A wee poem I have been working on following a trip to Islay. Uncharacteristically optimistic and upbeat by my usual standards I thought… call it an antidote to a really crap day.
.
The horizon rises rust and golden
There is mild steel in the sky
But the curl of the sea still smiles at me
This light falls kind upon the eye
.
A cold north wind unfurls these coat-flags
Slapping like a laugh at the side of your face
Peat smoke clouds my watered eye
Our ship lies soft in harbour embrace
I had a conversation with Will last night about camping. He was wanting to go to a small island, by canoe, in February. I suggested that the canoe was probably not a safe means of transport to get to the islands in question (right out to sea in some fast tidal waters) and also February might be a bit cold. As I said these things, I felt like I was damaging something precious- some kind of freedom, adventure, companionship that might easily be stolen by time, or the internet.
It started a discussion between Will and I about what we would like to do- as well as planning some camping trips ourselves, we revived an old idea of organising a trip for adult/child pairings along the lines of one of our wilderness retreats.
Today I was reading something George Monbiot wrote on a similar theme. He was writing about the way that our relative freedom from oppression, slavery, poverty, war has seemed to lead us towards LESS freedom- we become obsessed with a kind of freedom to consume, to shop. We talk about our consumer rights as if they are laws of the universe, a bit like gravity.
A couple of quotes that rather hit home;
Almost universally we now seem content to lead a proxy life, a counter life, of vicarious, illusory relationships, of secondhand pleasures, of atomisation without individuation. Those who possess some disposable income are extraordinarily free, by comparison to almost all our great-grandparents, but we tend to act as if we have been placed under house arrest…
…Had our ancestors been asked to predict what would happen in an age of widespread prosperity in which most religious and cultural proscriptions had lost their power, how many would have guessed that our favourite activities would not be fiery political meetings, masked orgies, philosophical debates, hunting wild boar or surfing monstrous waves but shopping and watching other people pretending to enjoy themselves? How many would have foreseen a national conversation – in public and in private – that revolves around the three Rs: renovation, recipes and resorts? How many would have guessed that people possessed of unimaginable wealth and leisure and liberty would spend their time shopping for onion goggles and wheatgrass juicers? Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores…
Ouch.
Returning to my discussion with Will- how might we start to raise the eyes of our kids above Monbiot’s three R’s? I suppose we might start with the big W. (Wilderness.) Here is Monbiot again;
Could it be this – the immediate satisfaction of desire, the readiness with which we can find comfort – that deprives us of greater freedoms? Does extreme comfort deaden the will to be free?
If so, it is a habit learnt early and learnt hard. When children are housebound, we cannot expect them to develop an instinct for freedom that is intimately associated with being outdoors. We cannot expect them to reach for more challenging freedoms if they have no experience of fear and cold and hunger and exhaustion. Perhaps freedom from want has paradoxically deprived us of other freedoms. The freedom which makes so many new pleasures available vitiates the desire to enjoy them.
I am not sure Will and I are quite ready for ‘fear and cold and hunger and exhaustion’, but there does seem to me a real need to get out of our digital comfort zones.
To leave behind the wide screens and look instead to the wide horizon.
Come with us if you like…
Angry
He stood in the door of the temple
And saw red
.
The beautiful ones
Stressed up like sharks
Creases sharp enough to cut
Hunkered down over their spreadsheet scriptures
Their holy bottom line
.
These beautiful creatures
Who can never have enough
Who are blind, but for the glint of golden things
Their altars slickened with the substitutionary sacrifice
Of the poor
.
Tear a rib from me Father
Make them anew
Turn over their chemical tables
Snap the twisted strings of their DNA
.
My blood boils
bright
red
Here I go again. I keep thinking that I will stop talking about this rock, and then I get sucked in again. This time I am responding to another letter in the local paper suggesting the rock can not be racist in origin or association for a whole set of reasons that seem to me to be at best questionable.
History is never value free- it tells the story we want it to tell, despite the best efforts of historical research methods. It serves our own world view.This was demonstrated most clearly recently by Michael Gove, our rather dreadful Education Secretary, who had a go at ‘left wing’ historians who described the first world war as an unnecessary slaughter in which lions where led by upper class fools. Gove suggested the first world war was in fact a ‘Just War’ in which Britain and her Allies responded heroically to German imperial expansionism. The reality of course is far more nuanced and complicated than can be painted by narrow dogmatic historical interpretations.
What story am I wanting my history to tell? Am I too captured up in a Marxist approach that sees history a struggle by the weak against the powers of empire?
Perhaps I am- but at the same time, I think that a history skewed towards an appreciation of the poor and disenfranchised is needed more now than ever. We live in a time of recession. We know that in such times there is a tendency to scapegoat, to caricature, to blame. For a brief while it was all the fault of the bankers. Now it is the fault of the benefits scroungers.
So every time I leave my front door and see the rock above, I find myself thinking of these images;
…and I end up composing another letter to the paper. The last one, honest!
Dear Editor
Thanks once again to John A Stirling for his detailed and helpful reply to my previous letter suggesting an information board next to Jim Crow rock. He makes several statements about the rock, which I would like to examine further. I do this with some reluctance as my original suggestion was an attempt to bring together polarised opinion, not engage in more sectarian opinionising.
A lot of our discussion has been about the origin of the name given to the rock, and whether the words ‘Jim Crow’ were understood at that time to represent a racist stereotype. John feels that this cannot be the case as 1) the rock was so named prior to possible American slave connections (as early as 1726) and 2) back in 1726 there were no houses in the area so the rock was unlikely to attract the attention of local residents. There are some leaps of logic in these statements that you must judge for yourself, but the truth is we are unlikely to ever know for sure.
John also mentions an often repeated local belief that the name of the stone relates to a local builders yard. One of my friends researched this possibility as part of an educational dissertation- spending time digging into records, both locally and in Lochgilphead. He was unable to find any evidence for the existence of such a business. Again, this is not to say it did not exist, more that we are unlikely ever to know for sure.
Next John mentions the possibility of the word ‘Crow’ being derived from ‘Croadh’- Gaelic for cattle and perhaps related to old Drover’s routes. However it seems to me unlikely as the rock is well away from known Drover’s routes (the nearest one being a crossing at Ardentinny.) However, once again, we are unlikely to ever know for sure.
John pointed us also to the apparent change in how the rock has been decorated- which appears to have become ever closer to what we understand as a ‘Golliwog’. Early photographs (1905) do indeed show the rock decorated with something more primitive, and with teeth. Could this have actually been meant to represent a crow? If so, why not with a yellow beak and with no teeth? Interestingly, there are other ‘Blackface’ stereotypes that include exaggerated teeth. However no one reading the words ‘Jim Crow’ in the 19th Century is likely to have missed the association with black people. Therefore it is perfectly possible that an existing local land mark was co-opted to a new racist purpose. Once again however, we are unlikely to ever know for sure.
What we do know however is that this area owes much of its early prosperity to the slave trade- from well before 1726. We know that in the great age of Clyde Steamers people promenaded the sea front and visited a many places of entertainment. We know that one of the most popular forms of entertainment were the Minstrel Shows. We know that racism has done terrible damage to millions of people the world over, and that one of the means by which this was perpetuated within popular culture was through the remarkably persistent Blackface stereotypes.
We can also be pretty sure that in anywhere else in the world, if the words ‘Jim Crow’ were emblazoned on a rock next to a Golliwog painting people would assume (rightly or wrongly) that it was making a racist statement. They might expect some kind of explanation as to why local residents allow such a thing to remain unexamined, unexplained, unchallenged.
So, we have a choice as to how we respond to this. We can accuse/deny, or we can display our uncertainty in a way that shows to others that we understand it, and have learnt something from the last few hundred years of local and international history.
Which brings us back to my suggestion of an information board.
You are supposed to get more placid, easy going, calmer as you get older but I think I might be bucking the trend.
People have always described me as a calm, easy going person- particularly, it has to be said, those who do not know me well. Perhaps the reality was that for much of my younger years I was scared of my shadow and far too keen on showing a calm competent exterior to cover over the insecurities within. Simply put, I wanted to please people, not to draw attention.
But at the age of 46, I find myself in a place where life has done most of its becoming, some of its being and may even be looking into its declining. Life, for the most part, has been very kind to me. I am loved (despite it all) and I have learnt how to love in return. I have what I need plus a little bit that I do not. I live in a rich country that has known internal peace and stability for my whole life.
So what makes me angry? I can not pretend towards being totally absent from grumpy old man syndrome so this might well be a factor. However, the anger in me is pushed by a conviction that this world we live in has contained within it some terrible disappointments. Is this really as good as it gets? Is there not more than this, better than this?
Growing up I was told that God would sort everything out- probably soon (a second coming of Jesus) but certainly ultimately. The second coming has been delayed it seems and if we do live in the ‘end times’ then God is taking his own sweet time to get it all over with. And in the meantime there are all those peddling a kind of religion that sees itself as a great big hoover for the righteous and the rest can just go to hell. And it makes me angry.
I grew into a society that despite the looming possibility of nuclear war still thought that all of the world’s problems could be solved by technology. But then came global warming and we seem powerless to change our greedy needy addiction to consumption even though it is killing us. Technology seems to be a means of giving separation from the problems; they look different when viewed through a screen. And it makes me angry.
But what makes me angriest of all at the moment is that despite a thousand years of history, we in the UK seem to becoming ever more feudal. The rich barons gallop by in their Ferrari’s and sneer at the great unwashed. And to convince themselves of their rightful place of election they demonise, denegrate and stereotype. They make poor-porn like the unbelievable shite that is Benefits Street. And whilst the poor lose out in a thousand cuts, the rich get richer. They get more stuff. And it makes me ANGRY.
I heard a story today of someone who had been without benefits for three months. The person had been working previously, but mental health problems had made it increasingly difficult and they lost their job. A shattered self confidence was made worse after a ATOS assessment regarded the person as fit for work. The end result was that they stopped leaving the house. The machinery of unemployment benefit was impossible. It was hard enough to breathe. Hard enough to think. Every day becomes a competition between distraction and overwhelming dread. Death seems a valid option.
Add into this the current nastiness in the media, and in the mouths of government ministers, about scroungers, wasters, smokers, gamblers, and the self esteem of people already near rock bottom falls further. Anyone who has seen this kind of defeat close up, or experienced it for themselves, knows these words to be what they are- pure propaganda used to justify a social policy geared towards wealth creation for those who already have wealth.
And it makes me incandescent.
Lest I give the impression that I am some kind of Jesus, turning over tables of injustice in the white heat of righteous indignation, I also get angry at computers that do not work, at my wife when she does not deserve it and my kids when they do.
Michaela and I have just spent a night on Islay- I had to do some work there on Friday, so she tagged along too. It is a hard life.
Islay is a beautiful island, full of rolling farmland, beaches and a dozen or so distilleries that make the finest whisky. The beaches are stunning and the air full of birds.
On Islay, everyone waves at other drivers as they pass by. It is an instinctive thing- everyone gets a wave. It costs nothing, this kind of distanced friendliness. It is possible to maintain the illusion of conviviality despite all sorts of shared history that divides as much as it unites.
Today Michaela and I explored some lovely beaches and walked around the edge of the weather as it waved to us from dramatic skies. What a beautiful world we live in…
We got a present in the post today from our friend Maggy. The note with it said something like ‘I am not given to reading Papal documents as a matter of course, but this one is different’. So different that she sent a copy to us!
This one is the first such document to be written by Pope Francis, and could be seen as his personal agenda, his manifesto, for his papacy. He has called it Evangelii Gaudium, or The Joy of the Gospel. You can read it on-line here, which I had tried to do, but given up. It is much easier to read in paper form so thanks Maggy!
The ‘Gospel’ that Francis talks about ‘Evangelising’ is a very different Gospel that the Evangelicals that I grew up with would recognise. For them the Gospel was simply this- repent, because unless you say the sinners prayer you are going to hell. Francis’ Gospel is about the truth of Christ growing within us, so that as we experience his profound liberation we become ever more sensitive to the needs of others.
Francis is also concerned that the church may be a poor church, for the poor. Here are a couple of quotes which immediately light me up;
“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalised: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.
“Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a ‘disposable’ culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the ‘exploited’ but the outcast, the ‘leftovers’.”
I look forward to reading more of the story that Francis would encourage us to see ourselves part of- the good news Gospel story that our world desperately needs to hear anew.
And I will contrast it with the other stories, like this one.
I will read other stories through the shape given by the Gospel.
There are parts of the UK that operate like some kind of holding tank for radioactive waste. Except that the waste is made up of people.
Some would call these people skyvers, wasters, people who live on the edge of criminality and addiction. They are the bastards of the welfare state; half lives created out of the fissive heat of market led capitalism. They are gathered together where the housing is cheapest, closest together. Even when new, it is housing no one wants to live in.
And because it is irradiated, those who live in these places become defined by it, cursed by it, captured within it.
What to do?
This has been the subject of study in sociology for decades- ever since the slums were replaced by high rise flats, which in turn were torn down and replaced by housing association faux-villages with their ragged green bits and broken picket fences.
The problem is not welfare even though there are problems with welfare.
The problem is not worklessness even though work is next to impossible to find if you are irradiated.
The problem is lack of hope.
The problem is caused by abandonment, by casting outside, by removing worth, by categorising as ‘other’, ‘less than’. By the death of dreams.
Today the Chancellor announced cuts of £25 Billion to welfare budgets and I want to scream out loud with anger at it all.
But who knows what to do with the radioactive waste? It is too expensive to clean.
I turn to writing as this is the only way I know how to scream. Here is another one of the poems that I am calling ‘protest poems’.
Cowboys and Indians
The wagons circled in that wild place
Under the kitchen table
Brambled by spiders’ webs
Stalked by wrinkled peas
He always wanted to be a pioneer
To ride the range, and
Eat beans beneath the wandering star
But no-one ever leaves this place
His cowboy became Red Indian
His range a reservation
In the streets below roam no buffalo
The distant drums
Lie silent
PJ harvey guest edited Radio 4’s Today programme the other day, asking some searching questions about (among other things) Britain’s on going role in selling arms to the worlds more despotic regimes.
This led me to listening to some of her music. Previously I had found it a difficult listen- too much keening wierd singing, too much crashing and bleeping. I had not heard of her last album, entitled Let England Shake. It is full of references to a broken lovely England and our legacy of war making. Songs like this one;
or this one;
this fragile tent 