DECEMBER NOTES

MONTAIGNE:  Given the subject matter, “Of Experience” has about it a remarkably buoyant magnitude. Take, for instance, the following passage, as translated by Donald Frame in The Complete Essays of Montaigne:

It takes management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it. Especially at this moment, when I perceive that mine is so brief in time, I try to increase it in weight; I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it, and to compensate for the haste of its ebb by my vigor in using it. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.

Propelled by verbs—perceive, arrest, grasp, make, try, try—the sentences wheel and wrestle across the page, resisting stasis at every turn, refusing to wait around. They achieve that mimetic, nearly miraculous work of performing the very action they describe. Here and elsewhere, Montaigne’s musings on mortality, his gripes about illness and aging, his love-hate relationship with the natural order, not to mention his fervent epistemological stocktaking, make for a stubborn blueprint for life in the red zone, an operative action plan for how to wring futility’s neck.

The ubiquity of suffering heightened Montaigne’s attentiveness to the complexity of human experience. Pleasure, he contends, flows not from free rein but structure. The brevity of existence, he goes on, gives it a certain heft. Exertion, truth be told, is the best form of compensation. Time is slippery, the more reason to grab hold.

In each of these apothegms, we find evidence of what Keats would later call, in a letter to his brothers, “negative capability,” a notion that F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his essay “The Crack-Up,” summarized as the capacity to embrace two contradictory ideas at the same time and go on functioning. “Of Experience” is one of Montaigne’s gravest works—“We must learn to endure,” he writes, “what we cannot avoid”—but the writing is so vigorous, so uninterested in despair. In the end, we get the sense from the writing that the writing was Montaigne’s method of magnifying enjoyment. Reading him might be as good a way as any to suspend life’s flight.

 Drew Bratcher 

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George Giacinto Giarchi graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1981 with a PhD in Sociology, and subsequently became Professor of Social Care studies at the University of Plymouth from 1977 to 2016. He is remembered in Scotland for his innovative social inscape study of the Argyll town of Dunoon in the 1970s - ‘Between McAlpine and Polaris.’

I am astonished to see how our lives intersected and terribly disappointed we never met.  I lived in Dunoon in the early 60's and have some searing memories of that time that I will write about one day.

Also would love to read his study of the impact of the military industrial complex on a small Scottish town.  But it's hard to get hold of.

‘Meaning and melancholia: Life in the age of bewilderment.’ Review of important book by Christopher Bollas by my bestie, Professor Jim Davis

 

‘Meaning and melancholia: Life in the age of bewilderment.’ Routledge 2018

By Christopher Bollas.  Reviewed by Jim Davis.

It was such a delight an inspiration for me to read this book.  Here is a leading light in the psychotherapeutic world applying his creative and innovative psychodynamic thinking to a range of social, cultural and political issues.

My fear has been that the early-days ‘portrait’ of Transactional Analysis as a ‘social psychiatry’ has, mostly, come to resemble Oscar Wilde’s ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’, and  that Pearl Drego’s call to transactional analysts to get out of our ‘psychic closets’ and involve ourselves in social movements for change remains largely unheard.

At the heart of this book, as the title suggests, is the fundamental importance of the search for meaning, and it is the process of searching that’s crucial as opposed to finding any definitive ‘truth’.  As Bollas puts it, ‘Arguably, the quest itself (for meaning) constitutes the meaning to be found’.  Indeed one could describe the book itself as an invitation to do just that.  RSVP!

His view is that there has been a ‘longstanding turn towards cynicism and passivity in our culture, a loss of belief in ourselves which has grown across generations and is now a psychic fact of our lives.’   Socially this fatalism manifests as a ‘detached, cynical spectatorism, opposed to any active engagement and involvement…an abandonment of a commitment to social justice.’ With the loss of meaning, and the feeling that our lives can make a contribution, mourning has turned to melancholia, and we share the experience of a collective ‘bewilderment.’ 

Bollas begins his book, in the Preface, by referring to the disturbing victory of Donald Trump in America, the vote for Brexit in the UK, and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe.  In doing so he offers us an invitation to widen our perspective from that of the individual, and even the family (itself shaped by politics, economics and culture) to the social, political and cultural realms.  He enjoins us both a)  to use our psychological theories to understand what is happening in our social world, and b) to account how ‘what is happening in our social world’ in turn shapes our selves. 

Social, political, economic and technological factors create frames of mind which are shared collectively, and are transmitted from generation to generation. Throughout the book Bollas’s search for meaning can be seen as dialectical - a ‘dialogue’ that shuttles between two seemingly opposing perspectives – in this case the social (history, politics, culture, technology) and the individual - based on the underlying notion that it is the exploration of the relationship between the two perspectives that elicits meaning. 

 

Bollas describes his book as a contribution to ‘political psychology’ and a ‘social psychotherapy’, and as an attempt to put psychological insight at the heart of a new kind of analysis of culture, society and history.  He bemoans the way commentators tend to ‘shy away; from psychological introspection in explaining the ‘anguish of political phenomena’ and seeks to provide  a ‘vocabulary and a set of perspectives that can set the stage for different types of conversations about our predicament’.  For example he refers to the paradoxical phenomenon of white working poor Americans identifying with Fox News and pro-Trump billionaires,  and suggests that this can be better understood psychologically - as an example of how oppressor and victim will form curious attachments to one another - than by means of socio-economic analysis.   If we do not understand the ‘dynamics of this collective ‘charge’, we risk losing contemporary societies to ‘explosive entropy.’  This book is therefore also a call to action, both in and beyond our ‘psychic closets.’  As I have pointed out elsewhere (ref)  ‘History tells us that slavery, racial discrimination, sexism, apartheid, colonialism weren’t seen as ‘social problems’ that anyone did enough about until the abolition, civil rights, #metoo, anti-apartheid independence social movements turned them into one.’

Bollas opens his analysis from the belief that in order to understand the present, and think about the future, we need to start with our history, and in the first few chapters he traces the history of the West (USA and Europe) over the last two hundred years. His aim in this is to make sense of how social, political and economic factors eg industrialisation, the horror of two world wars, colonialism, globalisation and technological change shaped the formation of collectively shared states of mind over many generations. 

For example, in relation to colonialism, ‘By the 1880s the overwhelming power of Europe over the rest of the world sponsored a manic state of mind; fuelled by self-idealisation, they licensed themselves to ravage the world.’  He wonders, psychologically, how many Europeans allowed themselves to recognise the ‘murderousness’ of this colonialism. The optimism about ‘progress’ to be found in Western society throughout the 19^th and 20^th Centuries could be accomplished only by splitting, and projecting unwanted parts of self and society into the ‘other’….so when Europe colonized Africa it found its perfect ‘other’: ‘’savages’’ would contain the projective identifications of Europeans’ minds.  They were seen to be primitive and violent so that the West could be sophisticated and pure.’  He describes this as a turning away from the reflective life, ‘burying ourselves in our ventures’, oblivious to the exploitation of the working–class and colonised people elsewhere in the world, which were seen simply as manifestations of the ‘natural order of things’’

 

As a former professor of English, Bollas begins his exploration of the impact of this social history on the fragmentation of inner life via reference to the literature of the early and mid 20^th Century - Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Camus, and Sartre.  He portrays Camus’ ‘The stranger’ and Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ as ‘literary derivatives of two World Wars that crippled the soul of the Western self’. In place of the hero, we now have not so much an anti-hero as a negated human being; an absence of self and thought where once existed presence, insight and soul searching’. 

I remember reading ‘Nausea’ (1938) and the impact it had on me in my impressionable youth.  The main character, Roquentin, spent most of his time in the library (searching for meaning no doubt!).  There he met a character whom Sartre named the Autodidact, whose knowledge of literature seemed truly extensive, that was until Roquentin realised that the only authors the Autodidact ever referred to had names, the first letter of which was between a and n, but never o or beyond.  Turned out he was working his way through the entire library, from a to z in that order! Reading Bollas I realised that the Autodidact represented Sartre’s negated human being, a self without presence or soul searching, collaterally damaged from world war two.  The ‘nausea’ of the title refers to the experience of life’s meaninglessness and absurdity, a characterisation that matches Bollas description of our most recent and current history as an ‘Age of Bewilderment’.

In a series of chapters which focus on how the social, culture shapes the individual, he makes that point that all individual psycho-diagnoses reflect the cultural mentalities of their time.  He gives a number of examples, beginning with the emergence of the borderline personality in the middle of the 20^th century, characterised by splitting, idealisation and projection.  Bollas extends the idea of borderline as a ‘cultural suggestion’, a way of understanding how radical contradictions between ideological positions held within a society can successfully be kept apart, eg Remainers and Leavers about Brexit.  It is precisely this borderline social structure that characterised post-war America, and enabled it to continue to idealise itself as the liberator of the free world whilst at the same time sustaining its war machine for the conflicts that followed.  The split between the idealised America and the paranoid war-making America, between a country of promise and a country of profound racial prejudice, between its identity as a leader in the global community and an inwardly retreating nationalism, all served to create a profoundly confusing borderline ‘object structure.’

 

The cultural disinterest in inner life has also led to the formation of a new personality type – which Bollas calls the normopath.  Unlike the borderline they are not filled with anger, but rather are those who seek refuge from mental life by immersing immersing oneself in material comfort and a life of recreation, fundamentally disinterested in subjective life. They are abnormally normal – seemingly stable, secure, comfortable and socially extrovert’  Normopathy relates closely to what Mark Fischer (ref) terms hedonic depression, characterised not only by the pursuit of pleasure but also a retreat into displacement activities such as addictive consumption, and a narcissistic withdrawal from ‘society’ and social issues. 

In a fascinating chapter entitled ‘Transmissive Selves’ Bollas turns his attention to the shaping of selves by our increasingly technologically mediated world. Regarding the impact of social media he says ‘We may wonder if we have ever before walked so blindly into a mass transformation….with so little idea of where we are going.’  He argues that whereas modern media may seem in some ways to have brought the world closer together, in fact such immediacy has created a disguised form of distance - we are not closer, but further apart. Our lives and selves are based less on immediate experiences and more on those indirect perceptions ‘spawned by the information revolution’

Selfies for example do not reveal the self but rather an ‘other in a solitary act of estranged intimacy’, and when we abandon actuals to communicate with virtuals we are momentarily dissociated.  Perhaps, even more fundamentally, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and the like allow us to become, so to speak, part of the show. As we transmit our private selves to the world, we also become a function of that new technology - what Bollas calls the ‘transmissive self.’  We become both the vehicle of the communication, and ‘extensions of these objects as much as they are extensions of us’  Forebodingly, Bollas suggests that ‘A glance at the android future promises, not depth of communication, but a vision from the mental shadows. ’

In and altogether too short a chapter on the implications for what goes on in the therapy room, I was intrigued by the way Bollas developed Freud’s idea of the return of the repressed (ie the reappearance of unconscious mental content being expressed in a disguised form).  Bollas coins the term ‘return of the oppressed’.   ‘Wherever there is oppression of any form the oppressed self is forced to find compromised forms of thinking and expression, as a result of that oppression.’  By way of example, Bollas cites the idea of the ‘pseudo stupidity’ of slaves feigning various types of incapacity as a form of resistance, for example by ‘accidentally’ breaking machinery, or appearing unable to follow instructions, ie deliberately committing bungled actions as a defence and protest.  ‘Part of the challenge facing the present-day psychologist is how to restore interest in being a subject in the face of oppression’.  As a challenge relevant to all TA Fields, Bollas asks ‘What tools can the clinician use to analyse oppression and the ‘return of the oppressed’ in order to help the client find a space and a voice for reflective thought, expression and identity in relation to any form of oppression - racism, sexism, gender identity. (ref Ds CP, Johnson on gender, me on resilience)

 

Continuing in his shuttling back and forth in the dialectic between the individual and society, Bollas shifts his attention to the impact of Globalisation. Increasingly, and in a multitude of different ways, people have felt profoundly alienated by the world around them and seem to be in retreat from complexity and loss of meaning, seeking refuge in a search for a simplified view of life. This has fuelled the rise in fundamentalism, in protest about being governed by forces outside peoples’ understanding or control.  It seems to me that Brexit has thrown up many examples of this pattern, eg ‘get Brexit done’, ‘take back control’ – political mantras that oversimplified complex issues, stirred up widespread fears, and appealed to swathes of voters in the recent general election.  As Bollas points out, in the US context, this movement also represented a vote against the elite and remote government in Washington.  He suggests that voters shifted from Obama to Trump (similarly, in UK: labour to tory) not because they were attending so much to the policy differences between the two, but because they wanted to ‘take back control’.  ‘Emotions, not evidence based ‘facts’ (especially the ones that made people miserable) would be the new criteria for meaning making. If thinking something made you feel better it had to be right; if ideas made you feel worse, then they were bad and to be eliminated’  

But, Bollas warns, the refusal to accept the complexity of life and the mind does not come without a price.  It corresponds, he suggests, to what Freud meant by the ‘death drive’ - ‘the self’s retreat from a non-familiar world into the enclave of the secluded self.’  In the heat of the moment we can abandon complexity and opt for a simplistic version of reality, a more self- friendly version of things, and one based on paranoid projection onto others.  Scapegoating simplifies a highly complex set of fears, and as Bollas emphasises, the group projection easily escapes reflective processes, pointing out that ‘the attack on Baghdad showed very clearly who really had the weapons of mass destruction’  Similarly, in Trumps projective identifications – Mexicans are rapists, fake news, ‘crooked Hilary’ -and his offering of simple solutions to complex matters, he is gauging the feelings of society and ‘organising them into a political rhetoric, which captures paranoid aspects of people’s imagination.  Paranoid thinking works because it binds people around powerful feelings, and simplifies complex issues into digestible ones.  ‘When political movements are based on paranoid ideas, the group process becomes all the more dangerous, as isolated selves discover there are millions of other people who share the same views.  The retreat into paranoia then becomes even more deeply assuring and confirming’ 

In this way Bollas suggests that certain ideologies can function as ‘emotional and psychic holding environments’, such as in the appeal of the right wing neo-liberal push to reduce the regulatory functions of government.  Regulation, they argue, is the enemy of freedom.  Government is trying to take something away from us.  These are felt, not simply as opinions, but as statements of fact, together with the belief that powerful forces in our world have taken away something that was cherished.  This in turn evokes a sense of loss, abandonment and helplessness.  ‘Fear, failure and impotence is a cocktail of emotions endemic to the marginalised’ and one of the ways out of this dilemma is to transform helplessness and depression into anger. In this way extremist views may represent a form of emotional, psychic holding in the face of extreme forms of dismay.

Deregulation, he emphasises, doesn’t apply only to the removal of the government’s regulatory functions, but extends more widely into a rejection of all forms of self and social regulation.  Trump’s shameless expression of racist and sexist views is a manifestation of what happens when an individual abandons self-regulation.  If this becomes widespread, it can result in a society governed by ‘id capitalism and primitive states of mind.’ Confronted by opposing views the paranoid feels under threat. Indeed anyone with opposing ideas is a ‘migrant seeking to cross the borders of the mind.’ This way of looking at things provides the paranoid self with a ‘powerful and pleasurable sense of cohesion in a world that otherwise seems contaminated by its opposite - plurality.’

 

March Update-The World of Co-vid

Isolation.  Stationary.  Distance.  Respiration.


I read 'Pandemic' by Sonia Shah 2016.  I wish our leaders had!


'Finnegans Wake' gives comfort


I study an OU course on Financial Concepts through a gritted mind.

I lose a job.  I start a job.  Two weeks later, lockdown hits!

I buy a car-a Subaru Forester.

The World needs a new Superhero-I'm here folks!

My son sends me a Matthew Syed piece from The Sunday Times and I respond!

Xi banks on the decline and fall of the West

The rot reaches so deep, we do not even see it. But our enemies do

Matthew Syed

Sunday July 19 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

On Thursday, Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysed the spending plans of the messianic Rishi Sunak. His analysis made for interesting reading. He found that the much-trumpeted “Rooseveltian” injection of £5.5bn was not quite as it seemed. Looking through the small print, Johnson found that it was an accountancy trick, a statistical mirage. It was money shunted from one place to another or, as he put it, an increase “of precisely zero”. He found the same for a litany of other “pledges”.

I was struck by this story, not because of what it said — if correct — about deceit at the heart of government, but because of how we responded to it. Some newspapers didn’t cover Johnson’s claims at all. It eluded the BBC’s main bulletins and, as far as I can tell, ITV’s, too. And, frankly, who can blame them? Deception has become so commonplace, so par for the course (think of previous budgets, many of which contain set-piece conjuring tricks), that it has melted into the background. Like a virus that has become endemic in a host population, we scarcely notice it any more.

I mention this because we stand at a crossroads. The stand-off between what we might loosely call “the West” and China has been described as a new cold war. I am not particularly attracted to the language but can’t dispute that a battle of historic significance is now being waged between Xi Jinping’s Communist Party (CPC) and the liberal democratic order. Unlike the last Cold War, centred around nuclear brinkmanship and ideology, this will be a battle over quantum computing, AI and global influence. And here’s a sobering truth: this is a battle the West might lose.

I say this not because of any esteem for the CPC, but because the decay within the liberal system has taken on a distinctive quality. It is not Donald Trump (who, to be fair, was quick to spot the threat of China) that should worry us, or his pardoning of his former adviser Roger Stone, or the woeful response to the pandemic or, coming to our side of the Atlantic, the farce involving the housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, or a million other scandals across the democratic world. It is not even the chronic short-termism of the modern West, something that stands in contrast to China making strategic plans stretching towards 2050.

No, the most telling sign of decay is stories — such as that of Sunak — that we hardly notice any more; a putrefaction so familiar that we can no longer smell it. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon writes: “It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption.” His point is, I think, indisputable: the last people to spot a system in decline are insiders. It is outsiders who are better placed to detect the rot.

And this, I think, helps to explain the growing assertiveness of the CPC. Some western analysts have expressed surprise at Xi’s menacing stance towards Taiwan, his manoeuvres in the South China Sea and the skirmishes with India along the Himalayan border. It is all too easy for us to write this off as imperial overreach, the vanity of a wannabe dictator. Doesn’t he realise that the Chinese system is corrupt, riddled with contradictions and saddled with slowing growth?

Here’s some news: Xi knows this only too well. The politburo may be kleptocratic but it is not stupid. No, its members assess that the time is ripe for global expansion not because of a hubristic assessment of their own strength but an assessment of our weakness. Like Gibbon looking back on Rome, they spot the rot. They note the epic polarisation, the surreal identity wars, the growing contempt that many westerners have for their own histories and institutions. And they see this as a chance to reset the world order gradually in their interests and against ours.

The same analysis applies to Vladimir Putin’s Russia which — although an economic basket case — has been flexing its foreign policy muscles and running a hacking racket against western targets; last week it was accused of trying to pilfer Covid-19 vaccine research and influence the 2019 general election. Again, western commentary explains this as a consequence of the internal dynamics of Russia and the personality of the president, who fancies himself as Peter the Great. I’d suggest that it is better understood not by our assessment of them, but their assessment of us. The wily former KGB agent, like Xi, sees a western order in decline.

Let me repeat: when an empire is decaying, it’s the stuff insiders no longer notice that is the killer. We focus our ire on property developers getting payoffs or government scientists breaking rules. All well and good. But we no longer notice, as Gibbon put it, “the poison introduced into the vitals of the system”: the legalised corruption, the revolving door between politics and business, the rules rigged to suit special interests. According to the author Francis Fukuyama, the US tax code is 10,000 pages long, layer upon layer of sweetheart exemptions, favours and quid pro quos.

As for market economies — they have ossified under our very noses. The rules are so advantageous for insiders that new businesses can’t get a look-in, clogging up innovation. Of Europe’s 100 most valuable companies, none was formed in the past 40 years, a point made by the author Matt Ridley. In America, incumbents are staying ever longer in the main indices. As for start-up rates, they are falling in 16 out of 18 western economies. Now consider another trend by way of explanation: in 1971 Washington had 175 registered lobbying firms. By 2013 this had exploded to 12,000, spending more than $3.2bn annually, a trend replicated throughout the western world.

I am not, of course, making a case for Russia or China. I could spend thousands of words detailing their corruption and horrific repression. I am merely suggesting that the best way to understand their actions is through the prism of our weakness. They don’t see their manoeuvres as overreach but the poking of a western order that is decaying from within and has lost the capacity to garner international support. On the latter point, they are surely right. At the UN, Britain failed miserably to gain backing for the condemnation of the draconian security law imposed upon Hong Kong, securing only 26 votes. Whereas 53 nations backed China, an early payoff from the Belt and Road initiative, where the CPC is spending big on other nations, garnering ever more soft power.

I am still putting my money on liberal democracy. We have the more enlightened system. But the best way to overcome our vanity is to put ourselves in the shoes of other nations, both friends and adversaries, looking at us in disbelief. As psychologists say to narcissists and as Gibbon warned down the centuries: “We need to see ourselves as others see us.”

@MatthewSyed

RESPONSE:  So thank you so much Ben for sending this on which I read with interest.  Matthew Syed seems one of the more insightful journalists working for the Murdochs though I continue to have obvious problems with Journalists musing on the erosion of ‘liberal democracy’ (whatever that is) whilst taking the filthy lucre of one who is a prime eroder of said democracy.

Here we have a continuation of a genre of journalism, realpolitik, personal anecdote, frankly expressed insight, tell it all-warts and all, which seems to be exploding.  It’s breast beating but disguised as insight.  It bemoans the loss of what, in reality, never existed, because specific interests with paws on the levers of power cannot in what might be laughingly referred to as ‘their view’ allow IT to happen.  What that IT is, is a functional, widespread, engaging and engaged, honest and transparent political system that responds to a series of checks and balances that are beyond the control of individuals or interest groups and to which all subscribe on pain of political disgrace and annihilation.

What we have instead is a philosophical hotch-potch of self interested think tanks, lobbyists, millionaires and billionaires, Corporate interests, Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex, Control of media, a militarised Police Force, State Erosion and Public Services nullified with their replacement by inefficient and unqualified private providers seeking profit from said Services.

The family silver has, of course, been sold.  The grounds also hived off for luxury flats and crowded estates.  The owners are all absentee landlords yet members of all the right clubs.  Navigation through the replacement forests of think tanks and special interest groups requires a Privately Educated School System to groom the next wave of Alpha’s in the codes and signals required for flourishing.

The point is that all of this, all of it, was clearly signalled in 1979 with the election of Research Chemist, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and with the installing of the actor Ronald Reagan in the US and the resulting onslaught of neo-liberalist ideology that led to the systematic dismantling of effective democratic state structures and the mass sell-off of public goods at bargain-basement prices to chronically liberalised international financial markets.

Along with privatised utilities of life-essentials like water, coal, gas, transport and public housing came the neo-liberal wraith coming up the rear with the inevitable consequences arising of endless war, privatised military and the hijacking of the military industrial complex by gangs with political masks.  The encouragement of massive corruption in the absence of state controls.  The exploitation of Africa and Asia for her mineral wealth made inevitable by TIFF and TIPP trade liberalisation as with the continued ravaging of Earth’s resources for short term profit.

The World stares obliterative disaster in it’s ugly face, not only for the humans but for all the extraordinary critters and vegetable and arborial life forms. Shrouded now in our winding sheets, stitched together in sweat shops by children, using micro-plastics dredged from the oceans, we await the inevitable. Mostly with the percolated anxiety of cattle milling outside the slaughterhouse, sometimes with an oddly triumphant and wilful ignorance that seems to celebrate itself.  Sometimes we wait frozen with despair or rage. 

But mostly we carry on.  Fighting, fucking, crapping, littering, music making, despoiling, loving, hating, boredoming, maniacal thoughting, opiated, close reading, not reading, mobile phoning texting, bullshitting, group thinking, micro exploiting, ageing, Being, transcending, being born.  Hope, hopeless.

To be alive is to be Cassandra, the doom-caller.  There are worse things, but I just can’t think what they are.

Lyrics to my song 'We will not be cast down'

We will not be cast down!

We will not be cast down

Oppressed or overwhelmed

 By all this tragedy

We will not lose our light

In this sea of swirl and trouble

We need our light to see by!

We'll not be screwed by fear

 Into a knuckle

Hard and dense with doubt

We will not lose our hearts

In this cold cold wind

We need our hearts to love with!

We will not unbelievers be

Amid these spirals of divinity

Nor fear the heart of darkness

We will not lose our sense of Self

At these gates of transformation

We need our Selves to live in!

We need our light to see by!

We need our hearts to love with!

We need our Selves to live in!

March Diary

From an OU creative writing course:

Character Exercise

This time you should also make your character desire something, and make the desire their driving force. It will work best if you make whatever the character desires desirable in the reader’s eyes too. Think about why they can never have what they want. ‘Three Hours Between Planes’ is a good example of this. (Bizarre Short Story by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

By giving your character desires and disappointments you will see how this quickly develops potential stories.

Ian had been told that desire dies in your sixties.  A therapist had told him that.  A harsh featured middle aged woman with flat eyes and a fiercely hooked nose.  Harsh featured Miriam-she of the great certainty.

‘One writer spoke of it as riding the wild stallion which is then tamed in later life.  He spoke of it as a great relief.’  She opined.

‘It sounds to me like loss.  The death of something.  I would regret that.’

‘Yet here you are seeking an answer?’

‘Well explanation possibly…’

‘What then is it that you want of me Ian?’

For the first time he noted with some admiration the fierce outline of her breasts, her tight looked after body, her knees pressed together modestly.  Her hands, he also noted, were shapely, the nails unpainted but carefully manicured.  Her ears too were small, like pressed flowers.  A forty something woman with a tight fit body and a harsh face with cold green eyes.

‘Well perhaps I should ask what you can offer me?’

She shifted in her chair-a slight discomfort appeared to have brushed her like a chill breeze.  She cradled her chin, somewhat hastily, and then dropped her hand back into her lap.

‘Who was the writer, the one that said that about the stallion?’

'I’m afraid I can’t remember’ Miriam said, ‘sorry.’

4.3.20:  From blurb on the next Paris Review publication:  Ideas of transformation, death, and the taboo appear again and again in this issue, from Senaa Ahmad’s electrifying take on the death of Anne Boleyn in “Let’s Play Dead” to the literal transmogrification in Jesse Ball’s “Diary of a Country Mouse” and Jayanta Mahapatra and Billy Collins’s respective poems on the deaths of friends, “After the Death of a Friend” and “On the Deaths of Friends.”

The video game creations of Hideo Kojima and the nature of his new game ‘Death Stranding.’  (Stranding derived from mass whale stranding incidents and their inherent mystery.)  Ref:  ‘A mind forever voyaging’ by Dylan Holmes/  ‘Hamlet on the holodeck’ by Janet Holmes.  Article by Andrew Chen  NY Times briefing.

• The new cookbook for Diana Henry ‘From the oven to the Table’.  Chicken Thighs Forever.  The actual sub-title of one of the chapters!

• The Fibonacci sequence.  Explore the inherent nature of symmetry and the Golden Mean.

• Coronavirus provides respite for the planet from ceaseless human-bullshit producing activity.  Mobility is bad (except for me)

• QUOTE:  This is so true!

We know how much we don’t know

• Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? If you haven’t come across the term before, you have definitely experienced the principle. It’s a psychological rule that states; it’s the most incompetent who are the most confident, while the intelligent ones doubt their own abilities. Put simply, dumb people are too dumb to know how dumb they are. Smart people are clever enough to know how much they don’t know. British philosopher Bertrand Russell who first laid out the idea perhaps summed it up best: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” Basically, all of us have a pretty lousy grasp of the limits of our own competence one way or another.

• Hopper, Elizabeth. "What Is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?" ThoughtCo, Feb. 11, 2020, thoughtco.com/dunning-kruger-effect-4157431.

Anne Lamott (From the Brainpickings Website) On Writer's Purpose:  'We try to help where we can, and try to survive our own trials and stresses, illnesses and elections. We work really hard at not being driven crazy by noise and speed and extremely annoying people, whose names we are too polite to mention. We try not to be tripped up by major global sadness, difficulties in our families or the death of old pets…

We work hard, we enjoy life as we can, we endure. We try to help ourselves and one another. We try to be more present and less petty. Some days go better than others. We look for solace in nature and art and maybe, if we are lucky, the quiet satisfaction of our homes…

We’re social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.

And then there’s a mass shooting, a nuclear plant melts down, just as a niece is born, or as you find love. The world is coming to an end. I hate that. In environmental ways, it’s true, and in existential ways, it has been since the day each of us was born.'

WHAT MUSIC AM I LISTENING TO?:  'Become Desert'  John Luther Adams  (Lovely ambient bellscape-excellent for writing to!)  Persuasive evidence for Biophilia.

BLOG OF THE MONTH:  Tyler Cowen  'Conversations with Tyler'  Mercator Centre.  The best interviewer I've heard across a staggering range of subjects.  Always considered, intelligent and challenging.  Also see his sonnet-like turn at the end of his interview on The Tim Ferris Show recently.

READING:  'Arctic Dreams' by Barry Lopez  Poetic.  Passionate.  Tremendously moving writing on the nature of the Arctic World.  Its animals, people, interlopers, abusive extractors and its meaning with its mystical magical wind sculpted ice-scape.  Outstanding!

FINNEGAN'S WAKE by James Joyce:  Has got me again!  Diving in from Mon 16th March.  Maybe away for a while!  I will be posting updates.

TED GIOIA:  Gentle reader if you have any desire to educate yourself truly in the ways of music then please absorb the contents of the wonderful Ted Gioia's blog post on The Best Music of 2019  http://www.tedgioia.com/bestalbumsof2019.html    This is a true gift from Ted to the World, and will furnish your musical education for the next 12 months and beyond!

FROM THE BOOK OF THREE RINGS BY ABRAXAS MELONJACKER:

She seizes him in her white arms!

Her breasts are stirred and flecked!

She lands on him like Zeus on Leda!

The red skeins in her hair weave tales

of wildness and of chaos.

The sea is sounding in his shell!

THE FEBRUARY FLOODS-A WARNING FROM GEORGE MONBIOT

Washout

Posted: 15 Feb 2020 05:05 AM PST

Despite growing awareness, our government still allows landowners to help flood the homes of people living downstream.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12^th February 2020


On Friday, campaigners in Calderdale, West Yorkshire issued an urgent warning. The peat bogs in the hills that drain into their valley were burning. The fires had been set by gamekeepers working for a grouse shooting estate. Burning peatlands, research suggests, is likely to exacerbate floods downstream. Towns in the Calder Valley, such as Todmorden, Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd have been flooded repeatedly, partly, local people argue, because the upper catchment is able to hold back little of the rain that falls on it. On Sunday, Storm Ciara landed in the UK. The River Calder rose higher than it had ever done before, and Todmorden, Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd duly flooded.
The following day, the UK’s diaphanous environment secretary, Theresa Villiers, made a statement in the House of Commons expressing her “support and sympathy to all those whose homes or businesses have been flooded over the weekend.” She assured the house that “every effort is being made to keep people safe”. But she said nothing about the land management that might have caused the flood.
Last year, a paper published in the Journal of Hydrology X reported experiments conducted in another part of the Pennines, the range in which Calderdale is located. It found that when peat bogs are restored, deep vegetation is allowed to recover and erosion gullies are blocked, water is held back for longer in the hills, and peak flows in the streams draining them are reduced. Broadly speaking, the rougher the surface, the less flooding downstream. Burning moorland for grouse shooting reduces roughness and increases erosion.
In October the government announced that, as landowners had failed to stop burning their peatlands voluntarily, it would introduce legislation to ban the practice “in due course”. Since then, there has been not a squeak. As Villiers dispensed sympathy on Monday, she failed to mention it.
There’s a long and bizarre history here. The fires recorded by the Calder Valley campaigners on Friday were burning on Walshaw Moor, a 6500-acre grouse shooting estate that belongs to the well-connected inheritor of a retail empire, Richard Bannister. After he bought it, burning and draining on the moor intensified. Burning and draining raise the abundance of red grouse, while reducing the abundance of many other species. Shooting grouse is one of the world’s most exclusive bloodsports: where their numbers are high, very rich people pay thousands of pounds a day to kill them.
In 2011, the government agency Natural England launched an almost unprecedented prosecution. It charged the Walshaw Moor estate with 45 offences relating to its intensification of management for grouse shooting (the estate denied them). Natural England spent £1 million on the case, then suddenly dropped it. Instead, it channelled £2.5 million of enhanced farm subsidies to the estate. Freedom of information requests were refused, so we have no means of understanding this decision. The burning continues, regardless of the warnings of those downstream. When I phoned Bannister’s office to ask about these issues, I was told: “We don’t wish to comment.”
Since 2014, when I first wrote about how government policies exacerbate flooding, there has been a major shift in awareness. In and out of government, there’s a growing realisation that impeding the flow of water off the land, de-synchronising flood peaks in the tributaries and slowing a river’s pace can reduce flooding downstream, saving lives, homes and infrastructure. Not every experiment in natural flood management succeeds. The evidence base is still small. More research is needed to discover exactly what works and what doesn’t. But, in some circumstances, ecological restoration can make a major difference, at a fraction of the cost of hard engineering.
One paper suggests that reforesting between 20 and 40% of a catchment can reduce the height of floods by 19%. Leaky wooden dams embedded in streams, and other low-tech measures, appear to have prevented disasters at Pickering in North Yorkshire and Bossington and Allerford in Somerset. It’s even cheaper if you use non-human labour. Where beavers are reintroduced, their dams slow the flow and trap sediments.
But in most parts of the country, the First World War mentality – sustaining the policy even when it proves disastrous – prevails. In some places, water flows are controlled by bodies called Internal Drainage Boards. Though these are official agencies, they don’t appear to be answerable to any government department. While largely funded by council tax payers, they tend to be dominated by landowners. Some members appear to have inherited their positions from their fathers and grandfathers. Many of these boards seem interested only in speeding water off farmland (including farmland belonging to their members), regardless of the impact on urban pinchpoints downstream. They dredge, straighten and embank rivers, trashing wildlife and rushing water towards cities lower in the catchment. Any government that takes flooding seriously would immediately dissolve these boards and replace them with accountable bodies.
Every year, Network Rail spends £200 million on hard engineering to protect its lines. When I suggested it might pay farmers to invest in natural flood management in the surrounding hills, it told me, “we are unable to strike deals with farmers or land owners, to pay for work to be undertaken on 3rd party property”. Shouldn’t changing this policy be an urgent priority?
Power relations in the British countryside are still almost feudal. Vast tracts of land are owned by small numbers of people, who are permitted to manage it with little regard for the lives and homes of the less elevated people downstream. The environment secretary, a scion of one of Britain’s grandest landed families, offers her thoughts and prayers. I’m sure they are appreciated. But we need action.
www.monbiot.com

Go Forth Child of Marx and consider well: THE 2019 UK ELECTION: THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA By Tony Dougan

Go Forth Child of Marx and consider well:  THE 2019 UK ELECTION: THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA By Anthony Dougan

If the 2019 UK Election taught us anything about British Politics it is that mutton is being continually dressed as lamb and the British system leads to the unlikeliest of bedfellows.

We have four main political parties masquerading as two, with hollowed out cores and sworn enemies on each wing.  Enemies within, enemies without.

Stewart Lee’s piece in The Guardian, ‘Only Aamon the demon is fit to replace Jeremy Corbyn’ put it succinctly in terms of the current hybrid monstrosity that is the Labour Party:…

“A Frankenstein assembled from leftover body parts attractive both to the wine-quaffing, avocado-crushing, lentil-souffle-nibbling, champagne-socialist hypocrites of Hackney and the chip-butty-gobbling, fish-gut-snuffling, raw-offal-scoffing racist troglodytes of Hull will never fly,…

And yet the Labour party thinks it needs to unite these two incompatible, and quite frankly vile and unacceptable, stereotypes.”

For myself I might add the Frankenstinian equivalent on the Tory side is the unholy unity of the monocled Rees-Moogian Borisian bum-boy self-entitled fox-hunting Islam-hating public school-chumming Etonian bullingdon-clubbing let-them-eat-grass neo-liberal nationalistic little-englander scum on the one hand and the faintly desiccated hush puppy wearing technocratic opera-going upper class twatting posh-lunching vile ancien-regime empire-longing monarchy-loving hedge-funding arse-slapping aristos of the Soft Conservative ‘left’ that are also stitched together in a system bereft of intelligence and howled on by a rabid audience of insult-spewing mutually-monsterising haters twitterising their vile filth on their keyboards 12 hours a day. No wonder the country can’t get anything done!

Frankly vile and unacceptable stereotypes indeed Stewart.

In politics never say never is a good slogan but, in truth, I can never see a Socialist Government in power in the UK in my lifetime.

Let’s say I give myself twenty years?

The only really popular Labour government in recent years was that led by Tony Blair with a Labour Party draped in the silk stockings of soft Conservatism that continued the Thatcherite Project with swivel-eyed enthusiasm and we now look back upon the antics of that War Criminal and his half-witted crew of technocrats with cringing horror.

It may well be that popular socialism with its credo of public ownership, collective action, strong state, high taxation, anti-monarchical, Big-Unions and comprehensive education for all, belief-system, may be a thing of the past. It may not be fit for the purposes of the 21st Century. Its vision may be a historical curiosity.

And yet we tremble and resist letting go of treasured beliefs even despite the continual evidence that they have become irrelevant.

The fact remains that the discounting of the leave vote was strategically suicidal on the part of the Labour leadership and Keir Starmer, now mooted as the new leader, had a role in forcing Corbyn to that artless strategy.  Whatever our view on the brainless simplicity of Cameron’s breathtakingly inept 2016 EU Referendum, it was a vote to leave and it could not be discounted without significantly alienating a swathe of the population, many in Labour’s heartlands.

But the question now, as we stand stunned, at the prospect of a revitalised and supremely powerful Conservative Party, under the leadership of an old Etonian Toff who offers no evidence that he possesses even the illusion of moral character, or commitment to any service other than to himself, the question surely, for all those supporters of Jeremy Corbyn must be-If I have got it so wrong then what must this teach me? What do I need to reflect on? Is my understanding sufficient to the times? Are the reasons why I present myself as a leftwinger sufficiently coherent? Have I read and studied enough?

Have I reflected sufficiently on the views of those I profoundly disagree with?

Do I understand Politics at all? Do I understand how Politics in the UK intersects with International Relations?

And most fundamentally, what do I now do to serve my country and my community and my own higher purpose?

Go forth Child of Marx and consider well.

And keep off Twitter!

 1.  Just as an aside Stewart Lee also refers in his article to the summoning of Aamon the demon by Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers, Head of the Golden Dawn, who is described as the acolyte of Aleister Crowley, the infamous Thelemite Magician and drug addled clown.  In fact it was Crowley who was the acolyte of Mathers prior to their huge falling out.  Each then spent years attempting to obtain the others toenail clippings and semen for the purposes of magical warfare.  It would make a fine film script.