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27.5.19

Brilliant post by Jim Davis on Attachment and denial on a Sick Planet


Attachment and denial on a sick planet by Jim Davis

The theme of our recent United Kingdom Association of Transactional Analysis National Conference in Birmingham was ‘Attachment and autonomy: celebrating psychological health’, but what future is there for this without an attachment to other species, the lives of our children, grandchildren and future generations, and a secure base in nature and the ecosystem. 
Kieran Nolan and I ran a workshop entitled It’s the end of the world as we know it but I feel fine: Denial, fatalism and psychological health on a sick planet?’ and this article is another step in attempting to raise the profile of climate change within our TA community.  In particular my focus is to understand climate change denial – of the destructive impact of the human species on our very own habitat, which Pearl Drego has described as scripty and suicidal.

From the mouths of ‘babes’.
Let’s begin with a story, one which I think pretty much tells the whole story.
In February this year everybody was commenting on the ‘wonderful’ sunny weather we were having, with temperatures reaching 25 degrees centigrade. If this is global warming, somebody said, then bring it on. Thankfully, not everybody thought like this.  A friend’s 18 year old daughter disagreed, saying ‘it’s not wonderful, there’s something wrong!’  Meanwhile Greta Thunberg, only 15, had gone from being a lone climate change protester with a placard on the streets outside the Swedish parliament, to the inspiration for the Youth Strikes for Climate movement holding over 500 events across 51 countries.
Their motto was: ‘we are going to change the fate of humanity whether you like it or not’.  In response to this a UK government minister for education reminded them that school attendance is compulsory, whilst a recent 2019 debate on climate change in the House of Commons was limited to a mere handful of MPs!

Facing the facts
I had intended to begin this article by making the case for the catastrophic nature of global warming and climate change but I changed my mind, for two reasons.  The first is that, paradoxically, one of the key causes of climate change denial is simply the experience of reading lurid descriptions of the horrors of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions, the effect on global warming, and the consequences of species extinction, deforestation, fresh water scarcity, rising sea levels, extreme weather devastation, soil erosion, areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable, food and water insecurity, mass migration, and social unrest. Are you still reading?
The second, and major reason, is that the scientific case has already been made, and now sits securely in the here-and-now reality of our Adult ego state.  Suffice it to say that whilst only 26% of US republican voters believe in human generated global warming the figure amongst members of the American Meteorological Society is 96%. 

Understanding climate change denial: individual psychology
How do we understand the fact that, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, so many people are either in denial about the potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming, or are not doing enough about it?  How do we understand the discounting of the effects of climate change, at the levels of existence and significance – primarily outright climate change deniers and those who believe it’s not a problem, or at the levels of changeability and personal capacity – primarily those passively believing nothing can be done?  Some examples, both individual and collective, of manifestations of this discounting are:
·      more IS being done
·      the environmentalists, the experts, are dealing with it
·      everything will be alright in the end
·       ‘they’ will come up with a technological solution – we always have
·       if we get everybody to recycle it’ll be ok
·      numbing desensitisation of ‘climate porn’
·      acting as if natural resources are infinite
·      green initiatives that fall way below what needs to be done
·       long term voluntary targets
·      the problem will be solved by the market

However, clearly there are also deeper psychological processes at work that create widespread experiences of denial, fatalism and passivity in relation to climate change.  In some profound emotional and cognitive sense the implications of global warming cannot be faced, and we know that behind psychological avoidance there always lie difficult feelings.
Fear messaging’ can be counter-productive, leading to defensive avoidance as in ‘this is too scary to think about’.  It can generate a state of prolonged worry and anxiety, which over time may lead to numbness, desensitisation and disengagement from the issue altogether.
Climate change represents a threat, both in terms of the imagined catastrophic consequences and the threatened loss of what we have come to take for granted in our lives.  We know that in the face of any perceived threat there will be an increase in emotional energy to hold on more tightly to what is precious but threatened (our consumption, cars, our jobs, air travel) together with an angry attack and rejection of what is seen as providing the threat (for example extinction rebellion or climate change policies that lead to unemployment).  Simultaneously, at the unconscious level, there will be an accompanying rise in energy aimed at warding off unbearable and conflicted feelings including:
·      fear of the consequences of climate change
·      anticipatory loss of what we’ve grown used to
·      either/both guilt and shame, for example by not reducing our harmful impact on the environment, not being a good, responsible member of society
·      states of overwhelm, helplessness and despair.
Without access to these feelings, without the ‘space’ - to reflect, absorb, feel, share with others and stay with the unpalatable truth, the trouble, and the unknown – there will be no drive to change and denial will continue to hold sway.  In the workshop that Kieran Nolan and I ran at the conference we experimented with a ‘truth and reconciliation’ type experiential exercise, which was both an attempt to create such a space, and to embrace the idea that a conversation with one’s enemy is inevitably a conversation with oneself.

Truth and reconciliation
In this exercise one group represented people most at risk from climate change eg people in the ‘third world’, future generations, the ecosystem/other species, and the other group representing those opposed to climate change policies eg fossil fuel companies, employees in jobs with a large carbon footprint, consumers in the ‘first’ world, and governments with inadequate climate change policies. 
In both of the above groups there are consumers, people working in high carbon emitting industries, and people in the third world both desiring the benefits and suffering the consequences of economic development.  In a very real sense we are all in both camps, and intrinsic to the truth and reconciliation process is the aim of some sort of healing through both mutual recognition and personal integration of split off parts of self. 
The previous day the keynote speaker had shown how healthy attachment develops via the mother’s attuned response to the baby’s non-verbal signs of distress in relation to what Winnicott calls impingements arising in the mother-infant interaction.  In relation to this she also referred to the work of Jessica Benjamin, but in my view could have said more about Benjamin’s view of the necessity of mutuality in this process of recognition.  In Benjamin’s view, we can only experience recognition from another if we in turn recognise the other’s subjective internal experience, because otherwise we wouldn’t ‘know’ that they are having a resonating experience.  This is similar to Carol Rogers’s idea about empathy, namely that for change to occur as a result of the communication of empathy there needs to be a recognition in the receiver of empathy of how the other is impacted – their emotional resonance, understanding, and fellow feeling.  In TA terminology, recognition hunger is essentially mutual.
As the two groups talked to each other I could see a movement towards mutuality, as each ‘side’ changed from attempting to ‘prove their case’ to the beginnings of experiencing, and acknowledging how those on the ‘other’ side were affected.  A particular example of this process was the ‘other’ side’s response to a woman ‘representing’ a local community in the third world who talked movingly about the harmful impact of industrial development that took no account of the local community or their local environment.
Another feature of the discussion between the two groups was the predominant focus on the objective facts regarding both the impact of climate change and the reasons for not doing more to effect change.   Part of the problem in efforts to promote awareness of and action on climate change is that most people involved have been either physical scientists or environmental groups.  They have tended to rely simply on delivering more facts (or the reiterating the same ones) on the assumption that it is information that drives understanding, acceptance, and ultimately appropriate behaviour - the so-called ‘information-deficit’ model.    
Only gradually did the conversation account emotional experiences, despite the fact that it is primarily via the expression and communication of feelings that others are impacted and relationship and mutuality is established. 

Another, related, focus of the workshop was to explore the question of ‘what was it that impacted people and heightened their awareness of the significance of climate change and/or prompted them to take action?’  This is a very important question because our answers to it will hopefully help us to understand better how awareness, change and action can occur. 
For me perhaps the most important single experience was reading Naomi Klein’s ‘This changes everything’.  Prior to training to become a psychotherapist I had been very involved in left wing politics, political theatre and trade unionism, and my Masters’ thesis was on the radicalisation of social workers.  The rise of Thatcherism and the demise of the left felt devastating to my hopes for a ‘better’ society, and becoming a psychotherapist represented a way of continuing this goal at the level of the individual, alongside the mantra of ‘the personal is political’. 
Reading Klein’s book rekindled in me the aspiration arrow of physis in that it helped me to see how the planetary crisis of climate change and the nature of capitalist economics and neo-liberal ideology are fundamentally inter-related.  It helped me to see that the climate crisis provided an opportunity for a resurgence of collective action for social good that had been interrupted when I was younger. As the title of Klein’s book proclaims, ‘This changes everything’.

One of the participants in the workshop, Carol Wain, agreed to me including part of her story of the impact that the workshop experience had on her, in relation to this question of what provides the spark for change.  In her words:
‘’I was DEEPLY impacted by workshop, my core values were awakened and my emotions were stirred thus shifting me to another level of consciousness and responsibility about global warming and the part that not just others are contributing and the action I must take right now. What particularly moved me was the continual message throughout the workshop that we cannot stay in our comfortable denial, that we are in crisis NOW and the urgency of action that needs to be taken is NOW.  As I reflected on the workshop I presented in the morning on ‘The Mystery beyond ‘self’ – opening up conversations about faith, religion and spirituality and TA, I understood taking responsibility to play my part to solve climate change as ‘actions of faith’ and coming from my spiritual core and as a part of my expanding Adult.  I would like to propose that it is the same with the earth – when we treat the earth as an ‘It’ to be consumed rather than a ‘Thou’ to be related to with love and care we destroy the ‘sacred’. ‘’ [The emphasis – capitals, bold type etc are from Carol’s original communication to me]
Carol’s feedback was about the need for urgent action, but she also emphasised her responsibility to address climate change as an ‘act of faith coming from her spiritual core as part of her expanded Adult’.  What I think this highlights is the crucial importance, as we struggle with the impact of climate change, of the need to address fundamental questions such as: What stories do we tell ourselves, in our diverse cultures, about our place on this earth, the value of nature and other species?  What does being a good human being, living a good life, being a good citizen, look like? What are our I+U+ social responsibilities?
Like many other social and political issues, global warming raises challenges in relation to our focus remaining solely at the individual level.  There is a growing need for a more social psychology that addresses how social and political issues create collective ‘dis-ease’, and a need to return to the early days when TA was seen as a social psychiatry.   Global warming threatens the planet’s very survival, and raises questions about our social responsibilities in both our work and lives more broadly – including who suffers, or benefits, from climate change denial and what economic and political interests are involved

Understanding climate change denial:  The Cultural Parent

The global economy doubles in size every 25 years, and since the 1980s has been characterized by privatisation of the public sector, deregulation of private enterprise, lower corporation tax, and cuts in public spending.  What supports this process is our dominant global economic culture driven by an unrelenting, narcissistic and addictive attachment to consumption, consumerism, money, and economic growth at all costs.  Material affluence is viewed as the key to fulfilment, only the affluent are seen as winners, and access to the top is allegedly open to anyone willing to work hard enough. 

Consequently, the most significant reason that we haven’t done the things that are necessary to lower emissions is because they fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalist economics and the dominant values of neo-liberalism.  We continue to expand the global economy on the fantasy that resources are infinite, and that a person (or company) is entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy.  This by its very nature is opposed to any notion of sustainability.  It is, as Drego says, suicidal, and the prevailing culture of consumerism, ‘what the customer wants’, and free market deregulation will not by themselves avert environmental and human catastrophe.
What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources.  However what our free market, capitalist economic model demands to avoid collapse is the exact opposite, namely unfettered expansion.  This is a fundamental contradiction that is not being faced socially or politically.  Far from being the only viable economic system capitalist economics is in fact primed to destroy the human environment, and threatens catastrophic consequences, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable.

At the same time, culturally, there has been a profound and deeper shift  towards a pervasive cynicism and passivity that cultivates indifference to fundamental social issues such as human rights and the safety of our planet, which in 2017 the Institute of Policy Studies described as  a ‘moral crisis’.  Things are bad, but more than that, within our Cultural Parent, we hold the belief that nothing can be done about it.  Infamously, Maggie Thatcher once said, in relation to the dominance of Thatcherite neoliberal economic policies, ‘there is no alternative’.  In an echo of that idea it is now easier to imagine the end of the world because of global warming than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, or any alternative to it.  This cultural belief, that nothing can be done,  is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressed person who lives life as if their hopelessness, despair and pain are endless and about which nothing can be done.  There is no alternative, and any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion.  Socially this fatalism manifests as a detached, cynical spectatorism, opposed to active engagement and involvement.

Depression and anxiety, phenomena of endemic proportions in our society are conventionally pathologised in terms of an individuals’ mental ‘illness’.  However, the fact that 1 in 6 Americans are taking anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications surely means that we cannot see these symptoms as merely individual, rather than something that arises from social conditions, and which in turn serves to foreclose the possibility of social action.  Interestingly Mark Fisher makes a similar point regarding the increasingly widespread phenomenon of what he calls hedonic depression.  Depression is usually characterised as a state of anhedonia ie an inability to get pleasure.  Depressive hedonia however refers to the inability to do anything except pursue ‘pleasure’, and is characterised by a retreat into displacement activities such as compulsive consumption and a narcissistic withdrawal from ‘society’ and social issues.   Or, to quote Maggie Thatcher again, ‘there is no such thing as society’. 
As Christopher Bollas puts it, with something that could apply equally to the ‘retreat’ of either form of depression; ‘Perhaps the most serious climate change lies within the human mind itself.  Unless we find some way to get ourselves to come out of our retreats, be it religious fundamentalism or normopathic materialism (normopath is a term that refers to the mental process of immersing oneself in material comfort and a life of recreation, fundamentally disinterested in ones’ subjective life) our societies will continue to deteriorate and the political processes will be emptied of that intellectual vitality and communal effort essential to the survival of homo sapiens.’





We are all in it together: the need for collective action
The risk of planetary catastrophe, inevitably, affects everybody and brings people together in a shared collective experience. There will be no ‘winners’, only losers, and as Christopher Bollas says ‘even the oligarchs will be fast tracking themselves to a nihilistic emptiness in which there will be no rehab centre’.  We are not in it together equally though. Climate change and the ecological crisis is going to, and already is, affecting those most vulnerable in the world in much more dire and catastrophic ways.  This moral issue can and should provide one of the main arguments for climate change policies.
Unfortunately, to say the least, the past 40 years, in the UK and elsewhere has been characterised by a fundamental retreat from social and cultural forms of collective attachment and a corresponding retreat into social isolation, individualism, cynicism and loss of meaning.  Public space, both literally and metaphorically has been predominantly supplanted by the rights and privileges of the private domain. 
History however tells us that slavery, racial discrimination, sexism, apartheid, colonialism weren’t a ‘social problem’ that anyone did anything about until the abolition, civil rights, #metoo, anti-apartheid, independence social movements turned them into one.  We also know that change in our internal, private world is more successful when accompanied by change in our engagement with others in our social worlds.  Hopefully also, within our professional community, we will heed Pearl Drego’s exhortation to expand our vision of Transactional Analysis and as she wrote, reframe our theories and aims in all three fields, and reposition ourselves in the midst of larger social movements, including that of embracing strategies for planetary healing.

And finally: What will we tell our grandchildren when they ask us ‘what did you do’?
Kieran will never forgive me if I don’t mention Extinction Rebellion. What they are demanding and want all of us to demand, of our government, is;
1)    Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change
2)    Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025
3)    Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice
As I write these three ‘demands’ I’m thinking to myself, my god how simple, obvious, unobjectionable, maybe even too limited they are, and yet, currently, how unlikely they are to be adopted.
Remembering the ‘stories’ I told at the beginning of this article, and in particular the reprimand that the government minister made to the demonstrating school children, I find it actually laughable, if it weren’t so very serious, that the media, politicians and others make such a fuss about the disruption caused by Extinction Rebellion demonstrations.  We can only imagine the ‘disruption’ that will ensue should even the least catastrophic predictions of climate change come to pass!
I’m grateful to Mary Dees, another participant in workshop mentioned above, who referred me to The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research’s 2015 report entitled ‘The challenge of communicating climate messages.’ It comes to very similar conclusions regarding the importance of emotional reactions and motivations, and provides some very interesting and useful guidance on how to account this.  It struck me as the kind of approach we Transactional Analysis educators, organisational consultants and psychotherapists are particularly skilled in and which could therefore provide the basis for using these skills to support work aimed at promoting climate awareness and action.
 Recommendations included such things as:
1)    More dialogue is needed, less lecturing
2)    Promoting affinity with the natural world through learning experiences that demonstrate the interdependence of human and natural systems and the ecological impacts of unsustainability
3)    Fostering understanding of physical, emotional and spiritual human needs and the need to reconcile these with the ecological needs of the planet
4)    Participating in difficult dialogues, as opposed to delivering unwelcome messages
5)    Making a human connection as opposed to delivering scientific findings
6)    Deliberately engaging the heart as opposed to just speaking to the mind
7)    Taking people on an emotional journey as opposed to merely giving bad news
8)    Motivating active engagement as opposed to triggering fight-or-flight

As a TA psychotherapist I am of course interested in how we might include climate and ecological issues into our therapeutic work with clients, for example in relation to safeguarding (children, future generations), fostering autonomy-awareness, decontamination and deconfusion in relation to climate denial, and the ethics of our social responsibilities  But that is for another article perhaps?

References and suggested further reading

These are the primary references re influences on my ideas for this article.

Jessica Benjamin, ‘Recognition and Destruction: an outline of inter-subjectivity’, in Mitchell and Aron, ‘Relational psychoanalysis: the emergence of a tradition’, The Analytic Press, 1999.

Christopher Bollas, ‘Meaning and melancholia: Life in the age of bewilderment’, Routledge, 2018

Pearl Drego, ‘The cultural parent’, TAJ, Vol 13/4, 1983

Pearl Drego, ‘Bonding the Ethnic Child with the Universal Parent: Strategies and Ethos of a TA eco-community activist’, TAJ, Vol 29/3, 2009

Mark Fisher, ‘Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative’, Zero Books, 2008

Naomi Klein, ‘This changes everything’, Penguin, 2014

Exinction Rebellion website; www.rebellion-earth/the-truth

The Bollas and Fisher books I strongly recommend in relation to the section on Cultural Parent, and for addressing issues regarding a social/cultural/political psychology.
Naomi Klein’s book is in my opinion essential reading, primarily in the relation to the link between the prevailing capitalist economics and climate change, and for a thorough analysis of what can be done at the social, political level and technological levels.
Pearl Drego, especially the ‘Bonding the ethnic Child…’ article is inspiring, particularly in terms of accounting spiritual and moral issues and the importance of collective action.
The Extinction Rebellion/the truth website is as good as I’ve seen in terms of ‘making the case’ and, unusually, in accounting the importance of the emotional.



12.5.19

LIFE IN THE MORONARCHY

Listening to the delicate notes of Mary Jane Leach’s ‘Celestial Fires’ as I write this, I am struck by an overwhelming fact.  Besieged on all sides by the white noise of the Brexit row it seems inescapable that the national circus that is the political leadership of the UK has become the cracked mirror in which we see ourselves as we really are, the dispossessed peasantry of history, lacking attention to the other, mired in prejudice and fatally blind to the nuances of the ‘issues’.

A sinking ship of fools without destination or means of navigation.  If, as is said, you get the leaders you deserve then we are living not in a democracy but a moronarchy.  A population of morons living in the hazardous chaos of a school playground surveilled and controlled by moronic bullies, jobsworths, sausage machine maintenance workers, and thechnocratic wall-measurers.
The country seems reduced to a nation of dunces bereft of education, attention span and the most basic interpersonal courtesy.

The online conversation has become an offensive tirade of vile abuse.  The Press parrot black and white narratives without hint of complexity or possibility of collective resolution.  The TV is a  concatenation of idiocy upon stilts.  The radio spews the views of tinpot wannabe dictators and ambitious chancers.  We are paralysed in ludicrous certainties at the very time in history that demands flow, creativity, applied intelligence and humanity and the call of the new.  At the very time when kindness and tolerance and compassion needs to be present in the national debate we descend into the spouting of propaganda, intolerance and hate.

It is in the boiling rage of such times that evil does its work so effectively.  The reductionism of the many to the one.  Emotions trumping intellect.  The vapid simplicities of unshakeable certainty.
Strange is it not, that the question ’Shall the UK leave the European Union?’ should open such a sea of division?  Is it not the simplest of questions with a simple yes or no answer?  The prime instigating moron in the circus was the toff, David Cameron, appeasing the rabid streak in the Tory Party that hates all that is foreign or different whether of colour, belief, or identity.  A grouping that sits comfortably with its own self entitlement while denying the very air to the proletariat, the worker, the non-gendered, the sick and the mentally troubled.  A collective that shops happily at Harrods while queues form outside food banks.  And indeed all our representatives seem happy to claim expenses for everything from books of stamps to housing allowances while Universal Credit mires millions in the myriad humiliations of poverty.
‘Build it and they will come’ it is said.  It has been built, but no one has come.  It is long past time when the hero with whichever one of his or her thousand faces must come.  Is it Jeremy or Greta or Caroline?

To understand why we are experiencing this disaster we need to look just below the surface of things.  That bubbling cauldron of the Id where lurks the unconscious drives that lead implacably to violence and hate and where too the compulsion of collective atomisation gives way to the notion of identity or death. If this current process looks like a a conference of hyper-vigilant children in a Lord of the Flies type clusterfuck, it’s because that’s precisely what it is.

Like children denied love and attentive care we have all frozen into attachment disorder.  We cling to simple solutions because we are scared.  We embrace moronic certainties and the pedlars of such illusions because all around the sand shifts chaotically.  We are in a constant state of Fear!
Fear is a highly contagious disease for which the only remedy is Love.

And dear reader, is there anything more lacking from our national conversation right now at this historical pivot than love?  And has there ever been a time when it is more needed?

Vote for the Love Party in the European elections.  Vote for Love in the Local Elections, the General Election coming down the tracks (Yes Boris that means bye-bye with thanks for the albeit brief horrors you are about to visit upon us!)
And vote for Love in the International Election! (It's a bit in the future.  IF there is one!)




4.5.19

20.4.19

Do I own my library or does it own me?


1)  How many books do you own?

Oh lots.  Hundreds.  Several hundreds!  They crowd out of their shelves, spawn families, and sometimes cascade onto the floor across desks and into stacks on floors and staircases.  They are a nightmare to move.  Life without them is completely unthinkable.  They grow relentlessly.  They are my friends. They are the representations in material reality of my mind's development throughout my lifetime.  They form semi-autonomous communities of critical and cultural theory, Philosophy, Poetry and literary criticism, specialist studies of the Sonnet form, Shakespeare, Stevens, Coleridge and Shelley.  Nietschze dressed by Walter Kaufman  wrestles endlessly with Plato while Socrates looks on stroking his beard.  Graphic novels and comics.  Outdoor pursuit skills and bushcraft texts.  Novels, the Folio’s complete works of Conrad.  Folio Society limited editions of the Letterpress Shakespeare but also of The Canterbury Tales illustrated by Eric Gill and 'Gawain and the Green Knight' rendered by Simon Armitage and Paradise Lost with illustrations by William Blake.  Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’.  Collections of short stories by Nathan Englander and Miranda July, Wells Tower and Mark Haddon.  Critical texts from the world of Social Work.  Pikkety's weighty 'Capital in the Twentieth Century' nestles up to Shoshanna Zubhov’s 'Surveillance Capitalism'.  Homer in all his/her/their various translations is/are heavily represented.  My preference is for poetic translation to capture the feel of the original but I will read it all.  Homer and Greek literature has been the cornerstone of my reading from the age of 8 or 9 when my mother first bought me a children's copy of The Odyssey rendered by Barbara Picardie, which I must have read over a hundred times. 
Lots of texts on the craft of writing but only one 'Writing', by Stephen King is necessary.  Lots on poetics-structure and form.  Heaney and Hughes are collected.  Robert Frost’s Notebooks and, of course “The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ who I adore.
Science and Speculative fiction with Olaf Stapledon and Ursula Le Guin and Richard Mattheson and Philip K Dick joined recently by Brain Catlin’s mad Vorrh Trilogy.  Ghormenghast awaits a third reading.  And of course my much adored Complete Sherlock Holmes Story’s and Novels of Arthur Conan Doyle fully annotated by Leslie S Klinger and published by Norton Books.

THE FOOD SECTION:


Food is an essential element of my physical and cultural life.  Cooking, studied and learned and practised to a professional level, is, to me, essential for a civilised life.  Ignorance of cooking as a signifier of maleness is, to my mind, utterly inexplicable.  The expectation that women will shop and cook for their male partners is extraordinary.  Some women make great cooks but it should be by choice not expectation.  I own and have read probably over a hundred cookery books alone.  But it is the same ones that end up be-spattered in my kitchen.  Delia’s Summer and Winter books.  Jamie’s 30 minutes book (you will never make anything in there in 30 minutes!) and his ‘Return of the Naked Chef’.  Nigel Slaters Real Food.  Nigellas ‘How to Eat’, a string of texts on fire cooking, a particular love of mine. The vegetarian cookbooks of Dennis Cotter, ‘Paradiso Seasons’ and ‘For the love of Food.’

 So as I say this post has turned into a deeply personal account of my thought growth.  My books are the representations in material reality of my mind's development throughout my lifetime.  They form semi-autonomous communities of thought becoming articulated in the World.  Just as Public Libraries are the material representation of the communities intellect so their destruction under Austerity represents the destruction of thought itself in the Public Sphere.  This is the ultimate consequence of the Neo liberal project.  The destruction of independent critical thought itself and its replacement by non-autonomous consumption propaganda.  The monetisation of existence itself.

Consequently an existential crisis for us all.


2)  What was the last book you bought?

'Mythologies' by Roland Barthes  I have heard many times it is magnificent in thought and deed.  I'll let you know!

3)  What was the last book you read?

'The Dawn Watch  Joseph Conrad in a Globalised World'  Maya Jasanoff.  William Collins 2017
A beautiful biographical and cultural and literary celebration of the great Polish writer Konrad Korzeniowski.  A lovingly written summation of Joseph C as a visionary who anticipated neo-liberal globalisation, industrial colonialism and global terrorism.  Three books are the cornerstone of this thesis 'Lord Jim', 'Heart of Darkness', and 'The Secret Agent', all of which are essential texts for an educated human.
Conrad was famously called ‘a bloody racist’ by the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe.
CEDRIC WATTS from University of Sussex in an article dated 1977 has it thus:
“In the lecture entitled 'An Image of Africa' (Massachusetts Review (Winter, I977), 782-94), the distinguished novelist Chinua Achebe declared: 'Conrad was a bloody racist'.
Heart of Darkness, he claimed, is 'an offensive and totally deplorable book' in which Conrad has adopted 'the role of purveyor of comforting myths'.
The lecture was variously cool, mocking, sarcastic, and angry; and disconcerting enough.
Like many other readers, I have long regarded Heart Of Darkness as one of the greatest works of fiction, and have felt that part of its greatness lies in the power of its criticisms of racial prejudice. Particularly disconcerting, then, was this attack, coming from an important and influential black novelist whose work 'Things Fall Apart' can be regarded as 'a Heart of Darkness from the other side’.”
I have to agree.  Conrad was no racist but he lived in a time of Empire and felt eternally grateful to the British for giving him a home.  The Congo was the nightmare delivered by the monstrous King Leopold the Second of Belgium.  It is an unremarked upon holocaust.  Largely ignored by popular history.  It remains in that nightmare to the present day, aided and abetted by rapacious Corporations greedily devouring its natural wealth and potential leaders riven by tribalism, gangsterism and and who appear endlessly corrupted by insatiable greed and cruelty.
Conrad could find nothing else to do than look away with disgust and horror.  Kurtz's last words are all the explanation he can conjure.  'The horror!  The horror!'
Jasanoff’s Book is described in many reviews, without hyperbole, as a masterpiece.  It is!

4)  What are you reading now?

Have just read ‘I am Dynamite!’ by Sue Prideaux in audio, narrated by the fantastic Nicholas Guy Smith, a  brilliant biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, that crazy poet of the universal thought waves.  It has encouraged me back to the original texts and I am currently re-reading ’The Birth of Tragedy’ beginning with Nietzsche’s marvellous ‘An attempt at Self Criticism’ added latterly by him and demonstrating such self knowledge and wisdom and the obvious fact that, apart from all else, he is one of the greatest German writers of prose as well as a profoundly decent human being.  Unfortunately his sister, Elizabeth was a monstrous anti-semite and fascist.  Her life alone should be subject to dramatic reconstruction from her Queening over the German colonists in the Paraguayan Free Germania to her megalomaniacal hording of her brother’s archive until her death in 1935 when she expressed a dazzled admiration of the moustachioed Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.  It is clear neither Hitler nor Elizabeth possessed the intellectual capacity to understand the ideas of Friedrich but that did not prevent them from attempting to co-opt him into their Nazi ideology.  The very thought would have had him turning in his grave.

Currently I am reading Nietzsche’s first text, ’The Birth of Tragedy’ in translation by Walter Kaufman and the mammoth 814 page K-PUNK  The Collected and unpublished writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016).  A true treasure trove of ideas from Repeater Press 2018.

5)  What are the five books that have had the greatest impact on you?

Hate questions like these.  The Desert Island Disc phenomenon.  If you could take only one book, one piece of music etc…
Obviously the two Homeric works, The Odyssey and The Iliad.  Equally obviously Shakespeares Complete Works.  Probably Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ as it would take several years to unpack it.  Oh God that’s four already!  Then probably a work on Bushcraft by Ray Mears or Mors Kochanski to enable me to build a comfortable treehouse and trap and eat the local wildlife as well as building a birch (or whatever tree equivalent) bark sailing canoe to escape!
So those are my desert island minimum.
The five books that have had greatest impact upon me are:

  • The Tragedy King Lear by William Shakespeare.  Good to read about a family even more dysfunctional than mine.
  • Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher as a rediscovery of the reason for radicalism and belief in political action.  A tardis of a book!
  • The Iliad of Homer.  Naturellement!
  • The Collected Sherlock Holmes Novels and Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I am an addicted Baker Street Irregular!
  • Lean Logic by David Fleming.  The ultimate fix for the encyclopaedia browser on what really matters.  Thanks David!