Left limbo

Delighted to discover that all individual judgement has not been squeezed from Waterstone bookstores.

For in their Hampstead High Street branch yesterday, where usually the bestsellers would be the head attraction, was a table of literature in translation- obscure (to me) Belgian symbolist authors jostled with Kenyan luminaries for the delectation of Hampstead's intellectuals!

I found "An Education in Happiness: The Lessons of Hesse and Tagore" by Flavia Arzeni (http://www.pushkinpress.com/engine/shop/index.html) irresistible for wrapping up a current theme with two of my favourite authors. I am reading Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard at present: the French biologist turned Tibetan Buddhist monk and photographer; and, just completed a regular re-reading of Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game'!

As I did, Shushaku Endo's "Foreign Studies" (http://www.peterowen.com/ pages/modclas/foreign.htm). Endo I have read extensively since my philosophy tutor (and Jesuit priest) introduced me to his classic novel: 'Silence' that charts the failed mission of a Portugese priest to support Japanese Catholics after the expulsion of their missions in the sixteenth century. It is radical for its understanding portrayal of the motivations of a torturer and challenging for its subtext about the ability of a tradition to be grafted into a culture in this case Christianity to genuinely take root in Japan.

I deeply love his last major novel: 'Deep River' as an assorted group of Japanese visitors to India seek their own personal redemptions; and, the deep image the novel carries of the maternal, divine image of forgiveness that transcends particular belief structures and insinuates, by grace, into the lives of the characters.

He wrote too a beautiful, idiosyncratic Life of Jesus that sees the miracles as a divine failure in the face of human unbelief.



Shushaku Endo

Traveling back from London yesterday and over-hearing (there was no escaping it) a fascinating conversation between two young women, dolled up to the nines for a day out in Oxford.

I learnt how to avoid paying your magistrate's fine (£145 for common assault on a 'guy who should n't been followin me should he'). The disadvantages of going to prison (that appeared to be minimal, though grounded, I fear, in a wholly unrealistic picture of 'Holloway'). The fact that 'me boyfriend' promised he would remain faithful, interestingly by 'swearing to God' and should he stray, he promised that she was really the only one in the world for her. This led to speculation on whether he had actually strayed, decided in the negative, and on what she would do if he did that left nothing to the imagination!

Moving on we decided that H&M jeans were 'just as good quality' as Armani and you were simply paying for a label that often no one could even see - 'I mean you aint going to pull up yer jumper just to show off the label r yer'! This was said with the vehemence of unbelieved conviction.

The conversation was liberally peppered with fuck, fucking and fucked.

What struck me most was the complete lack of self-conscious awareness that everything that was being said was being heard. They existed in their own bubble. The conversation revealed time and again an attenuated capacity to imagine real consequence to action. It was frozen in the present and in a flow of emotion that you bounced along on rather than navigated: full of instant reactions and unrealistic expectations.

Running through it was both a heartening kind of honour - there were certainly rules of behaviour that needed to be observed - and a depressing lack of centre, of imagination, of self-awareness.

A world both recognizable - how many times am I bounced by emotion rather the navigator of desires - but utterly alien - how is it possible to be so unaware that actions give rise to chains of consequence that can be imagined and acted upon (and of one's immediate surroundings).

It reminded me of the world people fall into when speaking on mobile phones - the world around ceases to exist - and you find yourself allowed into the most intimate conversations: recently I was treated to a blow by blow account of a partnership breakup from a person sitting right next to me on the train! She was oblivious and I so embarrassed I had to move!

A very enjoyable evening at Clarence House on Monday for Youth Business International's Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

A compelling array of young creativity and effort from a Scottish contribution of making safe door hinges to prevent accidents to a Centre for Autism in Saudi Arabia.

The Prince practiced a necessary royal skill of working a room in such a way that everyone feels that they have had meaningful contact (we talked of Oxfam's presence in Russia and about Burma) whilst keeping moving!

Dinner was held in the throne room in St. James' Palace where ambassadors used to present their credentials to the monarch - and it was dominated as a room by a large red and gold throne, a touch camp I thought!

Before the Prince's arrival, we were treated to a speech from Carl Schramm, the President of the Kauffman Foundation, one of the world's largest and devoted to the promotion of entrepreneurship. He missed his vocation as a preacher (or possibly discovered it but with a different form of religion) - a courteous, accomplished tour de force that drove your assent not so much by content but by cadence!

It reminded me of my physics teacher at school who in 1923 (he was a teacher continued long beyond normal retirement age) who told us of hearing Lloyd George speak at the National Eisteddfod. Before he began, he asked whether anyone present did not speak Welsh and apologised to the small cluster of hands (including my teacher's) that went up. My teacher told us that after he finished, he would have followed Lloyd George anywhere, in spite of not having understood a word!

My friend and colleague, Pushpanath Krishnamurthy or ‘Push,’ as he is known the world over, is a Global campaigner currently working on the Climate Change Campaign for Oxfam GB and he is walking to Copenhagen as both personal witness and public campaign.

You can follow his progress here: http://gopushgo.com/

It is a noble act, with a sound history, in a political context you immediately think of Gandhi's salt march but, more deeply, you think of pilgrimage. We tend to think of this primarily as an internal event - the person pursuing their own salvation - but in truth, at its best, it was a profound social act of reciprocity of people having an opportunity to give and receive hospitality.

In the Hebrew Bible, there is an intimate link made between welcoming the stranger and welcoming God because God is always 'strange' to us, always transcendent to our expectations, always an opportunity to step into a new space of relationship. Likewise the pilgrim is always an offer and offering to explore a new world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/14/maya-angelou-interview

I remember seeing Angelou interviewed, many years ago, on daytime television by a woman journalist, whose name I cannot remember, but of whom I thought at the time, she was the best interviewer I had ever watched (as good as the legendary, John Freeman).

It was the cadences of Angelou's voice that first attracted me and the sense she conveyed of hope carried through the darkest of life episodes. This was a woman, raped as a child, and who watched her rapist beaten to death as a result of her words. She fell silent for five years, feeling responsible for his death.

This interview captures much of what makes her a special personality. The kind of person you instinctively want to celebrate.

Do journalists inhabit a different universe?

This question occurred to me pondering the reportage of the Archbishop of Canterbury's talk on faith and development whch I attended on Thursday evening. They appear to have selected that portion of the text most open to controversy, distorted it beyond meaningful recognition, and posted it to generate heat but no light.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/12/faith-development-rowan-williams

This was not the preserve of the so-called 'tabloids' of whom you would have an expectation of this behaviour but The Guardian and The Times.

"Archbishop warns aid agencies of dangers from faith groups" squealed the Guardian when, in truth, he had simply been articulating a perception that secular agencies might have of faith based agencies - a perception that was then unpicked.

An inspiring, thoughtful lecture (and I would say that because I helped inform its writing) was obscured by faux-controversy. Let us not try to spread understanding at all costs!

Driving into the office on a rain drenched day, listening in the car park to George Butterworth's 'The Banks of Green Willow': a perfectly constructed minature from a composer who was notoriously demanding on himself, destroying much of his output, and whose life was sadly foreshortened by a sniper's bullet in 1916.

Lie back and think of a certain kind of England.

Driving across the landscape, touched by the first snowy hand of winter, I was struck by how quiet it is: both town and countryside, as if the first frost brings hibernation.

In truth, part of its sleep, a substantial part, is political. It is caught in time: where the state shop lingers in villages as the provider of goods and the public official is omnipresent as the arbiter of life.

If that life is better than in Soviet times, thank not the skilled leadership of its current dictator (who in the modern vein casts himself as a democrat while furiously manipulating any democratic outcome). But thank the gas and oil transit fees that the state earns from Russia that keeps the shaky show on the road for now.

All the meaningful investment is public and it is showy but ill considered. The two castles I visited are being restored with government cash but with no apparent deep thought as to how best to exploit their charm and beauty within a wider context. We can think bricks but not visitors!

And the future looms: I remember an evening with a prominent public official, drink flowing, so what happens, I asked, when the Baltic gas pipeline from Russia to Germany is completed, bypassing Belarus? 'We are screwed', he replied.

Direct and to the point.

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.