen film where we laugh with the therapist. So that’s one condition of the film: it takes the real events of war and our proximity to its truth through wikileaks and makes it pure entertainment based around the audience’s awareness of psychological categories. The ideological shape is that this is what matters perhaps? The ability to laugh at oneself, to allow the sacred (real death and war) to be turned to the service of an evening out. This is the form we believe in.
Pubs are closing everywhere and at an astonishing rate. Their signs are going down and for sale signs going up all over the place. I was passing this pub near Mosborough and took a photo of the sign. I wonder where they all go? There is I assume a collector somewhere with a warehouse full of defunct pub signs. Anyway – what a collection of paintings that would make wouldn’t it?
A day in someone else’s life:
07.30: rise, dress, breakfast, settle arguing children Continue reading “morton hall”
I have a friend who told me about her long term interest in violence, something stoked by a young man who brought those ideas more than somewhat to life. She proclaims an understanding of the violent, the obscene, the killer, the paedophile and wonders if that makes her bad? Is she in need of help? I found her intensely compassionate in her telling of her tale and told her so.
Is that true compassion then? To understand the other to point of being able to experience a lack of evil in even the most extreme behaviours?
