Left limbo

My colleague, Duncan Green, has an entertaining and thoughtful blog on the themes of his book: 'From Poverty to Power'- http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=1236

This week he is in South Korea at an OECD conference (someone has to do it) on the measurement of well-being. GDP is finally being slowly discredited as a measure of prosperity (or progress) since it only measures throughput in monetary terms and throughput can be of both positive (a sold field of tomatoes) or negative (a car crash), it does not indicate real value (nor account for non-monetary changes - a restored landscape say or a deforested region). So the search is on for alternatives - and the discussion in Korea revolved around many measures or a few - and what about self-reported happiness as the central indicator of the few.

Meanwhile, "the last word on this conference goes to the wonderfully serene (and enigmatic) abbot of Beomeosa, a breathtaking Buddhist monastery on the outskirts of Busan. I asked him if he could help us by telling us what happiness is and how we could achieve it. He smiled and told me to drink my tea, and then he would answer. ‘Did you like the tea? Yes? That is happiness.’ He also described happiness as ‘thinking about happiness’ and ‘the undivided mind’. Put that into your metrics, guys."

An elderly woman gets on the bus and sits down, followed shortly afterwards by an equivalently aged man. They recognise each other and he sits opposite her. After the initial pleasantries, I overhear from the woman: "Yes, I have always been focused on the tenth century myself." After which they discuss his most recent book (on politics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries) and its reception by reviewers.

I think only here!

It reminded me of the Second World War question of an Oxford don as to what he was doing towards the war effort; and, he replied, 'But I am what the fighting is for!"

Andrei Znamenski's 'The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination' is one of those of acts of scholarship that make you rejoice.

A balanced, lively, intelligent account of how a term first applied to healing traditions in Siberia came to be understood as a common generic pattern in the religious and social lives of indigenous people around the globe (and how, with the rise of postmodernism, that common patterning has once more been put in question).

Equally, it is a sympathetic account of how those traditions have been assimilated and transformed by a wide variety of spiritual seekers in the west, applying them as therapy to their own lives, as sources of spiritual inspiration; and, as reinvigorating (or re-inventing) of western, 'pagan' or 'pre-Christian' traditions.

As I read, I find myself framing it within my own experience in Tuva of a shamanic tradition revived after the depredations of communism; and, revived with the interest and engagement of western seekers. Thus, a tradition not simply reborn but recreated.

However, if you believe that shamanism captures some intrinsic aspect of the human spirit, there is no reason to imagine that any such recreation is not in itself an authentic creation leading towards the truth of things. Every incarnate tradition is a compromise between the spirit and its form and our capacity to interpret.

Coronation Street - the centrepiece of Britain's longest running television soap opera - was being demolished. The gritty northern street of terraced houses, corner shops and a pub was systematically being emptied, ready for dismantlement and the last resident, confusingly, was one of the original characters from Eastenders, the BBC's London-based rival: Wendy Richard, looking sour, in a bilious cardy...

I woke up! On what, I wondered, does my psyche feed? Neither of these programmes have I watched in any manner other than the desultory but there they were in considerable (if amended detail) hanging around in my dreamscape.

I found myself, divertingly, wondering what it says about a country that its regular soaps are all grounded in working class realities (though Emmerdale - a rural based soap tends to be posher, as does the Archers its radio equivalent, also rural)! This is not the territory of the Bold and the Beautiful.

Also, what they tend to leave out. Coronation Street remained for a long time suspiciously white, when many of the northern cities that its life 'mirrored' had acquired significant ethnic minority populations. Only the rural soaps, do 'religion' with long running characters who are priests (Anglican naturally) with the one in 'The Archers' daringly married to a Hindu. Nobody ever appears to read nor in the myriad pubs and bars, that dramatic convention requires as meeting points, does anyone appear to ever finish a drink. Life, also, tends towards the miserable side, apparently the appetite for narratives that are uplifting is minimal in soap land: one scripted by Paulo Coelho would undoubtedly bomb!

But they do often break new dramatic (and social) ground, Coronation Street's ethnic time-lag notwithstanding, I recall an Eastender's story line that movingly addressed depression (in this case in an older male and triggered by unemployment) that many people, especially sufferers and the carers of sufferers, found illuminating and helpful; and, they have also managed to be the first television spaces to give room to sexual minorities; and, in the case of The Archers managed to do this as simply part of the furniture - rather than as dramatic story line - a couple who happen to be gay, rather than 'the gay couple'!

Meanwhile, I have noticed that in Australian soaps (to which in the past I have been addictd) at points of high tension in people's lives, they decide to take a few days to 'find themselves' or 'think things through' by getting away from it all and going into the countryside. This is always, without fail, a bad idea - either 'Nature' trips them up and they end up lost in the 'wilderness' in need of dramatic rescue or some dark individual emerges out of 'Nature' to stalk them with terrible consequence.

What does that say about a nation that is highly urbanised and clings to the periphery of its continent?




The Rover's Return: the dramatic centre of Coronation Street.

Kathleen Raine by Victoria Crowe.

Woke from a dream where I had been taking tea with Kathleen Raine.

Yesterday rummaging in a bookstore, between meetings, I picked out a passage (or it picked me) in a book by Joan Halifax, the transpersonal psychologist, connecting an ability to remember generally with an ability to remember childhood specifically as if the latter provided a sustaining energy for the former.

On the train home, I found myself recollecting moments from childhood that I had not attended in years; and, it was strangely reviving, energising.

I found myself trying to recall what I had read as an adolescent and found that in spite of being a furious reader only a select band of texts could be recalled, stood out; and, all with a remembered context and emotional charge for their reading.

Prominent amongst these was reading Kathleen's essays on Blake: 'Blake and the New Age' for opening a door to Blake, a hermeneutic key; but also, in themselves, this is how the world appeared to me, always trembling on the edge of revealing itself as embedded in other, deeper worlds, or worlds that gave this world transfigured depth. Paradise glimmered in the sunrises that I used to witness, often sitting on a log, on a hill just above Stratford, mist rising into immortal longings.

Longings that Kathleen evoked in her own series of autobiographies: longings sought and betrayed and sought again. Books that Simon introduced me to, one of two close friends, and that I read and re-read. Ironically for a vocated poet, I think they are her finest works as they ground in the particular texture of a life what in her poetry can become, at times, to generalized, etherally metaphysical. They fed this one 'Romantic' rather lonely soul, carrying it on with conviction.

At the railway station met Stewart who was the first chair of the Prison Phoenix Trust. In which capacity, years past, he once took me out to lunch to (gently) force me to have a pay rise. A move I was for complex psychological reasons (that I no longer recall) resisting!

He was a senior probation officer (and a Quaker) and I remember asking him once what enabled him to continue in his work, day after day. He replied: "Hope for everything, expect nothing" Hope because anything is possible, including miracle, expect nothing because it may not happen; and, expectation closes around a particular view of the future that itself can deny the look for alternative paths forward.

It is enjoyable: these casual encounters with people unexpected.

Since it was a long flight...

I also read Mark Kurlanksky's 'Non-Violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea'. It is a quirky book, more focused on our evasion of the use of non-violence than on its realty and mechanics. This is illustrated at the outset by his pointing to the fact that 'non-violence' is a negative for which there is no obvious positive word, though Gandhi promoted 'satyagraha' (truth-force).

It is a text with a definite American bias in that the historical examples are drawn primarily from the history of the United States. We look at the transition from boycott and theatre (the Boston Tea Party) to the violence of the Revolution (participated in by both sides, Mel Gibson notwithstanding) and the Civil War fought to maintain the Union rather than to abolish slavery (and, in effect, it only liberated slaves so they could face the choice between sharecropping and segregation in the South or urban poverty in the North - though from both positions the seeds of future liberty were sown, if slowly grown).

However, it is highly effective in reminding us that Christianity began as a religion of non-violence. It is only with the Constantine settlement that this changes: power definitely corrupts.

It is excellent too on showing how good leaders of non-violence campaigns are deeply pragmatic. Their idealism is carried by what works and if any particular practice fails, try another. To be in non-violence is also to be in for the long haul of changing people's fears and hopes; and, if one be tempted to add a dash of violence to that journey, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, you immediately fail as the enemy usually has more and better equipment of repression (and violence begets violence, the triumphant revolutionaries metamorphose into the new tyranny).

Finally, if you want to neuter the testimony on a non-violent leader, make them a saint: witness Gandhi. Honoured in a country that shelters under its nuclear bombs.

However, it is, as Kurlanksky remarks, only necessary in the path of non-violence to begin; and, if we begin with Indian independence what a path it has been, with cumulative successes offering new insights on which to build. It is only twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell with, in the last days, a minimum of violence.

The book too offers small pictures of the truly heroic - my favourite is the fourteen women who gathered to silently bear witness to the brutality of the Argentinian junta by walking around the Plaza de Mayo. There was an overcoming of fear in the cause of justice.

I read Raj Patel's 'Starved & Stuffed' to and from Mexico. It is a searing indictment of the global food system where the price offered to farmers in the South (and North) is relentlessly driven down to benefit the profits of global corporations and keep the price relatively low for us - the consumer in the north.

It has a long history - to maintain peace from the urban classes, we have manipulated agriculture to produce ever more food at a lower price (yet at a greater cost - in subsidy, in environmental degradation and in the lives of farmers). The book opens with a chapter on suicide, not the usual starting place for a book on food or agriculture, but a pattern that has become a grim reaper of indebted farmers' lives.

The book has an accompanying website at: http://www.stuffedandstarved.org/drupal/frontpage

From the 'miracle' of Facebook emerges a photograph of me at school - a rather dim image, and I am, as customary, hiding at the back (second from the right).

It was the presentation of our Headmaster's leaving present - we had purchased for Mr Pratt a bird bath in the appropriate stone to blend with his Cotswold cottage!

It is too a testimony to mortality as one of the boys (we were 17/18 at the time) is sadly no longer with us. Richard (5th from the left, the tallest) was killed in a car crash, not long after graduating.

This week I had a brief sojourn in Mexico City.

This was mainly spent in the pleasant conference room of the 'Holy Spirit Centre' discussing strategies and budgets for next year and beyond with my Latin American colleagues. I had forgotten how lively this can be in this part of the world as culturally people are pre-disposed to question the meaning of everything and enjoy nothing more than a good argument, conducted at pitch and with emotion!

But the facilitation was excellent - the right balance between expression and decision - and great progress was made for the region under its new leadership.

It left little time to see anything - though I loved noticing the colourful street names - embracing scientists, writers, and admired foreign politicians. I lived at a hotel on the corner of Newton and Galileo. Also, since this was a prosperous middle class area, the sheer style of the architecture - Spanish colonial reinterpreted and simplified by high modernism - and the high level of interior design, evident at the hotel, and in the nature of many of the shops and restaurants in the district.

Noticeable, however, how 'European' this is - and one of our themes during the week was the 'resurgence' of the indigenous - that there is a crisis throughout Latin America as the neo-liberal state is questioned (as another version of the colonial one) and deeply polarised societies grapple, none to successfully, with their deep divisions.

I was struck also, given the powerful neighbour to the north, how few people spoke English - though restaurants carried English menus, many of the waiters did not. There is an indicator of a powerful local culture (and more than local).

It did lead me into one cultural 'clash' - sitting, having breakfast on my last day, at a cafe, I thought (after my coffee had been served), I was being systematically ignored in favour of four prosperous business types at a nearby table. My hackles were rising until the waiter gave me to understand that he had been waiting for my companions to join me, assuming naturally that people did not breakfast alone!

But no time for sightseeing, and no art sadly...

The value of trees was very evident in Ethiopia - as fuel, building material, shade, and soils' anchor; and, like much in the country, they are vulnerable to diverse pressures. One is cultural - the making of charcoal on which to brew coffee - apparently it does not taste the same without it. As you drive along the road, young men, mostly, hold out their hands as if in a scissor motion. At first I thought they were begging until I was told that they were offering bundles of charcoal - illegally acquired from state owned forests. The coffee brewing means that charcoal fires burn bright in many rooms, smoking them out, fire alarms cannot be a popular or functional item!

It is not the least of the benefits of the work on asset based development that people were recognizing the necessity of nurturing natural capital and replanting trees. Sadly this often means not the native acacia - hardy, drought resistant and spiny - but eucalyptus which though it grows fast is both thirsty and tends to smother out other growth.

Either way the country needs trees: never has it been more evident to me that they bring life. I was reminded of Jean Giorno's fable: 'The Man who Planted the Trees' and if they are not quite the restorers of paradise envisaged there, they come close, and are essential to it.

As I traveled to and from Ethiopia, I re-read Schumacher's 'Small is Beautiful'. I read it first when I was a seventeen year old student of A-level Economics and it made a deep and lasting impression on me. Here, at last, was a text that made sense, that grew economics out of a deeper set of values. It made me want to change the world - a world that placed the value of human beings in a space that was both metaphysical and natural.

I had avoided reading it again lest reality disappoint memory.

However, it did not, leaving aside occasional archaisms, it is as vivid and relevant a text as ever - prophetic too as many of his speculative futures settle into present and approaching realities.

I had forgotten how deeply religious the text is. There is both direct evocation of the reality of values grounded in the metaphysical and continuous allusions both to his own Christian faith and to Buddhism (a tradition that had deeply affected him). The Creation is not ours, it is gift, and as gift our task is one of celebration and care. The 'dominion' we exercise ought to be continuous and renewing; thus, we cannot use non-renewable resources carelessly (as we do).

Also, his emphasis on the dignity of work. We create ourselves, and our meaning, through the offering of hand and brain, and that to be denied meaningful work is to be diminished. An economy that does not subordinate itself to this essential task is an economy that fails to work as if people mattered. It is a way of seeing deeply rooted in Catholic social thought - one of his sources is the great Thomist philosopher, Joesf Pieper.

Meanwhile, in a short chapter on 'predictability' he dismantles (in about 9 pages) the intellectual basis of much of the 'economics on which our current market fantasies are based.

They were waiting for us, sitting in rows, men to the right, women to the left facing us. Rows of farmers in the hills near Addis Ababa, recently greened by much needed rain, this is a food secure area (relatively prosperous yet poor). They had been working with a local NGO and their story of change was impressive. Beginning with a 'grain bank' enabling them to store their crops and sell them at the right time, their time, rather than that of the 'middle man', they had slowly accumulated new assets: both physical like saving for the first time and mental that it was right and proper that women should own their own assets and that families (rather than men) should make the decisions on their distribution.

As they told their story to us, one women mortified her nearby teenage daughters, by standing and declaring to the assembly that she was proud that she had refused to have her children circumcised. The children looked as if the ground should come swallow them and fiercely proud of their mother's declaration. Everyone applauded.

It was one of those moments that justify what you do: people claiming new lives and building community on renewed values. As the chair of the farmers' co-operative declared, he had recognised that 'we are all equal under God' and thus he no longer beat his wife, they had a new relationship, building a future anew. It flowed too into the local environment - the neighbouring hillside, denuded by the individual search for fuel and building materials and been communally reforested and managed collectively.

It was not the traditional image of Ethiopia - and many people I spoke to raised the subject of how this fiercely proud nation, never colonised, was seen by the outside world as a 'famine wracked' place of hopelessness.

Much has changed in Ethiopia since that last great famine that haunted our television screens twenty-five years ago; however, much remains to be done and progress is always fragile. Many people in the north, east and south of the country (where I did not go) are on the verge of famine and this fact is obscured, willingly by a government facing elections in 2010, where they hope to consolidate their power (and avoid the violence of 2005). All we know of famine is that the greater the democracy, the lower the risk. People do not die because there is 'no food' but because the political system fails to act early enough to distribute food fairly and effectively. The government does care but has conflicted values; and, in that conflict may fail to act early enough or effectvely enough.

From the occasional series in the Daily Telegraph of signs noticed by traveling readers. This one caught my eye, from California, and was captioned 'Aimless Arithmetic'.

Perhaps it was painted by an ageing hippie convinced that everything is indeed interconnected and enfolded in a wider unity!

I remember visiting a small exhibition of Rouault's works at the Royal Academy in London. One of which was a life size picture of a man stripped, bare, standing looking out. The painting was hung at human height, giving the impression of a mirror. You stood before it and was looked at by yourself. For the self in the painting was the man Jesus, utterly alone, abandoned by his friends, judged, awaiting death - behold the man, every man. I stood awhile, watching people, coming in front of the painting, and everyone, who let it bear scrutiny, was changed. The change was completely noticeable in the way they carried themselves, in the way they looked from then on. The shifts in body and timing were subtle but real.

In this painting Rouault had captured both the complete humanity of the self - the capacity of its exile and in having that exile shared by this particular man: a path restored home.

Rouault is an intense painter of the human: a humanity that never steps out of the possibility of redemption; however, distantly we pass into either our own griefed loneliness or our own enclosing pride.

When I saw yesterday, out of the corner of my eye (online), a headline connecting President Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize I thought it must be referring to a comment piece of extended irony. The kind of writing that tends to depress me. I passed on.

But this morning it turns out to be true!

As one who wishes President Obama well (from a distance both of geography and connectivity), the award of the prize for essentially not being someone else and altering the mood music is startling (and a mite ridiculous)! The prize, rightly I feel, has been awarded to inspirational figures whose practical achievements have at the time (and even subsequently) not led to actual effective outcomes; and, to afford people a measure of exposure and protection. You think of HH the Dalai Lama and Ang San Suu Kyi in both these contexts.

But awarding it on the basis of hope in a promising start...maybe...no!

It is a pity he did not smile appreciatively and firmly turn the prize down. Now that would have shifted the mood music significantly, instead by accepting it (as is already apparent), it has offered another polarity around which the quite ugly political discourse in the US can sadly fester.

As both Martin Luther King and Gandhi were aware peacemaking often turns on the counter intuitive symbolic act. 'No thanks, perhaps you may be able to consider me later!' might have been just such an act.

"Voina’s recent provocations are sharper. Last year they organized a performance called A Cop in a Priest’s Robe—a commentary on the powerful new role of the Orthodox Church in Russian society. Vorotnikov, wearing a priest’s robe and a police officer’s hat, walked into a supermarket, loaded a trolley, and left without paying. Store personnel didn’t protest this seeming demonstration of priestly and police invulnerability."

This particular 'happening' (described in an article here: http:// www.artnewsonline.com/ issues/article.asp?art_id=2757) evoked a paradoxical mixture of amusement and depression. It is sadly true that the misapplication of powers - temporal and spiritual - can generate such indifference but yet none of the 'art' so described (in the article) steps beyond the ephemeral, a gesture against a particular system, but not a statement of what might transcend it.

Compare with the spiritual resistance pitched beyond the grasping tentacles of Communism.

The philosopher, Alasdair Macintyre, in 'After Virtue' reminds us that originally 'to protest' meant as much 'to bear witness to' as to be against. It is a meaning we might fruitfully restore.

Walking to the railway station today, I pass the Oratory.

As a centre of Catholicism, this has a migratory history from left to right. Cardinal Newman is one of the intellectual architects of a developing faith that was embedded in Vatican II but the congregations of Oratorians he founded are embedded in the more traditionalist wing of the Church.

As I pass, I notice rather large men in black, with fluorescent waistcoats - neither 'largeness' nor 'fluorescence' being hallmarks of Oratorians I pause. There is a small queue of people being shepherded into the church.

I notice the poster and discover that St Therese of Lisieux has come to town: more precisely her relics have.

She tours.

I find myself in two minds. One mind is wholly comfortable with the sense that a relic is a place infused with the saintly spirit of the person it once carried and, therefore, a meaningful place of veneration - and appeal to the continuing reality that is the saint. The second mind is ambivalent, possibly about the way in which the relics become the property of others. These are used to reinforce particular perceptions of the faith that may not represent the saints' own understanding. The use of the relics freeze the saint out of life. The saint lives but we conceptualise their life according to our purposes.

It may be better to leave saints to communicate according to their own lights; and, leave their relics to lie peacefully in their graves.

Off to facilitate a small development charity's strategy day; and, had a wonderful anxiety dream where instead of the eight people expected, thirty or more turned up, were completely disinterested in my facilitation and instead brought piles of food and a guitar and partied away oblivious to the 'need' to produce outputs and outcomes! In spite of my obvious distress in the dream, on waking it felt quite liberating!

'Mercurius' is a 'novel' by Patrick Harpur. Novel is a loose description for the book that though it carries a compelling narrative also manages to give an abidingly fascinating account of the 'Great Work' of alchemy. In this case conducted by an Anglican priest in the basement of his Vicarage in the 1950s, and commented on by its discoverer, an intellectually curious, emotionally fragile woman, trained in anthropology and a reader of Jung in the 1980s. The book is accompanied by notes that trace the alchemical references and vividly sketch some of the personalities and explorers in this tradition.

I am haunted by it. Last night I woke in the early hours, fretting over a potential problem at work, and making tea lay in bed reading the next chapter. It restored me to balance and I returned to sleep and dream.

The best description of the work, thus far, is Eileen's, the young woman's, that it is essentially ritual: a maturation of the soul, that is enacted through the unfolding drama that is the work, as the terms of the work are transfigured, over and over, but a soul cannot mature on its own, the work implies, the conditions of the world are to be changed - what is unfolding inwards, must be reflected outwards. It is not, as Jung thought, a psychological projection read off matter that brought individuation to the person but a restoration of the harmony inherent in all things into which, once inserted, the person is transformed: to taste paradise is to be restored to your original God-given image.

As the forms and processes unfold I am at a conscious level lost in their peculiar language - of Sol and Luna, fixed and volatile, mercury and sulphur but beyond the conscious am full of recognition. The images strike the depths before surfacing.