The new Proost podcast is out, this time featuring a fantastic chat with Mark Berry.

If you don’t know Mark and his work here is a starter;

Before training to be a Youth Minister, Mark Worked as a Theatre and Music Lighting designer and a musician, he retains a deep love for the arts, and plays Guitar and Bass.

Mark began his ministry as a Youth worker in 1994, before becoming a Pioneer minister in 2005. His ministry has seen him sharing life with Far Right Skinheads, Gangs and Nightclubbers, growing a Church with unchurched young people in a secondary school, becoming a Chaplain and then a Director of a professional football club and running ‘Sanktuary’ an overnight café andsafe zone for the night time community.  

These days, Mark is working with prison leavers and (pertinent to this discussion) teaches a module on art and spirituality.

Here is the pod;

I very much enjoyed this chat – as I always do with Mark – there is so much in here that I feel the need to explore further, both in terms of my own ponderings, but also in relation to the broader issue of Proost. After all, Rob and I have done a lot of talking about what might emerge around Proost, but as yet there is no actual publishing or promoting going on. Having said that, I think this is right. We are determinded that if and when a new organisation emerges, it will do so because it is part of a movement of people who have some clarity about what they are about. We can’t do it by ourselves anyway so we need to explore and develop these ideas in community.

That word, Poeisis

In pod 10, we spoke a lot with Mark about this word, which had been very significant for him as he found meaning in artistic expression. My entry into this idea had been through theopoetics (you can read more about this here) and you may be able to hear me grappling to reach some kind of clarity as to how these things fitted together. In the end we got there, but it required a lot of subsequent chat with Mark, and another pod chat with Rob, which you can listen to here;

We would love to know what others think. Are these useful terms? Might they give clues as to our unfolding, our unveiling?

Allegory

I particularly love this; art making is itself an allegory, another way to encapsulate – no, to demonstrate – the ground of our being.

In making this statement, I am rejecting another common way to think about art, namely, as the means of defining the ‘specialness’ of humanity, as the only animals capable of abstract expression. (This also means rejecting at least in part, the ‘specialness’ of the individual artist.)

Instead, perhaps we can think about art as co-production, in deliberately deciding to join the great unfolding, the explosion of creativity which we are part of. You might chose to use religious language here- Creation and the endless excitement of a creative god – or you could just decide to leave this space wide open.

If we follow this logic, the intrinsic value of the art we make is found not in its percieved ‘excellence’, but rather the degree to which it enables reconnection to the creative stream at the heart of everything. Not that this is easy to define, but I think we know it when we encounter it.

Artistry

The above photo is of one of Dame Magdalene Odundo’s pots, on dsiplay in the appalling oppulence of Houghton Hall, Norfolk. The juxtaposition of empire plunder and black female art was by far the highlight of our vist there a couple of months ago.

In my above rejection of the centrality of the ‘great artist’ narrative, I must acknowledge that some people have particular gifts and skills. What they do with this gifting should be a matter for their own exploration and of course some will reach fame and acclaim in their own lifetimes. Many will not.

I am more interested in ordinary artistry – in the way that we all seek to orniment, to illustrate then to make meaning through object and experience. When we collectivise this pursuit, adding power to each other, becoming more than the sum of our individual talents, special things happen.

There has to be space and room for both.

Dominating world news this week has been the death of seven people on a private yacht, including the owner, Mike Lynch and his daughter. The 184 foot Yacht cost Lynch £40 million. We all understand why this is world news and these things were not;

In June of this year, Greek coastguards alegedly (according to eye witnesses) threw migrants overboard, to their deaths. You can read about this here.

Also in June, at least 11 people were declared dead and 64 others were ‘missing’ after two ships were wrecked off southern Italy.

According to a March report by IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, more than 27,000 people have died in the Mediterranean Sea over the last decade, whilst trying to reach southern Europe from northern Africa.

Meanwhile, the Italian Government has responded to these events by trying to prosecute rescue ships for ‘trafficking.’ It did not work, thanks to Italian courts refusing to play ball.

These disparities should shock us to the core, but…

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The spirit level

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Private planes need private pilots

You don’t fly them yourself

They land on private airports

Your private wings of polished steel

.

Private yachts need private sailors

You don’t sail them yourself

They sail to private islands

With private shores of swept sand

.

Private banks need private bankers

You don’t count the pound yourself

They digitise your billions

In private vaults of silicon

.

Private lands need private armies

You don’t guard them yourself

You raise up private watchtowers, put

Broken champagne bottles on private walls

It is always difficult to talk about money and so if this feels uncomfortable, move on. Otherwise, hear me out as I try to do justice to this rather tricky subject. After all, many of us wonder whether it might be possible to make a living through art and so I intend to be rather candid.

Michaela and I have been making a living through art, poetry and pottery for about eight years now and have loved every minute of it. We took a deliberate decision to live creatively and simply, knowing that this would have major financial implications. We have not regretted this decision for a moment and here we are, still doing OK, still making art, still paying our bills. We are proof that another way of life is possible, not just through sacrifice and ‘going without’, but by chosing to live towards what matters, what feels important. We only wish we had made the move sooner.

Let’s puts some numbers on it

We live these days on a shared income of around £25K per annum, roughly half of my (Chris’s) last annual salary when I was a Service Manager in health and social care. We have to declare a privilege here, in that we live in our own house, without a mortgage thanks to selling our old house and moving somewhere smaller. (We are aware that housing costs are a huge part of many people’e outgoings, and many feel that ownership outright is totally out of reach.)

We currently run two vehicles, both 11 years old and on their last legs. One is a van, necessary for all the ceramics events we do, the other an old runabout that we use locally. The hope is we can find a vehicle that will do both jobs, but for now, our biggest costs are keeping these two in running condition.

We are all seeing spiralling energy costs, and our art depends on an electric kiln!

Our income, as with many artists and creatives, had a big dip last year. We are OK, but it forced us to think carefully about what we do, how we use our time, what our output should be and how we might diversify. We make no complaints here, as most small businesses will be in the same place.

The business of selling art

There has always been an inherent contradiction in the fact that our decision to live more frugally and creatively was dependent from the start on other people using their disposable income to buy things that we make. Unsprisingly, when people worry about their own income, they have less capacity for purchasing art… although, conversely, many of us keenly feel the need to connect with object of meaning, or to lift a friend with that special thing from distance.

Our experience at the last major ceramics event might be instructive. Overall income was only slightly down from the previous year at the same venue, but the pattern of sales was very different. We make objects ranging from the teens of pounds to around £400 for the largest one-off pots and pictures. We would normally expect our main earnings to be from mid-range items of around £40-80 – vases, poetry plaques and the like – but at the last event, we sold almost nothing in this middle range. Unsurprisingly, most sales were smaller, sub £30 items. Many of these were bought as gifts and often came with lovely stories about the person they were bought for. However, over half our earnings came from the sale of our most expensive offerings.

Perhaps this pattern reflects the way our economy is working at present – many of us are feeling the squeeze, whilst others have done well – but also, through the conversations with customers, people are making conscious attempts to invest in objects of meaning. That is after all what art is for.

Art has always depended to a lesser or greater degree on patrons, on investors, on those able and willing to release money in support those who create the art. In exchange, these people form a relationship with the art, with the artist, and hopefully with the meaning the art is reaching for.

We can honestly say that the greatest pleasure in making our art comes at the point when we meet others who are moved by it. It is often an emotional exchange, full of stories of loss, of hope, of love. The purchase that comes after these exchanges may be very small, out of all proportion to the memory it leaves in it wake.

Of course, we are deeply grateful for these exchanges, but even beyond this, we have come to see them as part of the business of art itself. If we have a calling, it is towards this.

What about the Patreon thing?

One of the ways in which we have tried to diversify and build a different income stream is through this thing called Patreon.

If you have not heard of this before, this is a way for patrons of art (or ‘Patreons’) to support artists directly, through a monthly subscription (paid in American dollars!) In return (depending on what ‘tier’ you subscribe to) you recieve rewards in the form of art.

Seatree has a Patreon account, under the name of Seatree community. This has three tiers, as follows

• Tier one ($3 a month) access to a monthly e-mal with a made-for-Patreon-only video based around a new poem.
• Tier two ($10 a month) as above, plus a monthly hand written piece of art by Michaela, featuring the words of another poem, rendered in her own wonderful style as shown in the image above and the video below
• Tier three ($20 a month) as above, plus a monthly piece of pottery, either as a surprise or one agreed with you.

We both love doing these Patreon things, but we really need to widen our community to make this work for us. If you would like to join us, you would be very welcome! Simply click here and away you go.

Here is a sample of one of the tier one videos (normally only available to those who subscribe, so I hope they will forgive me!)

This week, I blocked an old school friend on FB, after she shared a number of posts that were clearly racist, anti-muslim and anti-immigrant – oh and there was one of those ‘share this if you think we should look after our own before spending billions in foreign aid’ posts too.

The thing is, this woman was someone I remember as being a quiet, kind, nice girl. What happened to make her politics so angry, so violent? Part of the answer might be local – my home town happens to be the constituency seat of the repugnant Lee Anderson, former deputy chair of the Conservative Party and now a Reform party MP after his racism became too toxic even for the Tories. In other words this place;

I feel a deep sadness when I watch this film. If feels like the legacy of working class collective consciousness that gew up during the mid and post industrial period has been eroded down to a sort of angry desperation which is searching for someone/something to blame, and so is wide open to the easy answers, and the convenient victims, offered to them by dreadful men like Anderson.

I say ‘dreadful men’, but I ‘know’ him. I have not met him personally, but he used to work with Michaela’s uncle in the mines, before Thatcher closed them all, decimating whole communitiies during my teenage years. My late sister knew him when he worked in the constituency office of the then Labour party MP for Ashfield. His unfolding and unravelling to the extreme right has been the same trajectory as the wider politics of the area, so I feel ike I understand Anderson. He is that man in the corner of the pub who makes people laugh and holds court with his loud opinions. He has verbal intelligence, quick wit and that say-it-like-it-is bluntness that seems authentic and appropriately ‘northern’. Of course, he is also a bigot and as slippery as a greased rope.

Regretably, Anderson has read the room. His journey from Labour party staffer, to the top of the Conservative party, then to the extreme right wing has not been about principles, it has been about political electability. He has been able to ride that same wavecrest that saw the end of the ‘Red wall’ by Boris Johnson’s populist Tories. He took the racist rhetoric of people like Patel and Braverman, along with the fear mongering and division making over immigration, and gave it a Bentick miners welfare twist, leading him inevitably towards the right – and more than enough of the good people of Ashfield went with him.

Now we jave far right mobs on the streets, setting fire to police cars, stoning mosques and trying to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers – people fleeing from war, murder and rape. As if they are the problem. As if they have stolen our country. As if they are the wealthy elites storing up more and more wealth, more and more property. As if they closed down the mines and hollowed out the high streets, as if they clog the corridors of out Accident and Emergency wards. As if they personally emasculated each and every one of those red faced men standing at the bar in England football shirts.

We need some light relief.

How can this happen? How did people get so angry? How does this anger become a social movement- a moraly-bankrupt, based-on-lies eruption of fake-righteous activism?

Lessons from the past

Firstly, we have to pay heed to history. This is not the first time after all. It is almost a cliche to talk this way so i will not labour the point, but look at the economic circumstances that led to the rise of fascism in the 30s, or the battles against the racists and antisemites in east end of London in the austerity at the end of the second world war. In the words of the proverb Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.

Political discourse

Politics is about the operationalise of ideas, right? It is about justice and looking after the weak and poor. It is the way that large diverse populations are able to work out differences and work towards peaceful consensus. It gives everyone a seat at the table. No? That is NOT what it is really like? OK, well can we at least agree that our system is the least worst option? Has the bar sunk so low?

What happens when politics loses contact with overarching ideology or principles? When power seems an end in itself?

What happens when – rightly or wrongly – the perception grows in a population that we are beset by ‘problems’. These ‘problems’ are defined poorly of course, because they are complex and filtered through information sources that are often untrustworthy and controlled by powers that have a vested interest. Then, what if the political system we vote for seems powerless to address these problems in a way that makes any obvious difference?

One answer is that clever people see this as a political opportunity. The Tories tried it first, by framing the problem in a way that could divide and anger just enough people to make a political difference at the voting booth. In the absence of hope, give them fear, give them anger. Give them hate, because nothing unites like a common enemy.

But who makes the best enemy? Who deserves our anger most? This takes us back to the question of by whom and how our ‘problems’ are defined.

We now have a Labour party fight-back, who have offered little or no hope in relation to those ‘problems’, rather playing a political card called caution.

The freedom of information

The internet. The ultimate expression of libertarianism. A free, open space in which everyone (or every geek at very least) has access to the same megaphone as the rich and powerful. Except that is not how things panned out.

Firstly, if everyone has a megaphone, that is a whole lot of noise.

Then there is that algorithm thing. We run a small business, and anyone who does this will be well versed in just how damned complicated a game we have to play to game Google towards recognising our humble offerings on the altar of the algorithm. The time this takes is entirely open ended. This is not a level playing field.

Much more seriously however is that other quality of the algorithm – the way it feeds on attention. The way it feeds us ever more extreme versions of what it thinks we are interested in. The way it allows us to exist outside our bodies as excarnate, silicone avatars, devoid of the mediating effect of fleshy proximity, insulated from responsibility. They become externalised egos, allowing us a certain liberty and freedom we would find appalling in reality. There are some unintended, but convenient to some, consequences to all this, in that extreme megaphones become much louder.

The two-dimensional slicone goggles starts to affect our every day ways of seeing.

Truth or fiction- who cares. Who is loudest? Whose content makes my outrage tingle most?

And some clever people know how all this works – they can game it, use it as a tool for mass maniplation. The Cambridge files laid all this bare, but there has been no corrective, no regulatory response. It sits there as an open undemocratic secret.

Is there an antidote?

Of course not- after all, we know what the internet has told us about vaccines. We have made our bed and we must lie in it. There is no medicine for this kind of poison.

I really do think this is true in one sense. We can’t make a world without extremes or without the algorithm. Thugs will always be thugs and politics will always be political. The poor will always be with us. Wars will always force refugees out on the terrible road, longing for distant mythical places of peace. It has always been this way.

Dear friends, I cannot hope for the end of violence, but I can sing of the present reality of love.

I can tell you that the same person I unfriended on facebook was kind to me in ways I will remember.

I can hope that deep inside each and everyone of us on all sides – rioters , counter-protestors, police – is god. That the deepst, most truest part of us all, is god.

I am still processing a poem I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Here it is again.

Given what we know

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Given what we know and what

We fear about the trouble we’re in

We will bounce babies on our knees

We will run our fingers through loose earth, and

We will love one another

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Given what we know and what

We fear about the state of our world

We will feed strangers

We will dance to the skirl of fiddles, and

We will pray

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Given what we know and what

We fear about just how much is broken

We will embrace

We will light a candle in the empty church, and

We will plant trees

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Given what we know and what

We fear about the misuse of power and money

We will play

We will wave willow and kick leather

We will laugh

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Given what we know and what we fear

About the end of things we hold dear

We will look to the birds

We will walk the woods that remain, and

We will sing

This week, we are running a pop up shop over the water from where we live, in a place called Gourock. The shop space is on a street full of galleries so always attracts people who love art, as well as the day trippers and the lunch hour wanderers. It has been pretty busy today, with a smattering of sales which were welcome, but I can honestly say that the conversations I have found myself immersed in have been much more important.

A social worker, beaten up by the job, unable to hold back tears. We spent ages talking about the strain and stress of it all and the skew we feel towards kindness in a system that has no recognition of what this look like sometimes.

A pair of former hospice workers, out to meet old colleagues.

A jazz musician fresh from a walk around Arran talking about the frustrations of the music business.

A childrens outreach worker, whose caring heart means that she is the one from her team who does the birthdays and the get-well gifts.

A teacher rejoicing that one of her colleagues has found her way towards something better than the strain of her current job, so she was looking for a gift to send her on her way.

Then there are those discussions that I will call ‘spiritual but not religious’.

Suddenly I find myself sharing the deepest parts of life with others. Perhaps some words in a piece of art have unlocked something. The shape of something half forgotten which then bursts out into the space like a brightly painted trout. I have had several of those today and each one has felt precious. In a world where so many people have left Church and formal religion behind, perhaps art and poetry – even pottery – might be one of the ways we can still connect, first with each other, then with something else, that I would tentatively still call god – even if she takes shapes I no longer know or wish to define.

So I am grateful for our little shop. I even think there will be people I have met today who I will meet again, who will become part of my journey as I hope to be of theirs.

I like this retail business.

I am just getting over a nasty dose of the old Covid and starting to look forward to running a pop-up shop in a lovely space over the water- McGilps.

The shop is a way for us to showcase our pottery to an increasingly art-interested Inverclyde. This will be our second time in McGilps, and last time I loved it. So many good conversations, and we sold some work, allowing us to continue doing what we do. Alsongside this trading, we have also tried to put on a couple of events, including a poetry reading or two.

In fact, the poetry evenings are starting to take a rather lovely shape. I choose a theme, then spend a long time gathering poems. I always start with a few favourites (including some of my own) but then the discoveries begin, though internet searches or dips into half-forgotten books.

The trick then is to make people feel welcome, comfortable and safe. This cannot be guaranteed despite our best effort, as the chemistry of a human gathering is partially imported and not fully manufactured in the moment. The last McGilps gathering was special though- one of those evenings which live on in the spirit long afterwards.

Next Thursday evening, we go again. You are invited. It will be free this time (last time we charged twenty quid, but it felt wrong to charge for such a beautiful space) although we will take donations for the Amos Trust.

This time we ill be exploring poems of protest and resistance. I have written a lot of these, perhaps too many. Poetry always seems to give important voice to oppressed people. The thing is however, protest poems are not just strident protest, not just the calling out of the powerful and the politics of justice. To illustrate my point, I offer you a teasers of one of the poems I hope we will read on Thursday. It may seem long, but it won’t when you read it.

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What He Thought

BY HEATHER MCHUGH

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We were supposed to do a job in Italy

and, full of our feeling for

ourselves (our sense of being

Poets from America) we went

from Rome to Fano, met

the mayor, mulled

a couple matters over (what’s

a cheap date, they asked us; what’s

flat drink). Among Italian literati

we could recognize our counterparts:

the academic, the apologist,

the arrogant, the amorous,

the brazen and the glib—and there was one

administrator (the conservative), in suit

of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide

with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated

sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.

Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic,

so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome

(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)

I found a book of poems this

unprepossessing one had written: it was there

in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)

where it must have been abandoned by

the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)

to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.

I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book

back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans

were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then

our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there

we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,

till, sensible it was our last

big chance to be poetic, make

our mark, one of us asked

                                             “What’s poetry?”

Is it the fruits and vegetables and

marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or

the statue there?” Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer

instantly, I didn’t have to think—”The truth

is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that

was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed

taught me something about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out,

all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents Giordano Bruno,

brought to be burned in the public square

because of his offense against

authority, which is to say

the Church. His crime was his belief

the universe does not revolve around

the human being: God is no

fixed point or central government, but rather is

poured in waves through all things. All things

move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is

the soul of the soul of the world.” Such was

his heresy. The day they brought him

forth to die, they feared he might

incite the crowd (the man was famous

for his eloquence). And so his captors

placed upon his face

an iron mask, in which

he could not speak. That’s

how they burned him. That is how

he died: without a word, in front

of everyone.

                     And poetry—

                                        (we’d all

put down our forks by now, to listen to

the man in gray; he went on

softly)—

                  poetry is what

he thought, but did not say.

Heather McHugh, “What He Thought”, from Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 © 1994 by Heather McHugh and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. http://www.wesleyan.edu/wespress