LUNGS

If trees are the lungs of the world, we breathe them. I have a great and abiding need for trees. I think if you have trees, rocks and rivers you have everything.

Here are photos from the West Coast of Aotearoa/New Zealand. None are filtered or shopped in any way.

The first two are of the Londonderry Rock. This rock is famous for the fact that nineteenth century gold miners could not blast it or shift it. This fact indicates that the environment around the rock has been heavily mined; it looks natural but it isn't. The third photo is of the track to the rock. It is lovely, all mossy and shaggy and rocky and how a track ought to be - in other words, entirely artificial, made by miners. Pretty as hell though.

The next three photos are of tunnel walks, where tracks took me through tunnels hewn in rock. I liked these walks immensely as they were mysterious.

After that comes a photo of light through trees, and then there is one of trees flooded in Lake Brunner, seen through the usual veil of West Coast rain. (It is, after all, a rain forest). I was lucky; this was only slight drizzle and actually looks quite bright.

The mountain photo is just that - just great sere vistas of rock and slope and layered land.

The last two are of the Carew Falls. I especially liked the bottom one. Much of my life I have looked at beautiful distances and thought 'I wish I was there'. In this photo you can see the road I came on. Instead of wishing I was 'there' and traveling hopefully to 'there,' I am actually 'there'! I am in a place of great beauty, and 'there' is now 'here'. With trees and rocks and river, I have all I need.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS REALLY ARE - THE SERIAL KILLER, HIS VICTIM, AND THE NIGHT FOREST

 

WHERE THE WILD THINGS REALLY ARE – THE SERIAL KILLER, HIS VICTIM AND THE NIGHT FOREST

Here is a joke:

A serial killer and his female victim walk into the forest at night. After a while she says she’s scared. He replies ‘What do you mean you’re scared? I’m the one who has to walk out of here alone’.

When I heard this my first reaction was against its obvious tastelessness. Then, the whole thing unravelled into something as strange and complex as the forest itself.

The joke plays on the idea that the forest is more frightening to both the killer and the victim than the implied murder that is about to take place there. When the victim says she is scared, it is of the forest, because she doesn’t know her companion is a serial killer. We know because we are privy to the joke.  We know the real threat is the killer, not the forest. The killer is also afraid of the forest. He is more afraid of the forest than of the terrible act he is about to commit.  In fact we suspect from what he says that while he may be under some imperative to murder this victim, he doesn’t want to. Once he does, he will have to walk out of the night forest alone. We have an image here of a man who is subjected to an archaic and atavistic terror, at odds with the terror he himself is about to unleash. Murder is a superficial thing in comparison.

Wild places at night have always been frightening, even to those of us who are urban through and through and have never been there. Think of the Disney version of Snow White, or the forest around Hogwarts. Forests are inhabited by sinister or marginal people, dangerous and rare beasts, and supernatural beings which are usually hostile. Forests are our pasts – much of the world was thickly forested before humans entered and changed the land for ever. They feel pre-human to us. Forests are dark, and we humans evolved on the sunlit savannah, loving the parklands and the broad rivers where we can find game and watch for predators from afar. Forests are both repellent and romantic. We are not at home there.

 Even serial killers are not at home there. You would think that there really ought to be some murders in the night forest, along with the unicorns and the gingerbread cottages. This makes the fear of the serial killer the punch line of the joke. It makes rational sense to be scared of the forest. The serial killer is one of us after all. He has asked for our sympathy by revealing his very human fears.

If the forest at night represents the murky and tangled darkness of our secret and ‘worst’ selves, we would expect the serial killer to be unafraid. Serial killers are a well explored trope and we think we understand them from cop shows and the news media. We think of them as damaged, for sure, but functionally fearless. A man accustomed to plumbing the ghastly depths of inhumanity should simply do what he has to do, and go hard and go home. After all, he has already faced the worst of himself. What is more frightening than his own depths and his own deeds? What can possibly be out there? The reason the joke is a joke, is because it violates our ideas about serial killers. This one is a wimp, afraid of a few trees! He is no wild dark thing, he is domesticated. Thus he is diminished in our eyes, and so he should be.

While the serial killer has domesticated himself by revealing his fears, he has also revealed himself by telling his victim he will walk out alone. We know nothing about her, apart from the fact that she is scared of the wrong thing and that she will probably be murdered very soon after she realizes her mistake. She is a notional character, and strangely we identify less with her than with her killer. Unless she turns and fights or runs away, but we suspect she won’t, because the joke has effectively foretold her future.

There is a lot to consider in a joke. This is in fact a very good joke, because it can be used as a probe to investigate our culture and our collective psyche, as well as explore our individual reactions. Jokes are like dreams – almost endless. Carl Jung talks about the skill of circumnambulating the dream. The problem is almost always knowing where to stop. Regardless of how far we go in our analysis, a good joke is never just a laugh. The one above educates us because it is above all else, transgressive. It violates our ideas about serial killers, and about human fear and strangeness.

Here’s to transgression. Here’s to the night forest, and the strange creatures who seek comfort there. Here’s to the cultural probe, to weird-ass humour and to our capacity to find learning everywhere. Ex tenebris lux indeed!

The veil.

So,clearly, Trump is a bad and stupid man and Clinton is a reptilian shape shifter. I want neither of them anywhere near anything I care about. From where I stand, which is somewhere between my Facebook location of Standing Rock and the toilet I clean for a living, it feels all care and toil. I want none of it. The Earth groans under our weight, and we groan with her.

Media wise, I watched the Democrats talking about going high where the Trump supporters went low. Very broadly, they appealed to reason and civility, those cornerstones of liberal thinking that go back to the founding parents of the USA and the whole Enlightenment project from which sprang the Constitution. I suspect they assumed that reason and civility was built into the bones of Americans - that the truths really were self evident.

They weren't, of course. I won't go into the many reasons people voted Trump because they are well canvassed almost everywhere among the chattering classes. But I will say this.

Over the last two years I have learned by very personal means the shocking truth that we are not rational beings. Even if we see ourselves as rational actors, we are also creatures of instinct and drive. I know this is tiresomely Freudian and Weberian and really rather trivial, but I am not sure we can escape it. In part this is not our fault. We can only be truly rational actors if we are in possession of all the facts, and we never are. We have largely bought a world view that goes back to the idea of enlightened self interest, and yet even if we are educated and thoughtful we often have no idea how it all works. We want our views vindicated. We gravitate to people who are like us. We want to be loved. We would rather save one named child than a thousand children. We want to be fed. We want to be free. We want the world to be unified, kind and safe. We want the world to be vibrant, diverse and progressive. And all we get is one tiny vote.

Liberal and left wing commentators were disappointed with Brexit and the Trump win because they saw it as irrational. I say we, the voting public, always were. It doesn't take a lot of pressure for rationality to collapse, and especially it collapses when the rational options seem oppressive and opaque and cruel. Remember how bemused we were when we saw interviews with people who had voted for Brexit and then regretted it, as if they had no idea what the consequences were.  Well gosh, I stand here as a person who has often felt I was on the wrong side of history.  I have in fact often made decisions I have not only regretted but poorly understood even after reflecting on them.  Rationality is a luxury for the safe and the well. There is no point in being told to eat your greens when there is no food at all.

Here in Aotearoa/New Zealand I know no one who states they would have voted for Trump, and many who would see themselves as natural Democrats even if they disliked Clinton's hawkishness. This goes across the strata. For example, I was with a group of intellectually disabled people when Michelle Obama came on the radio, and announced that Hilary was ready for the presidency. All the intellectually disabled people spontaneously clapped and cheered. Natural Democrats, natural rationalists.

To explain our fraught relationship with rationality, I want to reference those great heroes of ancient times, those Colossi who bestrode  our cultural straits and inspire us even today. I am talking about Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris and Mel Gibson. There have been others as well, perhaps Chris Rock and Samuel L Jackson, although as actors they are not so culturally bound to types. These guys taught my and subsequent generations all we need to know about the power of the irrational. They didn't exactly think. They followed their unerring instincts and their guts and their sense of the sentimental, and even if the details went a bit runny at times they were always right. Or even Right. While more reasonable heads around them planned and considered, they would just act from their noble hearts. They were genuine individuals who had no time for systems or social context or theory or eve much self reflection. Their motivations were often on the personal scale - to save one boy or find their ex wife or seek personal revenge. And in doing so, they saved the whole world again and again.

Mostly it doesn't bother us that we are irrational. It's too bloody hard and we have no attractive role models.

For the educated and liberal, never make Trump voters the repository for the dark, the primitive and the childlike. Especially women must remember that under active patriarchy we have often been the repository for just those things. Never judge or scoff until we ourselves have fully understood all that is dark, primitive and childlike in ourselves. And remember we can never be truly rational actors until we are in possession of all the facts, and we never are.

Instead, I want to listen, share what I have, fight for principles, keep awake, and stay away from the oncoming headlights.

THE ROCK AND THE WHIRLPOOL

Every day of his life he failed to negotiate between the Scylla and Charybdis of his parents. His father beat his mother and his mother beat him. His father was chaotic and brutal, and left his immigrant wife without remorse. His mother left the slums and gentrified herself by a sheer effort of will. Her house was a preserved shell of good taste from fifty years ago. She dieted, seldom cooked, kept the good china on display, and his childhood bedroom was kept spotless and oddly pink, decades after he left it.

Nowhere was the conflict between his parents more difficult than in matters of religion. His father forbade him to go to church, and his mother made him. So he went, and after his mother died the best he could say of this woman who could fell him as he ran with a broom thrown like a javelin, was, with great earnestness, that she led him to the Christian life. 

Church, or not-church, demonstrated to him that punishment was a given, but he could choose his punishment. The rest of his life worked pretty much like that. His many efforts to be useful came across as ingratiating. His attempts at sexual relationships created vehement disapproval, both for being with other men and for existing at all. He remained close to his family, even when he couldn’t live with them, and saw himself as their servant. 

It didn’t help that he had a mild intellectual disability and a stack of anxiety related behaviours that got him into frequent trouble. He blamed his father for his angry outbursts. He saw his anger as something that had been implanted in him, and he could not take any responsibility for it. He lived in a world that almost made sense, at least it would if people didn’t annoy him and if they understood his point of view. He managed it all by humming and muttering and nodding and blinking and wringing his hands, and all these things helped him, even if people seemed to find them off putting when he went on buses and tried to make conversation. 

The death of his father threw him into brief fury. For about a month he slept badly, flew off the handle easily and failed to make amends. But the death of his mother, a year later, precipitated a deeper response. I’m an orphan, he said. He was, at 58. It would be different if I had a mother, he would say. I wouldn’t be an orphan.

Much of his emotional voyaging had taken place in reaction to different types of authority –to his parents, obviously, and to the rules and ideologies steering the ships of the various institutions he had always lived in as an adult. So newly orphaned, he set out to replicate his authority figures as best he could. It was plain to him that he could not look after himself. He needed parents. So in his mind his brother became his father and his sister became his mother. He was explicit about this. He wasn’t unsophisticated about it. He understood it as a conscious attempt to reconstruct his emotional life. He knew they weren’t really his parents and could not do the job that parents should. But they were the best he had. This attempt at conceptual flexibility was costly for him, being as he was a man whose world view you could usually bend steel around. It could only be done by necessity, and only if he was willing to leave some almighty and excoriating gaps in his already troubled inner life. Of course his executive functioning suffered. So he kept busy, staved off depression, and grieved honestly and with dignity. Very occasionally, over time, he would remark that now his parents were gone, he was no longer subject to their influence. He no longer needed to be dutiful. He could think his own thoughts and make his own choices. 

In reference to the motif above, in the Odyssey, Scylla is a rock and Charybdis a whirlpool. Odysseus has to choose how to steer his ship between them. Thus it provides a metaphor for a decision between two unpalatable options. Odysseus maneouvres his ship closer to Scylla, the rock. He chooses to lose a few men rather than the whole ship in the whirlpool Charybdis. 

We sometimes sacrifice a part of ourselves in order to preserve the whole. We often choose Scylla and it is often the only choice that enables our survival. We might sacrifice our ability to have passions and fantasies, to be desperate, to be delighted, to be great, in order to get by day to day, and who can blame us. The terrible passage between the rock and the whirlpool, so legendary they are given names, is real and compelling and for many of us it is all we can do. 

May this man, with all his disadvantages, sail out of the passage, not safe, but more human. May we all sail out, not safe, because safety (at least on its own) impoverishes our souls, but more human.

NOTHING BUT MODERATION - TO MY YOUNG FRIENDS

 TRIGGER WARNING - SELF HARM
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A young friend recently talked about her experience of self harm. She commented that she had stopped doing it some time ago, but that her depression and anxiety were no better. Other friends weighed in and agreed. They had found other things to do, like exercise, but felt their depression, anxiety and sense of unstable identity remained. What to do once you've stopped cutting and burning?

I want to say some things to my friend, and if I sound too knowledgeable or confident or technical I apologize. It's just that I talk like this. Some of what I am saying is plainly obvious, but I think it is worth saying it as an expression of support. I don't have the experience of self harm. It wasn't around when I was young. Granted, I have known women my age who have done it, and I once had a flatmate who cut her breasts and vulva and was duly hospitalized, but it wasn't in the zeitgeist. I may have been miserable and lost at times, but it never occurred to me to hurt myself. 

The first thing to say to my friend is that the reason her depression and anxiety didn't get better after she stopped cutting herself was that cutting was not the problem. It was a worthy attempt to solve the problem. The problem was the depression and anxiety (Did I mention that what I am saying is plainly obvious?!) I am not suggesting it's a good thing to harm yourself, as it has its own problems. It can become kind of addictive and lead to more risky self harm and outright deformity. I have known a young woman do very serious damage by using oven cleaner on her legs, for example. It's like Homer Simpson says of alcohol - it's both the problem and the solution. When self harm is seen as the problem, however, you miss the point. Perhaps professionals should say - that's great that you have found such a meaningful and adaptive method of handling intolerable difficulties. Now let's look at dealing with those.

One of the issues about self harm is that it tends to be associated with young people, and especially young women. In which case, society hasn't a fucking clue what to do with you anyway. Welcome to a world in which it must be really hard to establish some sort of stable and significant identity among the wreckage of terminal stage capitalism. I am truly sorry it has come to this.

Self harm is also associated with Borderline Personality Disorder, that grisly appellation hurled by the frustrated clinician at the fleeing patient.* I have written before about BPD in three blog entries with the titles "The Borderline Society and is Discontents'. In these entries I claim that BPD is an adaptive response to a society that denies true moral and spiritual development to individuals, and decouples us from nature. For now, let me just say that if you hurt yourself repeatedly you may well at some time 'attract' (love that term!) a diagnosis of BPD or its traits. And yeah, if you hurt yourself a lot you probably do struggle with intolerable feelings, deep sensitivity, and an unstable or at least fluid identity.

Self harm is indeed the problem and the solution. You may find it useful for lots of reasons. It might stop you feeling stuff if you feel too much. It might make you feel if you feel nothing at all. It might distract you. It might focus you. It might serve for beauty or pleasure. It might express congruence, in that it is an outward showing of your inner self. It might point up lack of congruence, reminding you of the secret of your inner chaos or agony. You can hide it, display it, turn it into art. What's not to like? But whatever the reasoning, self harm changes your brain. It injects you with cortisol, adrenalin, oxytocin, lactic acid, endorphins and anandamide. Really, what's not to like? And it's free!

So when you stop self harming, it may be because you realize its problems outweigh the benefits,  or you have moved on to other ways of replicating the chemical hits mentioned above, or you just find it no longer does it for you. You then look for place holders or activities that do the same chemical brain thing. Substance use is an obvious one and of course has its own problems. Exercise was mentioned in the conversation among my young friends, as was being tattooed. Being pierced can also be a substitute. There are slightly more oblique versions - brief and risky sexual encounters, sexual fetishes, extreme sports, all take one 'out of oneself'. At the other end of the spectrum, I think some of the older women I have met use reading as a way of gaining a total distraction or vanishing for a time, and light reading is sometimes even called an 'escape'. There are two aspects to all the activities mentioned here - pain or its promise, and distraction or leaving the quotidian self behind. The third aspect of self harm is aesthetic, and art of all sorts has its place here.

I want to be a bit non judgmental about all of the activities mentioned above and the reasons behind them, and about self harm itself. Let's look at all of these things as ways of managing intolerable internal experiences. A talented and courageous alpinist uses mountaineering as a way of managing depression, panic, and a pervading sense of not being good enough. She achieves remarkable things and is one of our most foremost climbers. When she doesn't summit, her depression absolutely crushes her. She then uses all her skills of self talk and self love to stay alive. This is hard going. I don't know how she does it. But it is her life, it makes her able to live on the heights. I must not romanticize this - I can't claim to understand it, but I can support it.

In the end, for my young friends who suffer depression and anxiety and instability of identity, I would urge nothing but moderation. Study and learn about your difficulties, but temper that with love. Rejoice in your sensitivity, and seek those who understand it, and also acknowledge that life is just plain hard for everyone and we need to somehow rub along. Harden the fuck up when you have to, and spend a day in bed when you can. Seek nature. Seek friends. Seek solitude. Be beautiful, but never perfect.

The photo above is of a trans woman called Macy Rodman and has nothing to do with self harm.  I didn't want the stock images of miserable girls or blood stained arms. I think Macy is gorgeous, and gender fluidity provides us with another way of thinking about identity and diversity and caring. That's all.





* This is a quote, but I can't source it. Wish I'd said it first!

PLEASE SIR MAY I BE YOUR WAGE SLAVE?

I have written before about becoming a member of the precariat, that new class of people who lack the full security and rights of those with 'proper' jobs. Many of us are job-insecure. We work part time, or temp, or seasonally. We may have near zero hour contracts and are expected to be on call all the time. We stick jobs together. We work for cash. We exist the the mauve or grey economies, selling from catalogues or at markets, or just plain hustling. My daughter and her partner live like this - all their work is insecure, they pay taxes, yet they have fewer civil rights in the country where they live. They cannot vote, having lived away from New Zealand for too long but having no voting rights in the country where they have lived and worked for five years. In classical Athens, there were citizens and denizens. Many of us are now denizens.

For some time I lived almost off grid, working for cash only and learning the fun things about life among the denizens.I found I could use my skills in the grey economy and I learned fast. Later, I attempted to get onto welfare. I have written about this before, in my post Obligation Failure, about the welfare system.

Being established on welfare was a big relief, but my situation threw up its own peculiarities. I was deemed by my case manager to be unemployable. This would put stress on her. She would struggle to account for how an educated, skilled middle aged woman with no criminal record could remain unemployed. She pointed out to me that she would fail to meet her Key Performance Indicators and therefore I had to get a medical certificate. But I'm not sick, I said. But I want to work, I said. Nevertheless, off I went to the doctor and paid $45 to be put onto a sickness benefit. I stayed on this for over a year as my situation remained complex and unresolved, visiting my GP every three months and explaining that I was not really sick but this was what the system required of me. My next case manager was sympathetic, and unusually flexible. And I applied for jobs here and there, just for a lark, and to show I was still, at bottom, respectable.

Eventually, and to my surprise, I actually got a job. I did this by myself and by completely legitimate means. It has shit pay and shittier hours and is not quite full time, and it is in a low status industry, but it is mine and I got it and I am now almost a citizen again. I will not reveal what it is in order to protect those who took the risk and took me on. I do not want to jinx it and I value the reputation of my employer too much. Naturally I am very grateful to them. I have tried to add value to the place by organizing and unionizing the workers, and I aim to educate myself where I can. It's a start.

Being in the workforce has immense value for me. I feel useful and purposeful. I am doing good. I have structure and sometimes people to talk to. We are perhaps the last vestiges of the genuine working class. We are mostly single mothers with old cars, high rent, and difficult relationships. We are endlessly tired. We care about our work and we do not expect much from it. Ours is not a living wage. We wouldn't expect it to be. We are simply selling our labour.

There was a time when being a wage slave was considered to be a bad thing. People wanted to derive meaning from what they did. In those heady days there was talk of paying parents, and of a citizen's wage, and of being freed up by technology to pursue higher things which would be then valued accordingly by society. Income and work were becoming slightly decoupled.

If there ever was a battle between labour and capital, capital won decisively in the 1980's. Now, there are large numbers of us, including many of the young and bright, who want to be wage slaves. A steady wage might consign us to near impoverishment, but at least we know what next week will bring. More of the same. No worse. When I was deemed to be unemployable, and applying for 'unskilled'* jobs on low wages, I was begging to be someone's wage slave. Now I am, under the circumstances, I am genuinely pleased.


*There is no such thing.

LOTS OF VERBS

It was 0550 and the fire of my night shift was collapsing softly into embers. In a fit of (I might add) uncharacteristic narcissism I looked up my name on LinkedIn. I found a much more illustrious namesake who worked for Barclays bank. Guess what she did? And I quote verbatim, including the capital letters:

'Responsible for being the independent Voice of Customer proactively influencing the customer agenda at Exco level to drive performance against key customer targets'
 
She also was:
 
'continually embedding a TCF culture' (TCF, for the non cognoscenti, is Treating Customers Fairly).
 
And....
 
'producing a 40% year on year reduction through eliminating root causes.'
 
Naturally she was far prettier than me. She could have eliminate my root cause any time. And boy could she pack in some verbs. No actual meaning, mind, but lots of verbs. 

Made me want to kick in a few windows.

Plumage

He walks now by feeling the ground with his feet, and he can't see the soup down the front of his shirt. Yet he can tell the change in the weather by the plumage of a bird, and the change of the seasons by the colour of the hills.

He can't hear his wife telling him dinner is ready, and the TV has to be disturbingly loud. Yet he stirs when the spur winged plovers call overhead.

 He sits in the sun on his stool outside the tiny retirement 'village' house and complains that it's cold, and people are unfriendly. He remembers his childhood in the country, where his father built him and his brothers a hut and they played, fought, experimented and grew together. It was an idyll. Even at the time, it was.

The memories are desperately acute. The smell of the grass and the long golden light of evenings in the hills are like a calling. If pressed, he would agree that if he went back to his childhood home it would be different now from how it was, that this is just longing and loneliness, but that is not how it feels when his head is on his chest and the past flows gently in under his eyelids.

It is not just depression and the beginnings of dementia, although it is also those things. And it is not just remembering. There is a deep imperative here, to spread his whole life out before him in these moments he has left, to raise up and widen his gaze to take in everything that matters, now, to become the sky and the fields and the mountains where his spirit is beginning to roam. It's not 'living in the past', it's preparing, pausing, taking stock. In Egyptian religion, the scales of Ma'at weigh the soul against a feather. Only if it is lighter does the soul go paradise. This man is weighing his soul.

SWEET DUALISMS

This stand alone (and on its side because of my lack of tech know how) splash of colour in the post earthquake landscape of Christchurch's CBD is the Les Mills gym. The picturesque rubble in front of it is what remains of the Calendar Girls strip club/Corporate Affairs brothel. Both of these buildings sprang up quite soon after the earthquake, big weird stark boxes, their interiors obscured, both of them temples to the body. I thought at the time how post EQ our carnal selves took precedent - how strip clubs and fast food outlets rose faster than homes, and how schools were closed and social services struggled. When the two new Burger Kings opened up - well - at least the Whopper has a home even if people don't.

Sweet dualisms. Life is not so simple, I have since discovered. About three years ago I would have considered it like this - brothels bad, social services good. Things of the body bad, things of the mind good. The social order is easier to think about when I can order myself in this way. Now, not so much.

For a time I worked hard not to privilege one experience over another. I learned to slice time so thinly I could feel the present moment as just this present moment. There! It's gone. A flash of the fish in the fast and complex river of time. If I am cold I am cold. If I am warm I am warm. Pleasant sensations are not to be privileged any more than unpleasant ones. Sensations are just that. Don't judge them or extend them or contract them or manipulate them in any way. Once I started with this, each moment became richer, and more interesting. My aim, however, was to do away with the moments altogether and enter a timeless state. I wanted to use the sensations of the body to transcend the body.

I don't know if I just gave it all up or went on to something different, but after that my practices became much more embodied and experimental, and that distinction between mind/good and body/bad just collapsed of its own accord. I have a strong monist streak in me now. Either you get more and more refined matter, or more and more coarse energy, but it's the same stuff. It doesn't go away, it is inside and outside us, it's as accessible as it is mysterious, and all its varied forms are fascinating. It's a mess, is what it is. And I suspect we can't escape it, contingent beings that we are.

This affects how we are in the world. It sounds twee to say that the best wisdom is found in the prison or the whorehouse, but it seems to be true. Living is hard. The more living you do, the harder. You get bigger inside and there is more of you to fill, so you start to care about shit, and you feel it more, and you care about more shit, and then that makes you bigger again and in the end you care about all of the shit. You don't transcend anything, you just take it into yourself. Let me tell you, whatever it is, it doesn't exactly make you happy. But you wouldn't go back, either.