Living Outside Time

My Theological Conundrum

2011-05-02T17:17:00.003+03:00

One of the last things my Slovak ex-girlfriend said to me was that ‘I should have become a priest’. While I see this might be interpeted as a judgement on my performance in the bedroom, I’m not sure she meant this. Without wishing to engage in unwarranted acts of self-congratulation, it seemed she was at least ‘happy enough’ in that department.

Actually, I believe she spoke about my vocation. I should have become a priest, not an English language teacher. I never got round to asking her why. Nowadays, while not exactly fallen out and vaguely in touch, we do not talk.

Anyway, it is something I have often wondered about.

After all, I have no degree in English language teaching. All I have is a CELTA, which took me one month to acquire, and which it is very difficult not to acquire (or at least used to be). On the other hand, I have a BA in Theology from the Theology Department of The University of Durham, one of the best Theological departments in the world (or so it used to be)*. From the same University I later scored a Distinction in the oddly named MA degree subject ‘Seventeenth Century Studies’, which featured Theology as a central component.

So, on paper it seems a Priest is what I was set up to become (or at least an academic in Theology/Religious Studies or History). Rather than linger on what has happened, I wanted to explore the theological conundrum that developed during my studies at Durham and that has remained to this day.

My dilemma is that I believe contradictory things about Christianity. Things that I have not been able to resolve. On the one hand, I believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ in an essential sense is unique, true and superior to all other religious revelations or teachings, as well as being relevant to the entirety of the world, to people of all cultures and all nations. My faith, I would argue, has resulted from experience as opposed to from argumentation or any habit of Church attendance. This faith is also strenghtened, however, by some reasoning. What the Gospel proclaims that God has done in Jesus Christ is exactly what I would expect a real God to do- were such a God to exist. In other words, the Gospel message makes sense at a theoretical level. This is what I can only imagine must be expected of a God of Love; namely that he would become one of us, teach wisdom and overwhelming love whilst amongst us – especially the emphasis that we should love one another -; that he would then be killed by us, very importantly that he would then forgive us for killing him, and finally that he would then rise from the dead, before heading back home. All these sorts of things just make sense. Or putting it another way, if I were God, and I looked down on a world of suffering and hatred, this is exactly what I would do; this is how I would behave. Hmmmmmm, maybe some of that needs to be explained.

Anyway, on the other hand, despite my basic acceptance of the Christian Gospel, there are other things I believe about Christianity, as it stands, that conflict with my positive regard for the Gospel. These concern two matters; firstly, Christian attitudes towards sex and hell, and secondly the increasingly widespread development within church circles of a liberal stance towards Jesus Christ, which while very agreeable in its tolerant approaches towards sex and hell effectively destroys the very purpose of Christianity’s existence by denying the divinity of Jesus Christ and the unique significance attaching to his death and resurrection.

This is a complex looking theological conundrum. As I see it, there is no point even pretending to be a Christian if you dont believe that Jesus was God and that he died and rose from the dead. On the other hand, since the meaning behind this divine act on our behalf was that God loved the world enough to sacrifice his only Son to death and doom for our sakes, it is surely then contradictory to believe at the same time that people still get sent to hell (presuming they ever did)? Doesn’t that contradict the Gospel in its essence? Doesn’t that eventuality obviate the whole purpose of the incarnation, just a shade? Maybe God shouldn’t have gone to all the trouble in the first place.

Furthermore, that the majority of the people who apparently still get sent to hell appear to get sent there because they get carried away by sexual desires arising in them from a sexual nature which God himself created, is an ever greater absurdity. While I do not deny that there should be such a thing as sexual ethics, just as there should be such a thing as business ethics and medical ethics, Christianity has always attached a degree of importance to sexual behaviour far in excess of its actual potency as a source of misery and suffering on the earth.

I realise that there are many church going people who will share my tolerant attitudes towards sexuality and judgement. I realise equally, that there are many church going people who will share my insistence that Jesus was and is God, that he died and rose again, and that those adhering to liberal forms of Christianity which deny this and deny the Gospel’s uniqueness as a divine revelation are not Christians. My problem is that I do not find people who hold to both positions – who are both liberal morally and judgementally and Orthodox in terms of Christology - or not many (in fact only one, and he may have changed his mind). Certainly not enough in any case to have found my niche in the ecclesiastical map, to have found my flock, a denomination that I would wish to work as a Priest for.

And so stands my theological conundrum.

And so it is that I am an English Language Teacher and not holding forth about the glorious power of the Gospel, the Jewel at the heart of Judah; about its ability to break the chains of fear and death, and to reconcile the human family through the power of sacred love.

Alas.

What We Are II - Evolution and Animality

2010-07-25T01:37:00.003+03:00

Some people think that we are highly evolved animals, cousins of the apes. Actually, it’s commonly supposed that most people think this, or should I say that most ‘intelligent’ people think this. By intelligent I’m excluding those who base their cosmologies on a book, as opposed to on organic relics dug up from the ground. Such ‘believers’ might consider themselves intelligent, but my point is that mainstream ‘respectable’ opinion does not.

Actually, it’s interesting to wonder what percentage of the 6.8 billion people walking the face of the earth ‘believe’ in evolution’.

Most people, I suspect, tend to believe either in ‘nothing’, by which I mean ‘that it is good for me and my family to get richer’, or else in reincarnation, a belief involving the ethical motivation to lead a good life to avoid coming back as a slug, or worse. The next largest group, I think, thanks largely to the power of Mecca and Rome (as well as its rebellious offshoots), believes with varying degrees of sincerity in its absolute importance in the eyes of a shy, generally invisible, all-loving, all-judging entity called ‘God’. So important do they think they are in the eyes of this being, indeed, that they suppose he’ll go to the trouble of deciding upon their fates based on everything they have ever thought or done and that he’ll then sustain their bodies and personalities for all eternity in one of two prepared places that he had gone to the trouble of creating – especially for them (as if the creation of the Earth, large and wide as it is, were not enough!!).

I’m not sure how or where or whether evolution fits into any of these belief systems. I suppose it sits happiest with the belief in ‘nothing’.

Still, believing in nothing hardly counts as a belief in evolution in my book. So, it seems that most people don’t believe in evolution after all, despite the rage it struts on the stage of ‘the world’. Most people just don’t care about evolution, I suspect. Or if they do, they tend to think that evolution is a shade barbaric. Most people, after all, don’t like to think they can be reduced to, and therefore explained away, as ‘animals’, whatever it is they think animals are.

On the other hand, I’ve also noticed that an interesting number of people in the West can’t get enough of this idea. The notion that we are ‘only’ animals fills them with delight! Why this should be, I suppose, involves a fair amount of fear and detestation of the spiritual, at least as far as ‘the spiritual’ has been understood in classically religious terms. Such terms usually have had a great deal to do with sex, or rather with its repression and denial; or if not about sex in such an explicit sense then at least about the general depreciation of the physical and empirical world and the seat of our senses, the body, that has been such a fashionable preoccupation in the Occident for over two thousand years.

Is this what it boils down to? Do people really want or do not want to believe in evolution because of whether they want or do not want to maintain that humans are ‘just animals’. If this is so questions must be raised about what animals actually are. And since we have never spoken to them or heard them give an account of themselves in their own terms, it’s very difficult for us to know, in ways other than by merely imposing our epistemological paradigms upon them, what they actually are. They merely embody and in that way prove our own preconceptions about them. That this is so, of course, makes it much easier for us to then eat them, or else kill them to fuel the flames of our vanity, than it would be if, well, we interacted and communicated with them as equals. Yet that this is so also means, ironically, that even though both believers and disbelievers in evolution care passionately about whether or not humans are animals, or the degree to which we are animals, we don’t actually know what animals are. No more, it might be said, than we know what humans are.

What We Are

2010-06-07T15:53:00.001+03:00

Thinking about what we are is a reasonable thing to do, I suppose.

And when I say ‘what we are’ I mean that. I don’t mean ‘who we are’, which is different. Who we are is strictly sociological, by which I mean that the question already presupposes that we are essentially defined by our membership in human communities. Who implies name, rank, status, role. Who wishes to locate us in a position within the external human community. It has already decided in advance that we belong somewhere within it, and not anywhere else. Who we are, therefore, is not that profound a question since it presumes too much, too much of that which it just takes for granted.

What we are is much better. I remember realizing this dancing under an African sky in the summer of 1990. It was an almost mystical moment, an epiphany of insight. It felt so marvelous, suddenly realizing I didn’t just have to be human, indeed that I couldn’t just only be human. I saw that this understanding ‘human’ is one that humans themselves had constructed. How can that make it true, or at least exhaustively true? There may indeed by something real in what we think we are, but surely this understanding cannot be the whole picture since we can only see ourselves from the inside, from our own perspectives. There must be something preceding, left over, flopping around the edges of our self-images. Surely?

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

2010-03-29T20:11:00.005+03:00

Recently I've reacquainted myself with George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. A remarkable man of controversial reputation for whom I can admit to having a very profound respect and indeed love. This is certainly in part due to the circumstances whereby I originally came across him.

In the aftermath of the spiritual awakening I experienced as a 19 year old, Gurdjieff brought a clearer shape and deeper understanding to my effforts to reintegrate myself into the world of others after months of what had seemed to be an intense mystical absorption. This absorption, luscious and sublime though it was, was isolating. In its most vivid moments it left me at a loss to know how I could harness what had come to feel like an entirely new mode of being to the context of the public, social world. For sure, I often felt that I was supremely happy, even that I'd like nothing better than to grow wings or drift off into the ether. Other thoughts of an even more eccentric nature suggested that the world itself would soon joyously unravel, to be swept into the arms of the eschaton, joining me in my rapture. Despite that, however, a core of sanity prevailed, a voice of sense that wouldn't let me conclude that the world would soon end, but rather spoke to me of my need to attend to the sensible. The objective options were just two, or so it seemed. To get a job or to return to university. Subjectively, however, I had to get a handle first on what had happened to me, to readjust to the groove of objective involvement. My psychic states at this time were the opposite of pathological, so I had no need of a psychologist. I needed a spiritual master. Somehow who could give me insight into the human condition of a kind that would allow me not to fly from 'reality' and the 'affairs of the world' but, on the contrary, to return to them-to come back down to Earth, even though I knew there was no going back to the person I had been before my spiritual awakening; as indeed there has not been. For this readjustment to the public life of objective engagement I have Gurdjieff to thank. Not that my life has been 'a bed of roses' since then.

Indeed, maybe the onset of my troubles, my worldy confusion and sense of dislocation, which began in 1993 and gathered force in 1994, whatever other causes they may have had, can be linked in part to my abandonment of Gurdjieff. The reasons I had for doing so are not as clear to me now as they were then; but I remember that I had felt these reasons authentically at the time. This does not mean, however, they they were not mistaken. Great errors are often hovering around us, waiting, ready to be made. Perhaps rejecting Gurdjieff's influence was one of them. Perhaps, alongside the various regrets that I have, I can add the regret of forgetting this man.

Gurdjieff is different. Don't take my word for it. Investigate for yourself. He's different in the way Morrissey is different and Jim Morrison are different in the world of popular music. In the way T.S.Eliot is different from other modern poets. But it's easy to waste words eulogising someone. I am biased by my love, and the effects he has had on me. No doubt we are all biased by our experiences in singling out particular people as special. Maybe they are all 'different', only to us. Maybe we only attach objectivity to that difference to justify the arbitrary nature of our attachments. So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he's not different. Maybe he's just another guru. On the other hand, maybe he's not.

Recently I composed a summary of my understanding of his teaching. Not that he was only a teacher of a certain body of thought, mind. He also composed sacred music and a was a choreographer of sacred dance.

But at the core of what he did lies what I'd call his vision. Aspects of it, in isolation, are not original. Even he acknowledged this. What else was he doing, after all, wandering around Central Asia for 20 years if not collecting insights and knowledge given to him by others. But a man doesn't have to say something new in order to be something new. In addition, a man can say something new just by saying things that are not new in a new way, or in new combinations. And even if what he says is not new, it can still be felt as new - as it was when he said it, when he appeared out of nowhere in pre-First World War Russia and began to shake that part of the world that would listen with his being.

“Gurdjieff’s most essential idea is that we are ‘asleep’. Our consciousness is degraded. It is not as it should be, or at least could be. We cannot marshall, but instead squander, the power of attention, since we are internally fragmented and misaligned between mind, body and feelings. So Gurdjieff’s problem with the human subject is not just a mind-body problem. This misalignment and internal incoherence means in the West that we tend to be lop-sided. We are too rational, too intellectual, and what he called our physical and emotional ‘centres’ are underdeveloped and out of synch, especially the emotional centre. In other cultures, things can be different; there, people might be too emotional or too physical. Since humans in general, however, lack the genuine power of attention, we forget our ‘higher’ selves, which we might only sometimes, rarely, or never experience. Instead, we are overtaken by a multitude of lower-level competing ‘I’s, all of which are different from each other, yet all of which think they alone are the true self when they are dominant. This fragmented mass-of-selves is often indecisive, ineffective or even chaotic in the face of events and experience, even if it might believe the contrary about itself. There is no abiding Master Self in charge; we are the victims of what Gurdjieff sees as our automatic reactions to external and internal stimuli. His view of the self, then, as a diagnosis of what is found, is pessimistic. Still, in terms of humanity’s potential future development, he seems much more optimistic than Freud – for whom normal, as opposed to neurotic, unhappiness was the ideal. What we can do now is to work on our powers of attention and on integrating mind, body and feelings, so that our higher self will be more active and awake in our everyday experiences; such that both our happiness and our effectiveness (what he called our ability ‘to do’) will be increased and our development, as both individuals and societies, made more harmonious.”

I do not claim to be an expert on Gurdjieff, nor to have read, alas, even most of his works, nor to have participated in any of the Group Work which he believed to be essential to effective development, so if you do claim to be an expert and you take issue with what I write, herein, perhaps, may lie the explanation.

The best free online resource I know about Gurdjieff is the Gurdjieff International Review and it can be found here: http://www.gurdjieff.org/

2009-12-27T08:58:00.003+03:00

Happy Christmas.

I hope you have a very warm and festive time with your loved ones; that the Christmas tree glimmers and gleams enchantingly, that only the best carols are sung and that the Queen’s speech, which I will no doubt miss, touches the right spot in the wake of the Turkey; well, if you're British. All the best as well for the next decade.

Oddly, I’ve found it easy to forget that it’s not just a year that is passing. According to ‘Time’, the decade now ending was a ‘decade from hell’. This magazine speaks publically, as it must. Whether your own decade was hellish or not, I hope the next falls upon you sweetly as manna from Heaven, or if that’s not your thing, as ambrosia from Elysium.

Most likely, life will pretty much ‘go on as always’, of course, but what kind of a wish would that be?

This year has seen me continuing to live in Ningbo, China. This ‘small’ Chinese city of 2.2 million people has a far longer, more distinguished history than the much more famous Shanghai three hours to the north. I say ‘more famous’, but I wonder, is Ningbo famous at all? I have yet to find anyone outside China who has heard of it. Maybe this is because they take ‘The Rough Guide to China’ as their source of information, a book that doesn’t even mention it in its index!Whether I think Ningbo deserves its reputation for obscurity can depend on my mood. As expats frequently frustratedly sigh: there is ‘not much to do in Ningbo’. What exactly one is expected ‘to do’ in a Chinese city is rarely spelt out. When it is, it usually amounts to doing the kinds of thing you might routinely do back home (or in Shanghai, alternatively); such as going to international restaurants, clubs, and live music events. To that extent, Ningbo is certainly not all that it could be; for excitement and fun I too appreciate Shanghai and the nearby Suzhou far more. As regards its performance according to cultural and historical criteria, there’s more to discover and find in Ningbo than might immediately be thought. Nevertheless, the ever spreading office blocks and skyscrapers have worked wonders in demolishing Ningbo’s ancient architectural history. Such a philistinism began under Mao's Marxism in the 1960s, when on ideological grounds traditional culture was considered bourgeois, unacceptably reactionary. Now, the destruction proceeds under 'capitalism', with no need to be justified on grounds other than that traditional buildings get in the way of more efficient ways of making money.

What do I 'do' here? I continue to teach English for Academic Purposes at this Chinese outpost of Nottingham University. I can’t help thinking: might it have helped if my students had first learnt to write grammatically decent clauses, let alone sentences, before embarking on the seas we must steer them through; seas of structuring paragraphs and the relationships between paragraphs according to the model of Western style essays. Teaching them the combative joys of ‘critical thinking’, the cut and thrust of dialectic, might also be easier if a general spirit of docility and conformity to received patterns of reflection had not taken such a hold. This unwillingness to think critically is part cultural, the legacy of a communitarian culture rooted in a Confucian regard for ones ‘place in the world’; part political, the product of a Communist party’s zeal to perpetuate its tenure in power.

This is by no means to imply, however, that the Chinese are lacking in charm. By no means. Ironically, it is perhaps the very repression of the individual that prevents those forces in the west that have disintegrated our sense of a common culture, and promoted our atomized society – fragmented now into a myriad of dissociated factions - from gaining a similar foothold. The family remains strong, as do roots. Chinese people belong, and not just to their friends and family. Selfishness and disregard for the common good do not seem cancerous. To me the people smile, seem happy and are kind, helpful to the stranger. No man is an island, but the Chinese man is less of an Island than the European or the American. But everything at a price, and it is indeed sad the Chinese do not more openly think for themselves, and celebrate diversity. Who knows, this might even help their economy (and that they do care about!); defend it from a potential shock, if foreign exports dry up, foreign direct investment is exhausted and China must rely more on domestic consumption and home grown entrepreneurship. Such seem to be Will Hutton's musings in any case (in his 'The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st century).

This year I’ve seen some other countries too. The tender charms of Thailand visited me in January, the more robust, Hispanic ones of the Philippines in May. Each land boasts impressive coastlines, natural beauty and sunshine, but strangely, the Philippines, unlike Thailand , isn’t a prime destination for tourists. I presume this is because the Government in Manila hasn’t developed the infrastructure for tourism as much. Perhaps the memory of Marcos and the widespread corruption also don't help. Culturally, it's a curious cluster of islands. Right bang in the heart of East Asia, but with a Latinate feel that makes you feel you're in South America. Hundreds of years of Spanish colonisation have had their effect. And if you like to speak English to locals on your travels, The Phillipines is definitely your place. Thank Uncle Sam for that, for colonising it for 50 years.

As it happens I'm back in The Phillipines right now, where I'm visiting a friend I met in Kuwait who recently married a Filipino. I might see Mount Mayon explode, though that is in the hands of Gaia.

The summer, after a brief stop over in Kuwait, saw me back in blighty, a country that shines in blessedness when the snows are absent and when you're a tourist with a car. I drove around the South, from the tip of Cornwall, to Bristol, to Portsmouth, to Eastern Kent, to my home village of Kettlebaston (it's on Wikipedia!), to King's Lynn and as far north as Derby. At last I learnt to appreciate The National Trust, but wondered: Stately Homes turned into museums are ghostly mausoleums. Can't an alternative prize for the National Lottery be to swan around a mansion for a month, waited upon by butlers and servants, living the life of Sebastian.

At least it would bring the houses back to life. And then to Slovakia, where the roots still clutch, where many friends were visited and memories stirred. Croatia saw me licked by the sun on an obscure island north of Dubrovnik, and in Bavaria I finally got to see Luwig II's castle, the template for Walt Disney's and the home of the King of Vulgaria (think 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'), as well as the Fuhrer's favourite retreat, in Berchtesgarten, now a wreck, bommed in the 50s to deter Neo-Nazis.

Oh, and I went to South Korea. I saw a solitary North Korean guard, rather slight and slim of stature gazing at me from across the border at Panmunjon. We were under strict instructions to neither point, wave nor smile at him; apparently, lest his regime use such gestures as propaganda tools; evidence, I presume, of the provocativeness or just general weirdness of foreigners. I suppose the North Koreans might also think that to point is to wield a gun. But I thought only Children think that.

An old thought on a topical isssue

2009-08-05T09:21:00.003+03:00

Our objections to the existence of God are not founded on an instinctive aversion to the notion of deity-in-itself, but on our offence taken at the nature of the relationship we suppose he wishes to have with us (1991).

Returning to China. It's in the Post

2009-07-29T07:51:00.014+03:00

I don't particularly want to return to China.

Notice, however, that I'm not saying I want not to return to China. I'm saying I lack an active desire to return - or at least that I lack one 'particularly'. This means I have a small desire to return but that it is not significantly forceful. Moreover, what I am also not saying is that I have an active desire to stay in the UK, or go anywhere else for that matter. Perhaps this difference between the negative or 'empty' lack of a desire to do something - return to China for example - and the positive desire to do its opposite - for example, keep out of China - may not seem very strong to you. But it seems real enough to me.

Last year, when I returned to the UK from Kuwait, I felt an active desire not to return there. Actually, as it happened, fate would mock that resolve most ironically, since a mere five weeks into my Chinese job, I felt I'd made a terrible mistake. That said, it's still the case that when I returned from the desert last August, in a procedure that felt like escape given the bureaucratic obstacles I had to overcome to leave, I was not only negative or passive in my lack of a desire to go back; I actively desired not to.

Today, differently, the passive, wishy-washy nature of my desire to abandon China will no doubt mean I shall not. Besides, the only alternative prospect I currently have to going back is the wonderful and seductive, but impractical and imprudent, one of continuing to do what I've been doing for the last five weeks; namely, not very much - in the eyes, of our work obsessed, productivity obsessed world, at least.

At current spending velocity (though I try not to look too closely), I'd be able to self-finance such a life of 'leisure', outside the system of employment, for about two years. Presuming I might spend a fair deal of that time not in the developed but the developing world, this lifestyle might be stretched to 3 or 4 years. If a little voice of omnisicent insight informed me that I'm to be gunned down in cold blood four years from now, or else a doctor told me that I am now the carrier, or will become the carrier, of a terminal malignancy that will dispatch me in 2013, then, of course, there'd no doubt; I'd give up work today. Similarly, if I won the lottery (something which playing it more often than twice a year might help), won enough, that is, to keep me going on a low but secure interest return (say 2% after tax), so let us say about 1.5 million pounds, yielding an annual income of 30,000 pounds - which would be nice and certainly enough - then there'd be no doubt, and I'd give up work today. Alternatively, if some delightfully insane, and rich, individual (insane here meant as a robust compliment), decided to become my patron and grant me a guaranteed income of 30,000 pounds a year for life, or just gav me this 1.5 million pounds, then I'd give up work today; and in each case bask under these open skies - though admittedly far less serenely if 2013 were indeed to be my cut off point.

But as it is I am not quite insane enough to suppose any of these four eventualities can be relied upon to occur. And it is only the second two of course that I'd actually want to occur, in any case.

And so it is, the sign of practicality and prudence in me, which marks me out as a man in his late 30s, no longer in the anarchy and eschatalogical otherworliness of his 20s, prevails. While it would no doubt be nice to continue being free of the system for the next four years, I cannot presume that at the end of it, or even before the end of it, I would not in fact end up a broke English teacher with a gaping hole in his CV and the requirement merely to recapitulate a work situation he had voluntarily fled four years earlier, something that might be harder in his 40s to regain than it had originally been to attain.

Yes, indeed, borgeois calculation is boring. It is deeply unromantic besides, in that 19th century sense of the word. But I have no desire to be poor in my 40s as I get older and older. Nor do I desire to go crazy - which, I wonder, might very well happen if I choose to live outside the system of employment without first having financial security beneath me. Living outside the system with financial security is altogether different. Here, after all, one can know that the condition that has made one's freedom possible is not under threat, and does not have a time limit, as it intrinsically is, and does, if the condition for ones freedom is a small, finite amount of savings that one is running into the ground. Here one can plan, one can reconfigure, one can raise ones sights and realistically plan about how to engage on one's own terms, as a free individual, with the world, with humanity, with life. Certainly, I would not do 'nothing' (who else but a corpse can do nothing?). I presumably would travel a while, but not forever. Almost certainly I would engage in some form of voluntary work in the hope of doing tasks that in the 'real world of work' I am presumably not qualified for, and would have to compete for; doing them, moreover, in a non-competitive environment that for that reason would be more gracious and edifying (one hopes!). Before long, perhaps, or perhaps not, I would re-enter paid employment doing what exactly I don't know, but whatever felt right and that I could get a job in. But the point is that I would be doing so from a position of freedom and strength, not from one of servitude and dependence, which is the point from which all wage slaves like me enter the market.

But I have no reason to suppose I will ever have this freedom. And so it is that I return to China, in which I have a job that lets me have a generous 17 weeks off a year and which, fundamentally, I can bear, and sometimes even enjoy.

I'd rather live the life of my dreams, it's true. But alas I know that such slogans tend really to belong only to advertising personnel trying to sell stuff, or else to people, unlike myself, who are lucky enough to have dreams commensurate with the current order of the world.

Recently

2009-06-30T08:53:00.008+03:00

Nowadays in China not only Blogger but You Tube is banned. In the past, Wikipedia was forbidden although at present it's being allowed through the wall (I think?). For how long it will be, who can know? Pornography sites are inaccessible, which is odd in a country that lacks our neo-platonic reservations about the means of reproduction; a country, moreover, awash (albeit hiddenly) with brothels and prostitutes. And now, so I hear, Facebook, the friendly, innocent whore of corporate connectivity, has been slain. Clearly, the Chinese Government is frightened of something. But clearly not frightened of actually being frightened - and of how that makes them seem.

The block on Blogger has of course made it difficult to post. Now, however, I'm in Germany, so have lost that excuse. I guess I'm just going through a 'dry' phase, which will last as long as it lasts. Actually, I've been posting a lot to Facebook in the form of the status update, which I find rather amusing, though people tend not to maximise its potential as they might. Though I know many an intellectual snob wince and squirm at the vulgar monster, Facebook has become an integral and very efficient component of my social life. I will be highly annoyed if the block on it is not removed by the time I return to the Red Dragon in September.

Since leaving China and its whole universe behind, I've been on a whistlestop tour through my past, taking advantage of my generous ten week holiday. I haven't done much in the way of actually resting, apart from in the past few days on a remote beach in Croatia. Instead, nostalgia has taken me back to Kuwait, to a school reunion in Cambridge and to Slovakia, where I've been reconnecting with my old world.

Today I'm in Munich and will go on a 'Third Reich Tour'. There seem to be many such trips on offer, and I wonder what percentage of the takers are fellow Brits, whose fascination for the Nazis is legendary (it seems we need an 'other' against which to define ourselves as much as the next nation). Then to Ludwig II's castle, I think, Berchtesgarden at the weekend, and on Monday six hours in Heidelburg before travelling to the absurdly located Frankfurt Hahn airport and on to Bristol, via Stansted, to spend some time with my very good friend Lee, a month before he gets married.

My summer gradually comes into shape as the possibilities for what I can do with it recede as its length ahead of me shrinks. Still, it's very nice to have had, and to still have, such a lot of time in which to do 'nothing' (whatever that means).

If Love Could Save The World

2009-06-12T16:57:00.001+03:00

Romantic love’s central limitation is its exclusiveness. By it not more than one person can be loved. Therefore, its nature is essentially centripetal and restrictive. It does not open itself to the stars, to the beyond and, more particularly, to other people. Not by romantic love, to be sure, is the world to be saved. And not in terms of romantic love did Jesus enjoin the virtues of love upon us. One cannot, perhaps, be so sure about John Lennon. When he said: ‘all you need is love’, he stood triumphantly beside Yoko.

That said, if in loving one's lover one recognizes that they are not merely one's lover but another human being like any other (who can deny this?), one can recognize that when one loves ones lover, ultimately, one is not loving them but through them humanity itself, in its entirety, expansively.

In this way they become a gate, a portal, though which the love of others can be realized.

In so far as romantic love is not such a love, I am wondering, how can it be considered the highest type of love?

Another drawback of romantic love is that it is often a love of one person’s ego for another's, not the love of one true self for another. Hence romntic love's conditionality and frailty. Too often we love one another in defiance of Kant’s imperative: as means not as ends, as organic commodities to serve our purposes, only for as long as we do.

Still, you don’t have to remind me that without romantic love, love can be a somewhat disembodied, bloodless affair.

A question: What kind of an understanding of love would there have to be if love were to become an item in political discourse? Not sure, but I suspect love would first have to lose its highly privatized, embarrassing nature (when grafted into the public sphere that is).

This reltes to how talk of a generalized, extra-romantic love in the context of a divine framework had always worked, at least when it did. Here, we love through the medium of a third entity, which removes the pressure, and supplies a shared point of reference and trans-individual framework. In loving one another we are loving more than one another; and this both allays our disappointments with one another and allows us to look beyond.

Memento Mori

2009-05-19T13:45:00.002+03:00

Thinking about my death rubs me up against the limits of language. I cannot stretch beyond these limits in thinking about my death. While it is true, if reincarnation be factual, that ‘I’ may have died before, if I did I did not do so as the creature that I am now but only as a different creature.

Nothing is more certain than that I will die. I may not die, of course, just as the sun may not rise tomorrow. Yet, my immortality in this flesh and the sun not rising tomorrow will only happen if unprecedented alterations in the nature of reality occur. These cannot with any confidence be expected. For this reason, sanity dictates – in so far as certainty can mean anything – that I will die and that the sun will rise tomorrow.

In dying I will return to the state of non-existence I occupied before I was conceived, or at least before I was born. Non-existence, therefore, is not unfamiliar to me. But there is a difference, surely, between non-existence preceding and non-existence succeeding my existence as this creature that I am. That difference, however, is only of significance to me and to those who have known me. To the universe as a whole, both these states of non-existence are identical. In both these circumstances, my interactions with the universe – my taking from it, in oxygen, in food, in impressions, my giving to it, in exhalations, in excreta, in activities - do not occur. From its perspective, in both scenarios, my non-existence before and after my life, I constitute an absence. I constituted such an absence before I was born (or conceived) and such an absence I will again constitute after I die.

The universe does not depend upon me. It has its own agenda, its own business to attend to. I became a part of that business in the early 70s and one day, be it tomorrow, next year or decades from now, I will stop being its business, except insofar as I may leave behind trace afterglows in the memories of those who have known me or, perhaps (ha!) in something objective and enduring that I might create (for example, a child, or else some other feat of noteworthy creativity – I make no promises).

It is uncanny to think about my own death. Uncanny because all I have ever known is life. Moreover, it has always been as someone who is alive that I have known anything at all. Therefore with regard both to the object and the subject of knowledge my knowledge on all sides has been enveloped by life. While it is true that I am aware of death, having seen dead animals and indeed lost to death people I have known and loved, this death that I have known has nevertheless been a feature of life, my life; this death has represented the boundary of life, its limit, or rather this death has constituted a doorway to death, behind which death is unknowably located, to which it merely refers. Death, the death of others that is known in life, is not death, but death’s signature written in life. The only way, even potentially, to know death is to oneself die. And yet, if it be true that there is no awareness after death, no existence of any kind, this death even then will not be known since I will not be anyone to know it.

If, on the other hand, there is something for me on the other side of death I will indeed have come to know death, but only as a portal to a new life. Even then I will not know death as we envisage knowing it, as an end, but only as a beginning. And then it remains to ask: What kind of life will this be? It will not be life in any sense that I have known it. I will be very different, if for no other reason than that I will no longer wear this body, which witnesses will see buried in the Earth or more likely turned into ash; this body which I have always worn; no, more than that, which I have always been. And beyond this, I will no longer be the being-in-this-world that I have always been – embedded in multifarious relations with other embodied beings, human and animal, traversed around by innumerable, very uniquely specific and unrepeatable spatio-temporal associations and interactive contacts with the Earth.

The inescapable strangeness and otherness of death is the central fact about death. We deny this strangeness when we say ‘death is a part of life’. Yet, of course, at the same time to say this about death is true, since, as far as we know, every being that has ever lived has died, and every being now alive will die. But that commonplace typicality, that universality, of death makes death not less strange but more strange. For normally, what is strange is also rare; but death is not rare, not at all but is as common as life. Death, then, represents the intimate, necessary marriage of life with the strange, the uncanny. For about death, as an experience, we can know nothing; yet that ineffability is the destiny of us all. Encircled by the strange as life’s limit, heading towards the strange ourselves, we are indeed strange.

Is this why we fear death? Because we fear the strange?

I’ll let you know about death when I die, if I can. But I make no promises.

Ten Ways For Women To Keep Their Gentleman Happy

2009-05-10T16:55:00.000+03:00

This is the kind of headline one would never find on my Yahoo homepage. Although, if one reverses the genders, it is precisely what I found this evening. And that kind of thing is not rare at all: advice men must receive about how they should improve themselves for women. Sexist? Not at all. Why would it be that? How can women criticizing men ever be sexist?

Anyway, it’s an interesting question. And for the sake of equality – whatever that means- one might as well ask it. How then can women keep us men happy? After all, it’s hardly a sexist question, is it?

What We Are

2009-04-11T01:53:00.002+03:00

That which we are most fundamentally within ourselves is not our ego. Yet that which we are most fundamentally within ourselves is not the ‘they’ either.

To my understanding, Heidegger, in rallying people to be authentic by shunning the impersonal ‘they’ of an unchosen, prescribed social conformity, was not, alas, asking us to get in touch with what we are most fundamentally within ourselves. Instead, he was asking us to identify closely and loyally with our ego, that is, with the ‘idea we can choose to have of ourselves’. For this reason, his existentialism created a new problem as it solved another. It solved the problem of inauthentic conformity to ‘essential’ forms of social existence. Yet, in the wake of that solution it ossified our being into a new, rigid straightjacket – identification with the self-chosen ego.

That which we are most fundamentally within ourselves is neither the inauthentic they, nor the authentic ego, but embodied spirit. Or to put it more simply: God found present within and, as it might seem, trapped inside our being. It is not only society, with all its conventions, that is our gaoler. We are our own gaolers too. To be truly free is to have freed God from within ourselves. To do this we must not only free ourselves from inauthentic conformity to externally imposed social roles; we must free ourselves from ourselves, that is, from the very idea, however authentically chosen it may be, that we have about ourselves – about who we think we are.

Such a freedom is a kind of death; such a freedom a kind of resurrection.

And with that I wish you a very Happy Easter.

p.s. there is no Easter in China.

A Beautiful Dream - to me

2009-04-03T02:24:00.003+03:00

My family are staying at my paternal grandfather’s house. He is still alive, though he died in 1977. My Dad is still alive, though he died in 2006. My mother, brother, sisters and I, and other cousins, are there for someone else’s funeral, though I don’t know who. I think perhaps my paternal grandmother, who died in 1992. Grandad talks to me for a short while – tall, thin and in a suit. This is weird only because I don't think I ever talked to him at all, so I wonder how my brain pieced together a personality, and how accurate it is. Later, we all go to bed. Dad doesn’t want to talk to his father, but my mother asks him to, ‘this time’. As grandad comes towards us, we clear the way to make this possible. He embraces my dad, who begins weeping as he stares up into his eyes, while my grandad smiles down at him reassuringly. This meeting happens on the stairs, and I am directly beneath them. I can’t see this encounter clearly, though my sister can, who is closer. I move round the stairs to try and get a better view, but wake up. I tell myself this dream would not be forgotten but I got up and wrote this anyway.

Saturday Morning

2009-03-27T23:42:00.009+03:00

I don't really have anything to say. But here I am back at my desk, late, very late on a saturday morning. And so it remains. The whole idea that one should have 'something to say' itself says a lot about the kind of world we live in - how cerebrally demanding it is.

I am under 100kg for the first time since 2006. I plan to get down to 90. I have not embodied such a stature since my early twenties. Obviously, I am supposing this may make me more attractive to the Daughters of Eve (or even Lilith?); but believe me, such vain fantasies are not the only consolation. With the same muscle bulk, carrying about 10kg less weight - which I've lost in the past two months - means something. Try it. Pick up a 10 kg bag, strap it to your shoudlders. Tell me laying it aside it means nothing.

And behold....suddenly I discover: once again I possess a jawline. And when I wake up in the morning, I have a rib cage, not just blubber upon my midriff.

The secret? I don't eat rice, noodles, potatoes or bread unless I have to. Dr Atkins etc. My exercise regime has not noticeably advanced at all, despite my tribal dance adventures in Thailand, nor do I drink any less beer than ever. I make no promises for the future but this circumstance feels nice. Should I post a photo if I reach 90kg?

People lose weight and they put it on again, blah blah. God, how the world is filled with blah blahs.

What is Love?

2009-03-03T10:55:00.011+03:00

Love is a fairly hopeless word. It has such a wide array of meanings, perhaps we should drop it.

Love of parents, love of dogs, love of friends, love of frogs; love of sport, love of God, love of art, love of tarts (of whatever kind). The list goes on. In each love very different emotional syzygies occur between lover and the beloved; while in their wake, different behaviours and expectations ensue.

The elasticity and capaciousness of love's meaning is clear. Yet, despite this, even though we know this, if you say that you have 'found love', people will not infer that you have activated a greater esteem for your parents or discovered that you adore dogs. If you say you are 'looking for love', similarly, they won't suppose you really wished you could find football as engaging as your friends do, or that you seek to pierce the veils of maya and behold the irradiance of the uncreated one.

Rather, they will think that you have found, or are looking for, a romantic partner, or, as it might be said, a 'lover'.

This is all well and good. But what annoys me is the downgraded, second place status then accorded to the other types of love.

And given that romantic love is shot through with conditionality and frailty, that its tenure is never guaranteed, that its machinations, if negative and implosive, can rip out your heart and turn you into a vegetable, it is perhaps to be wondered whether this form of love deserves its exalted status.

I know what will be said – that without the sour you can not appreciate the sweet*, that the singular sweetness of romantic love means that this love surpasses all others.

Fair enough, the second of these points feels like it could be true (though try saying that to a mystic!). But I wonder: is this the case only because of the context romantic love occupies in the world? The public world of typical social interaction, after all, is evidently not an environment of love. From it we can get little, if any, love. This means that most, if not all, of our needs for love, for self-exposure, undefended vulnerability and mergence with the 'other', are placed upon the shoulders of romantic love. This gives it a tremendous significance as an oasis in a desert, a haven in the hailstorm of the world. So when it graces us, it feels like we have been enfolded by the arms, and into the breast, of God.

I am not, I hope, stupid enough not to recognise that I might only display this sceptical and cynical attitude towards romantic love because I haven't had an entirely happy time with it myself. I can admit that. But whether this, for that reason alone, invalidates my reflections about it, I'm not sure.

In any case, it seems to me that romantic love is the religion of the modern world; and the questioning of its overwhelming dominance in the world of 'love' a rare heresy indeed.

NB I should add - in case anyone's interested (though I can only presume they aren't) - that the above does not mean that I am not interested in the successful pursuit of romantic love; even less, that I am now 'celibate' in my stance. I say what I say, not more than it.

* Taken from 'Vanilla Sky' in the context of Brian's (Jason Lee's) assurance to David (Tom Cruise) that he would never experience the true value and sweetness of love unless he were first to suffer from it. Presumably, because, otherwise, in the absence of duality, he wouldn't know how to appreciate it.

Thailand - Bangkok

2009-02-22T15:50:00.008+03:00

Alas my gorgeous and enthralling holiday in South East Asia has come to a close.

The 26 day journey broke down into four parts, corresponding to the four areas I visited: Bangkok, Jomtien, North Western Thailand, and Luang Prabang in Laos.

My first destination in Bangkok was the Khao San road, near to which I stayed with my friend from China for a few days. This is the main backpacker area of Bangkok. Made even more famous and commercial by the 1997 film ‘The Beach’, a film that itself complained about how famous and commercial it had become (!), my first impressions were pretty negative. Too many westerners, too much vanity, too much neon-lit, noisy superficiality masking emptiness within. No, things did not start well.

But then very quickly I calmed down. As I let my ego’s neurotic preoccupations with Ningbo wash away, helped in this transmutation by Tolle’s masterful words, I came to appreciate the vibrancy and youthful energy, the beautiful, approachable women, the abundance of bars, nightclubs and intriguing shops, the constant invitations to be massaged (though I never was), the general congregation of souls eager to have fun and escape beneath the endless, not (yet) too fierce sun.

Many of the young backpackers are just passing through, coming from the beaches to the south or the hills to the north. Or perhaps they’re on their way to Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam, or have arrived from there, if they haven’t just flown in from the West, or come to the end of their journey and returning home.

As for the Western men who seem to be less temporarily established, many, be they young or middle aged, are accompanied by Thai women. If you suspect some of these couples had met here, after a less than extensive, relatively undemanding courtship process, you might not be entirely mistaken. As you may know, it seems there is an elaborate industry in Thailand, of varying degrees of organization and explicitness, devoted to the pairing up of western men (farangs) and Thai ladies, ladies eager to make money, often much more than they could doing anything else, often with the intention of sending much of it home to their parents in the countryside (more of this perhaps later, in a separate post).

As I wrote earlier, my early days were principally spent dancing, a time during which, because of these exertions, and despite the amount of beer I drank, I quickly began to lose weight. In this thinning out process, however, (I am now 5kg lighter than I was when I left China) I was further helped by the tendency of Thai restaurants to serve fairly small portions, a practice, alas, not pursued by Chinese restauranteurs, who presumably want to fully exploit my greedy and ravenous appetite.

Four late nights of dancing in a row, combined with inadequate sleep, conspired, alas, to make my trip to Bangkok less the tour of its cultural richnesses than it might have been. Since I had such a good time, however, I didn’t let my guilt get the better of me. That said, my decadence had its limits. I managed to get to see Luang Pho, the gold plated 32 metre high standing Buddha, and to meditate awhile, lusciously, in the adjacent temple of Wat Intharawihan.

Later I took the ferry boat down the Mae Nam Cho Phraya river to Taksim, strolled around Thammasat University and relaxed and read a book, as instructed by my friend that I should, in Lumphini park. I also avoided the crime of all crimes against Thai culture – not to visit the Wat Phra Kaew and Grand Palace complex. The King used to live here before he moved north to Dusit Palace. Interestingly, as I discovered, the innermost recesses of this Palace, inaccessible to tourists, are now occupied by a finishing school for high class Thai women.

Regarding the King, you may have heard about the recent release from prison of the Australian writer, Harry Nicolaides, who, before the intervention of his Government, had been sentenced to prison for three years for insulting the King and the Crown Prince in his 2005 book Versimilitude.

Insulting the King is not a good idea. Only in Syria have I seen pictures of a country’s ruler more prevalently on display. Yet, wheareas there, I could never tell how authentic the regard was in which he was held by the people, in Thailand reverence and affection for their Head of State runs deep. Being as he is semi-divine, it is not unusual to see beggars bowing in supplication before his image. More generally, Thai money, all of which carries the King’s image, is handled with deference.

That said, like Britain’s, Thailand’s monarchy is constitutional, having become so in 1932, and the polity itself democratic. Whether or not the King’s exclusion from matters of political decision making (or relative exclusion should we say) helps or is irrelevant to the esteem in which he is held by the people, is an interesting question. I don’t know the answer, but would suspect that, just as in Britain, the Monarch standing above the political fray works to his advantage, it not requiring him to be associated with the crossfire of profane ideological dispute. Perhaps it’s the case that monarchies can’t have it both ways. They can either be political, in which case they must curtail democracy, or else they can sanction democratic political expression, in which case they must exclude themselves from politics. To have a King or Queen who is both a political player in a democratic context and the recipient of sufficient esteem such as to be more than a mere president, seems unlikely, if not oxymoronic. Perhaps it could only work in a polity resembling the court of Arthurian romance; in which all decision makers are united in bonds of shared allegiance and devotion under the Monarch to some enchanted, overarching principle or ideal, yet free to think and dissent as they see fit in practical matters; the Monarch acting as final source and focus for synthesis, not the supplier but the final focus for the crystallisation and articulation of acceptable compromise.

Ask Johnny Rotten, but there's no doubt our attitude to the acceptability of insulting our Queen is not Thai. Speaking as a monarchist, do I mind? Actually no, I don’t. Indeed I’m glad we have the freedom to criticise such an innocuous and evidently laudable character if we are so eccentrically persuaded; someone who, at the very least, can hardly be imagined to be doing what a de-politicised Head of State is expected to do any worse than a secular president might; and probably a whole lot better, and with a far more genuine smile, besides. But anyway, Mr Lydon has always been something of an exception. Most British republicans attack the monarchy, not the Queen herself. Only in 1997 in the surreal wake of Diana’s death did the tacit universality of British respect, if not love, for Elizabeth II meet a genuine, if ephemeral, challenge. But overall, as it’s a cliché to say, the monarchy’s not going anywhere until she dies. And the fact that we are free to demean her, yet to such a great extent do not, speaks volumes. It will be interesting indeed to take a measure of our feelings for this mysterious individual, who cleverly never gives interviews and keeps her opinions to herself, on the sad day when she passes away.

But returning in my thoughts to Bangkok, I left with a definite sense that I had not plumbed the depths of this ‘City of Angels’. There’s no doubt I’ll need to come back one day. But time was short, and the beaches, or rather a beach, was calling me, as were the hills to the north.

A Younger Man

2009-02-16T18:05:00.011+03:00

I have been looking over my young writings again and uploaded an entry for the year 1989.

I make no claims for their value. That is not a judgement I can make. Whether or not I say this only because of the delight and comfort I gain from gazing into mirror images of my youth, I’m not sure, but anyway. To be certain I feel attached to them, almost protective, perhaps because they meant so much to me at the time. Back then, what was most real and honest about myself was funnelled into them in a way it never could be anywhere or to anyone else.

If it weren’t for the fact that internet space is free and endless (apparently?), that it will cost you nothing to read them except time - which may or may not be precious to you - I wouldn’t presume to burden you with them.

As I read them now, it’s clear they are the writings of a much younger man. The buoyant and restless, unselfconscious and ‘adolescent’ flavour of this 18 year old makes me, a 37 year old, laugh. I wouldn’t write such things now, even if I were to experience similar emotions or think similar thoughts. I can remember being this young man of course, but I couldn’t, despite that, be him again, if you see what I mean.

I think one of the points about 'growing up' is you become more sophisticated; you pay more attention to how your words will inevitably fit into the world of readers and other minds - even if you're only intending to write for yourself. You become therefore in a sense more self-conscious, as you become more sensitive to how your words will be received. There’s less of that sense of standing alone on a mountaintop, declaring and declaiming to the void in passionate, epic authenticity (or presumed authenticity, should we say). Or it could just be that as we age life becomes less fresh, as what happens to us becomes less new, but tends instead to repeat itself and so become less vivid; such that when we write this change is reflected in the greater serenity, or is it distance, of our style.

Anyway, I have no desire to patronise my younger self. He wouldn’t have liked it at the time so why do it now? Besides, the years 18-21 are the efflorescence of the rose of youth. They are our most idealistic years, and for that precious. For that they can be permitted their tones of extremity, if not indeed celebrated for them. I suppose?

Personally, I feel my best early writings (or at least those which I'm most fond of) were written not in 1989 but from 1990 to 1992. I hope to work on entries for those years too and on later ones as well, though I wrote very little between 1998 and 2005. Most of the writing is prose though some might be called 'prose/poetry' (the actual distinguishing characteristics of poetry remain, as it happens, rather unclear to me).

It may very well be wondered why I bother to do this. I cannot expect anyone will like them or appreciate them, but who knows? I ultimately do this for myself, or rather, to be more accurate, for the sake of the writings, since to such a great extent I'm no longer the person who wrote them. At the time of their composition it felt like they were the most important thing in my life, more real and important to me, indeed, than I was to myself. I showed them to nobody except Lee. I accept this was partially becasue I didnt want them to be criticised, given their role in my life. I was also, no doubt, driven by simple shyness, as well as by a lack of confidence about their worth. That said, I always sensed there was something in them that wanted to see the light of day. So now I'm glad I give them that opportunity.

Either/Or?

2009-02-12T16:18:00.005+03:00

Eckhart Tolle’s core teaching, as I understand it, is that we are trapped in our minds. As such we live predominantly in memories of the past and in projections of the future. By doing so, we live in exile from ourselves, since it is only in the present, in the Now as he calls it, that we can connect with and find that richness and peace which is our true nature.

I believe that Tolle’s particular perspective and approach is significantly novel and that it is particularly well suited to the Western mindset. Neverthess, in general, of course, his overall message is not unique. As I have been told here in Thailand by those with whom I have discussed his ideas, to a great extent his message echoes the teachings of Buddhism and other Eastern perspectives which in their own ways also seek to liberate us from the grasping, desire-fuelled tendencies of our ‘egos’ or lower selves, as it were. These Buddhist teachings hope to lead us to an Enlightened state in which we can rest, in full awareness and mindfulness, freed from suffering, no longer the victims of our internal, automatic reactions to external events and our own emotional states.

Central to this similarity is a shared emphasis that both Tolle and the Buddhists place upon the importance of the inner or esoteric life of the individual, as opposed to his purely external actions and behaviours.

And what I find myself particularly interested in is how this focus on the interior life of the individual contrasts with the very different priority given to man’s external life by the three major, monotheistic religions that might be called ‘Abrahamic’. I speak, of course, of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Leaving aside the fact that esoteric, inwardly directed teachings can be found in each of these religions, for example in Kabbalism, in various forms of Christian heresy and in Sufism, it seems fair to say that each of these religions, in their mainstream expressions, are either suspicious of or explicitly hostile towards that kind of an emphasis on the interior, spiritual life of the individual that is the hallmark both of ‘New Ageist’ spirituality, to which Eckhart Tolle gives a contemporary expression and the various spiritualities of the Orient.

Why should this have been? Why are these three monotheistic creeds so predominantly externally focused, so centrally concerned not with the individual’s inner life and his quest for authenticity therein, but rather with what might be called humanity’s macrocosmic quest for meaning, truth and redemption at the level of community? In each of these religions what is most important is obedience to externally originated codes of morality or belief allied to a strong imperative to sacrifice the ‘self’. Far from a journey within, what is counselled is that we be somewhat skeptical and suspicious towards the virtue and value of our inner, personal realities.

I realise that I am simplifying the picture a great deal, that I may be laying myself open to be reminded of exceptions to these generalisations in both spheres – in the Western or Abrahamic and in The Eastern (including the New Age).

Nevertheless, in general terms the distinction seems real enough. Why for example in the West is prayer advocated far more than meditation. Moreover, why in the West is such a premium placed on the need to find ‘forgiveness’? Both these elements belong to an orientation that is externally directed. We are praying to a God who is outside ourselves, not inside, and our need for forgiveness implies that the most important centre of value in our lives, that which we find ourselves so easily offending, is external – be it other people or God.

At this point I feel that I am expected to make a decision and a choice….either for the Eastern or for the Western path. Without doubt liberal fashion and the spirit of the 21st century zeitgeist conspire to make me feel that I should join the chorus of denunciations of all things Abrahamic. That I should plump for the luxuries of the non-judgemental, individually anchored, Eastern glow. For sure, I must grant, I am very sympathetic to its appeal. And yet, and yet I hesitate. In the way I have always found myself hesitating when I have immersed myself in Buddhism and the New Age. The question, put simply, when I consider the East is this: What has happened to God? And after that, another question: What has happened to History?

More of that perhaps later, but sufficient now to recall some of the purported words of Yehoshua Bar Joseph (aka Jesus Christ) from the heretical, but for that far from uninteresting ‘Gospel of Thomas’:

“If those who guide your being say to you:
“Behold the Kingdom is in the heaven,”
then the birds of the sky will precede you;
if they say to you: “ It is in the sea”,
then the fish will precede you.
But the Kingdom is in your center
and is about you.” (my italics)

While his overall drift might seem to be uncomplicatedly New Age, the last line gives us cause for thought. It reminds us, or me at least, of balance. That the external matters as well as the internal, the outside of the cup in addition to the inside (despite the reverse, corrective emphasis Jesus makes elsewhere with the Pharisees), and that for all that might be sung in praises to the richnesses of our individual, internal universes, we remain not islands but inescapably bound up in community in an external world that endures despite us; a world that should remind us that inwardness can only go so far before it topples over embarrassingly, if not dangerously, into narcissism and solipsism, twin aliments and afflictions of our times.

NB, I should add here, in the light of a comment on this piece that I am not implying that narcissism and solipsism are inevitable, necessary consequences of the eastern, inwardly directed, meditative path. Indeed, I accept that correctly practised, these disciplines do lead us to take the external world seriously (albeit not in the way understood in the Abrahamic paradigm). My point, rather, is that our Western culture is already narcissistic and solipsistic to varying degrees, sometimes extremely, and that what we require for that is an external corrective; something which I do not see coming from the East. Moreover, I suspect that many are attracted to a version of Eastern teaching that they have watered down and altered through an interpretive filter that allows them to continue to sit a shade too smugly, perhaps, in their self-revolving orientations. That's all. Surely it is not only me, for example, who has looked on, more than a little sceptically, at the ease with which some New Age teachings so often work to soothe, if not entirely eradicate, the societal consciences of rich people who might perhaps want to think a little more critically and imaginatively about their attitude to wealth?

Does Money Exist?

2009-02-04T16:14:00.007+03:00

"If money actually existed", the old man said, "I might be persuaded to take it more seriously."

Actually, it wasn't an old man who said this, it was me.

Unless 37 counts as old, which I suppose it does.

Obviously, the non-existence of a thing doesn't prevent it from possessing great significance and importance in people's lives. After all, many (Hitchens and Dawkins, for example) will accept that God continues to be a highly relevant factor in society, despite, apparently, no longer existing.

But my question is: Will they also accept this about money, which also lacks either an organic or an inorganic base, and is just a thought we share. I suspect they will find this more difficult, the non-existence of money being harder to swallow, given its obvious and seemingly inescapable role in our lives (yawn).

We are indeed prisoners of thought, formerly of a caricature image of a tedious guy in the sky, presently of money, which has even less personality.

A Smiling Land

2009-02-02T18:33:00.009+03:00

On occasions I've felt, during my current visit to Thailand, that I should have been posting blogs. The urge to compose in the early days (I've now been here for 15 ) saw me saving messages in the archive section of my phone, with a vague view to writing them up here. These were primarily written while drunk in various nightclubs off the Koa San Road, where I also rediscovered my enthusiasm for tribal dance music and the associated effects it can have on my body in the form of dance.

Believe it or not, on more than two occasions I have received compliments from strangers regarding my choreographic choices. One guy seemed to think I was a 'dancer', by which I suppose he meant some kind of professional; though I liked it even more when he said that 'the women liked' my 'act'. I cannot deny it, such external validation is much appreciated, though it is not (thank God) the reason I like dancing. After all, I am not used to receiving it.

Pretentious is how I'll seem, I suspect, if I start attempting to address why I like dancing and what it means to me, so perhaps silence is wise.

Besides very late nights, a lot of energetic dancing, little sleep, constant tiredness, and multitudinous thoughts and feelings about women, my early Thai days featured the enlightening discovery of the great book by Eckhart Tolle, "The Power of Now". It says timelessly true things which, when read, seemed familiar and irrefutable. And yet, before they were read, before I had bought the book, these insights had been forgotten; in their absence I had indeed sunk beneath and been obscured by the weight and dross of my everyday Ningbo life. It was nice, it is nice, as always, to be liberated from the prison of thought and of mind by the rememberance that, despite pressures conspiring to persuade otherwise, we are not thought, no more than we are mind. I think I knew this with a greater, easier certainty as a four year old.

For sure, if we do not control and dominate our minds (correctly), and keep them in their place, we will be controlled and dominated by them, and lose ourselves by becoming their slaves.

Unfortunately, I will presumably have to return to an ordinary life of ordinary drudgery....in a little more than a week. If this is not a crime against humanity, what is it?

Differences

2009-01-01T13:28:00.002+03:00

When I think about the character of China I struggle. This surely is not only because I do not know the language. I sense that it is a different world, not just a different part of the world. Despite the obvious, profound differences between Islam and the West; despite, moreover, the increased personal freedoms here in China - with respect to personal matters such as alcohol and relationships – I do feel that China is more exotic and strange to me than was Kuwait.

Beyond Opposition

2009-01-01T13:05:00.004+03:00

The situation in the Fertile Crescent polarizes opinion. People are pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli. Being pro-both seems unconvincing.

Who was it who said that the test of a position is that it convince? Someone did, I’m sure. Was he right?

2009

2009-01-01T12:58:00.002+03:00

The ability to control one’s own mind is peace.

I hope your new years are happy.

Reflections II

2008-11-19T11:13:00.003+03:00

One of the unanswered theological questions is why God has so regularly been depicted as opposed to the sexual instincts.

Shedding presuppositions about God, one could, after all, just as readily imagine the character of a deity to be in favour of people having sex for reasons of love and joy – not merely for procreation – as one can presently imagine that he is a stern puritanical killjoy, passionately poised in opposition to ‘meaningless’ sexual delight.

An interesting thing to know would be how many atheists would not be atheists; how many in fact would at least be agnostics, if they were to be informed that, actually, God rather likes sex, and likes humans having it too.

Not, of course, that I wish to speak for God (presuming he exists, of course) regarding what he actually thinks about sex, and what we should do regarding it. But I am aware that at least a certain degree of anti-theism is motivated by contempt for received understandings of God’s anti-sexual stance. And one doesn’t have to be particularly intelligent, I hope, to realize that you cannot with much success argue the non-existence of something just because you dislike certain of its purported characteristics.

Not that this in-itself means that God exists, of course.

Personally, in my Universe, there’d be both God and Sex, and everything would be joyful. While I have time for the dialectic, I prefer it to operate within an ambience of love.

Reflections I

2008-11-19T11:07:00.004+03:00

Without the background of eternity as anchor and hope
Conversations will necessarily restrict themselves to the concrete and the superficial.

Even if God does not exist, our dismissal of a useful illusion has nevertheless deprived our lives of an irreplaceable quality of richness aand depth.

A White House

2008-11-12T14:00:00.005+03:00

This unChinese-looking building is where I work. Not quite the white house that removal vans will shortly be servicing but a white house nonetheless. Except that I don’t sleep here. I sleep in the small pinkish building off to the left which, believe it or not, is a hotel.

You can’t see the window of my office. I’m on the other side of the building. You can’t swim in the lake, or even take boats out upon it. Or perhaps you can, but it might be thought odd if you did. Anyway, it’s now getting rather chilly for that kind of thing.

Actually, a few more buildings have emerged since this photo was taken. Suffice it to say they are not of fascinating design.

The New World

2008-11-07T10:51:00.004+03:00

According to many the future is Chinese. If this is the case we have the following idiosyncracies to look forward to:

Warm drinking water. The failure of mineral water machines to cool drinking water to beneath room temperature is apparently not a lazy oversight. It is deliberate policy reflecting medicinal folk wisdom.

No bars, except for western outposts. Alcohol is available and presumably drunk by the locals. But don’t expect much evidence. One or two beers might be stretched to.

Cinemas without schedules. You can find out what’s showing, and at what time, only on the day in question, so you won’t be able to plan ahead. If you don't have the phonenumber or can't speak Chinese you might just have to turn up and hope for the best. It worked out alright for Bond, but luckily I had the whole afternoon off. Oh, and there's no salted popcorn.

Doting waitresses. In restaurants, waitresses stand to attention beside you waiting for you to make up your mind. Try not to feel pressurized. They would think it rude to leave. That said, more than once I felt their impatience and wondered if they might have better things to do.

Paranoid taxi drivers. Some companies must have had some very bad experiences. Their drivers sit behind fortified barriers, insulating them even from the front passenger seat. Taxis are also more expensive in China if you call for them than if you risk death trying to hail them down.

Ultra keen builders. Thankfully, they don’t work through the night, but fear not; the onward march of culturally destructive, growth fuelled construction will wake you up if your alarm clock fails.

Ebikes. No doubt these will take off in the West but they’re already raging here, albeit silently. According to a female Chinese friend, however, they are not for men and would make me look ‘unattractive’. I might consider getting a car only none of the other expats drive, which perhaps says something. You have to pass a written test too (in English?)

No salt. I’m told this lack of the vital table condiment is a regional variation not reflected in all provinces. Anyway, it’s best to learn what the word for salt is (yan, but not pronounced like that ). If you mime the action of salt sprinkling or shaking over your dish, which you might reasonably think would do the trick, don’t hold your breath. It may bring you only giggles, bewilderment, or possibly panic from the waiting staff; and no salt.

Sweep Down

2008-10-30T12:40:00.003+03:00

Sweep down gentle force to free us
Sweep down the kindling fire

Voices again speak to voices of substance
Ears hearing sounds of depth

Flesh singing to flesh of flesh restored in vividness
Eyes mingling with eyes at rest.

Co-optation

2008-10-22T15:56:00.008+03:00

More about China soon, but in the meantime a reflection that occured to me. That:

Writing about sex can be a perilous business. For centuries, sex occupied only subversive and maligned positions in human discourse. As a result, forms of thought about it and the language used to express them are today only uncomfortably deployed, with uncertainty and self-consciousness. Not having a mainstream literary canon going back to antiquity, focused on this subject, to lean on in our thinking, we cannot draw upon generations and generations, centuries upon centuries of unashamed, analytically serious thought and reflection about this vital, central aspect of our lives. Stranded by history, word is placed against word with little precedent, with few voices to guide. Meanwhile, many, often with guitar in hand, think this is just how things should be – that we should remain silent, shun our mind forged manacles, yield up the logos to Venus’ ineffable, oceanic vastnesses.

It is not that sex, as Larkin suggests, did not exist before 1963. It’s that beforehand, or thereabouts, it was not spoken of in public in the open, unselfconscious ways it has been since. Its subterranean nature was a fixed feature of its place in society. Obviously, sex was something you could do - provided you did it in the right way, with the right person. Indeed, even if you didn’t like it, it was something you had to do, provided you were not an ascetic, so the human race wouldn’t die out or at least so you wouldn’t scandalise your parents. But in any case, if you spoke about it at all you did so with reluctance. Or if, on the contrary, you spoke about it enthusiastically, with the concerted desire to shock, you rested on the laurels of a goldmine, knowing that to shock couldn’t be easier. Generally, you knew fields were explored not fit for Grandmother; fields banished from innocence and ease.

To an extent, this sheepishness endures, remaining a potential source for embarrassment and humour amongst the more reserved. But today the chuckles gurgling around prudishness, so easily aroused even into the 70s, grow ever more diminished, harder to generate, increasingly anachronistic, as the prudish themselves decrease, or retire to the pavilion.

Given this liberation, one would have thought writing about sex couldn’t be easier. Yet I wonder whether this supposition rests on the assumption that all that one might have to say about it is that that we should not be shy about our instinctive desires. If one wants to say anything else, new forms of restriction arise, forms of inhibition emanating not from the forces of reaction, but ironically from the forces of liberation that had supposed it was only traditional perspectives that could put a muzzle on proceedings.

Today, the effort to gaze too deeply into the enigma that is sex can raise suspicions. Indeed, the very notion that it is an enigma at all might be very strenuously rejected. It might be supposed that nothing is more natural, familiar and straightforward; moreover, that anyone claiming that sex is enigmatic necessarily must hail from the reactionary camp. That he must be wanting to re-impose a veneer of mystery and lofty spirituality over its friendly simplicity in order to put it back behind its walls, so as to refortify or resuscitate some traditional morality perceived to depend upon it’s exile from public discourse.

Being caught between the rock of traditional moral perspectives on the one hand and the hard place of modernity’s often mindless celebration of its achieved sexual liberations on the other, is not a comfortable place to be. Not if one wants just to think for oneself and approach the subject as one sees fit. Each side may put you down as dangerously close to the enemy encampment. The liberal camp might eye you with suspicion for the reasons mentioned above. It might also, patronizingly, think that while, curiously, not a conventional ‘sex denier’, you are actually a repressed person who just can’t face up to the fact. Someone who needs to get out more, see more action, realize the clear lesson that the only sex talk that really needs to happen is about how much you enjoy doing this or that with him or her. While the traditionalist camp might sniff in the aura of your words, particularly your lack of moral certainties and judgementalism, suggestions of that same old permissive drift of doom that justified Sodom and Gomorrah.

In this then, as in so many other fields, the game of discourse has been rigged beforehand. The pitch has been queered, as I like to say. The compartmentalizing knives of dualism and dichotomy, of the duty to be oppositional, to take sides in accustomed battle orders, to nail your colours to the mast, have been sharpened.

Which is why I say that writing about sex can be a perilous business. As co-opted as it has become by what are essentially politicized, grand interpretations of existence, it is a likely thing that you too will be co-opted and denied your space, denied your voice, eaten up as cattle fodder by the imperatives of somebody else’s narrative.

I am supposing that some may imagine that behind these words lurks an unspoken desire to confide something personal. If this is so, this confirms in-itself the tendency to co-optation and misinterpretation in these matters.

Although sex is not the weather, and means more to us than it, it remains interesting that we cannot easily talk about it as if it is were like the weather, and as innocent and unassuming; that we are often so aware that around it gather grand forces and energies of consequence that hook it into matrices of signification that belong elsewhere, and speak of our more general, fundamental orientations.

Some people I'd like to see again

2008-10-15T14:44:00.005+03:00

Facebook, Myspace and Friends Reunited have been good ways of finding, and being found by, people from my past. I’m glad I’ve reconnected with the shadows and ghosts that I have, restoring them to life. Moreover, there is no doubt that, in the wake of these new technologies, keeping in touch with them now will be easier than it used to be. The entropic forces tending to the dissolution of ties in the face of the demands of present and future are givens. They are not going to weaken. But against these, the possibilities for holding together, in however small a way, the shape of one’s narrative as it passes through the souls that one meets, have never been stronger.

That said, there a still several people I have not rediscovered, for whatever reason, and have lost touch with entirely. People who meant a great deal to me at the time that I knew them, who impressed themselves upon me with depth and vigour and resonance; and who, if I might be frank, I ‘miss’. I won't bore you with too long an inventory, but here are three. Obviously, I’d have included Jessica but I should only see her if she wants to see me, and I suspect she may be indifferent or opposed to the idea.

I have changed their names, but they will presumably recognize themselves in the unlikely event of their reading this. I met them all in my late teens and lost touch with them in my early 20s.

Joseph Brightman: We travelled across South America together in an Encounter Overland truck in 1990. Highly ebullient and bright – he was always keen to dispatch rapier words against transcendence and have a go at Christians (including my brother, the Reverend). If he hasn’t changed, I can imagine him salivating with glee over every shard of Dawkinsana. I believe he is some kind of barrister in London now. Though I can imagine him in one of those wigs, I would still like to actually see him in one. I wonder if he still talks really fast and laughs a lot. Despite his atheism, he had an epic sense of life as something intrinsically grand, which appealed to me greatly.

Frederick Davidson: ‘Best Friend’, if that’s not too childish a term for the sixth form and for the ‘gap year’. He had a crappy Ford Fiesta which we called the ‘Tin Machine’, and which he’d unsuccessfully push to destruction point on the M11 between Kentish Town and Cambridge. He wrote me supportive, witty letters when I was in South America, which I was grateful for. At school his ability to equal or beat me at essays despite doing next to no homework baffled and infuriated me in equal measure. Beyond his flagrant acuity, I have never met anyone whom I felt had such natural existential strength, and such a powerful will. I imagine him to be absurdly rich and thriving in the City, presumably unlevelled by recent events. The last I heard he and his brother were going to buy a yacht.

Andrea Stewart: Gorgeous, fiery, red-headed maiden I met on an Outward Bound Course in the Lake District in 1989. She liked my blue eyes, which I appreciated. She liked my letters too and once said I was ‘priceless’. Nothing ‘happened’ between us, as the vacuous cliché has it. I think she may, however, have been one of those whom I alienated in my mid twenties when I suddenly exploded into my ‘write your friends impossibly long and intense letters, why don’t you’ phase. The last I knew she was getting into head hunting. I wonder what her innate zeal and brilliance is getting her up to these days.

The World Financial System

2008-10-11T18:52:00.006+03:00

It would be interesting to know the percentage of the British population over the age of 15 that actually understands the media discourse raining down about the prevailing financial crisis.

One would have thought that if people do not understand it, that that in-itself is pretty strange. After all, what's happening threatens their real standards of living, as well as whatever policies they've devised to safeguard their futures.

Not, however, that I blame anyone for their ignorance, in so far as it exists. I only vaguely understand grand finance myself. Ok, I grasp the superficial elements, about what's been going on with greedy, blindly optimistic bankers and Governments encouraging debt; but beyond that, beneath that, it’s a bit of a shady blur.

The exact relationship between things like the availability of Credit, Inflation, Interest rates, Unemployment, House Prices, the Governmental budgetary status – in surplus or deficit, the Exchange Rate and the Balance of Payments, taken together, I’ve sometimes tricked myself into believing I might understand. But too often I realise, in awkward shudders of honesty, that I don’t, not really. That professional men of finance can themselves display divergent views on the macroeconomic shape of things, persuades me I might not be alone, that even they may be grasping at a few more straws than they realise.

When I listen to economists explain - businessmen, bankers, academics, or economic journalists - I thank them for their efforts; but I still wonder if I’m being lured towards a labyrinth, their labyrinth; a maze, a gated castle, festooned with lanes leading me from myself towards abstraction, towering above me in baroque inscrutability.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I can’t help finding economics more abstract, more shadowy, and less easily grasped than philosophy, than literature, than spirituality. The connections between the domain spoken of in economics and direct human experience have always seemed circuitous and tentative. Is this only because the arched persuasion of the mind intrinsic to business has never been mine? Or does my uncertainty partake of a larger, collective confusion?

Today, we hear much about the World Financial System. Surely the problem lies here. We speak of the dominant force in the world as a thing, a system, a matrix. What happened to the world as a concrete, physical place, where human and animals live together and share their experiences and productions in the brief time they have before they die?

It used to be thought a hostile and oppressive God, with a capacious beard, fiery eyes and an appalling sense of humour, stood between us and reality as a grim alienating phantom, dividing us from ourselves and from one another. But now, in our supposed wisdom, we have decided this God doesn’t exist and never did. While the theological significances of this discovery are dubious, since God’s true nature might be very different from this caricature, the irony that we have exchanged one form of alienation, one veil, one wall, for another, should not be missed.

The new phantom of the age is money, or rather the forms of divisive organization it exhibits, namely this World Financial system that we hear so much about, even over our cornflakes.

Regrettably, this time, for something better to replace it, simply denying its existence might not be enough. We might actually have to come up with an alternative.

Hushabye Mountain

2008-10-06T17:06:00.004+03:00

When I was young Christmas was delightful. A period of enchantment and mystic rapture. This was no less real just because I couldn’t conceptualise my luscious intimations.

Who needs words to access certain experiences? We need them only to communicate them, if we need to communicate them; and when we try we deal in shadows, not substance. Knowing this, that our words might sully, we can choose to remain silent in honour of the experience.

You may remember, but it seemed that every year at Christmas in the early seventies Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, starring the magical Dick van Dyke, was shown on TV. Watching it again now, I have become entranced by ‘Hushabye Mountain’ by Robert and Richard Sherman. The transcendent delicacy of emotion disorders my world in very agreeable ways. And I am moved to note that what we find here, despite the emotional richness, is the opposite of sentimentality. While some may baulk at the ‘sweetness’ on display, there is no forced or affected posturing, no mere simulation of feelings indulged in because one thinks one should, as it were, at one step removed from the real thing. Instead, the artistry is not artifice, but skillful mastery of evocation, technique deployed successfully in the generation of authentic response.

Well, in me anyway.

Alas, I can’t find an extract of the actual scene (except in Italian!?), but here Van Dyke sings it, against a series of portraits. While, as with all art, I can neither expect nor ask that you like it, there is a chance that you may, even as much as I; or that you might never even have heard it before.

Take note of the lyrics, as much as the music and the voice. Sometimes, with songs I love I find it sufficient to get carried away by the melody. I can find words superfluous, or even a distraction. But here they add to the experience, being exquisitely chosen.

Unexpected Nostalgia

2008-10-05T12:38:00.004+03:00

An extract from an email recently written to a friend in Kuwait:

'Despite the various frustrations of life in Kuwait: the shady employer, the bureaucratic sloth and irrationality, the lack of 'things to do', the Islamic rigour, the intense awareness of inequality, the prevalence of basic racism and social injustice, I already feel I miss the place. Not only the people and the friends I made but a certain buzz and energy that I think is a feature throughout the Middle East. I'm not sure I know how to explain it, but it was certainly there in Kuwait, as it was in other Middle Eastern countries I've visited.'

This does not mean, however, that I regret leaving Kuwait, far less that I regret coming to China, which as a venture is far too young to evaluate.

It's a pity, though, that the campus is 60s gloom, not the Durhamic majesty that surrounded me when I was last attached to a University, or the gracious delicacy of the Cambridge that embraced me as a child.

And that the campus is 30 minutes out of town in an insulated western cocoon.

Still, these are not significant complaints.

Reflections on Purpose

2008-10-01T16:21:00.005+03:00

Some thoughts on the results of my questionnaire, to the left. I base them on the results given by twenty seven people (none of them me) that had answered the questionnaire by Friday.

Although we’re told we live in a materialistic age, you wouldn’t guess it from the zero approval rating given to making as much money as possible as life’s primary purpose. I suppose there’d be more enthusiasm if I’d suggested life is about making enough money; enough for your needs, or even your desires. Are all people, at least those not in control of major league financial institutions, similarly unmotivated by unbounded greed? Or is greed a minority concern only for the type of people who read my blog? Personally, I’ve only wanted enough – enough, that is, to be free of the system. For this reason, I do not have enough, nor, presumably, ever will, if I’m to be ‘realistic’. Enough that I can roam and soar through the world, the free spirit I’m prevented from being. Still, since ultimately money doesn’t exist – being as it is a mere social contrivance, a convention for organising the production and ownership of material and abstract objects that do exist - I’m glad heresy and dissension from the God of this World are alive.

It’s interesting that nobody is primarily motivated by the quest for the perfect career. Did the question routinely asked as a child – what are you going to be when you grow up –mean nothing to you? Maybe at the end of the day, you just don’t really want to work, such that even if you love your job, there are still better things you'd rather be doing. Or is it that you know that since people are not their jobs, but rather people that have jobs, we cannot define our essence in terms of the ways we fit into the system of the world.

Somebody out there just wants to cope, to keep things together. And why not? It’s what we do anyway, or fail to.

The perfect orgasm. I hope you find it. I shudder to think what it will involve, and how you’ll know it couldn’t be bettered. Were you joking? I was when I suggested it. Still, we’re noticeably keen on exploring the possibilities for fleshly rapture, so presumably it’s a viable concern.

It is said that Zeus, fearing our primordial androgynous potency, cut us into our two genders. So we pine and hunt for our severed other half. Does the same dynamic exist for homosexuals? Hmmmmm. Anyway- alas, I have grown cynical about the mythology of romantic love. Bitter experience has exacted its toll. If she’s out there somewhere, the clock is ticking. My grey hair proves my point. I wish you luck, the two who seek ‘The One’. You don’t have to listen to my doubts. You might be justified in your hopes. But in the meantime, if you ask me, you might want to seek completeness in yourself. It will take the pressure off them ‘to be your saviour’ when they arrive.

If reproduction is the purpose of life, the purpose of life is to keep life going so that life can continue to be life. But doesn’t that mean reproduction IS life, since it is obviously essential for life. How then can reproduction be a purpose of life? Doesn’t a purpose of life suggest something that life is for, something, then, that is more than life, more than its mere biological basis?

Three of you think the primary purpose of life is to worship your creator, which in non-Gnostic cosmologies means God, as opposed to the Demiurge. I shall presume, to be brief, you meant God, not the Demiurge. In this world, worshipping your creator can be a noble purpose. I salute you. In many ways this is indeed my purpose. In any case, I join you in spurning the anti-theistic trends of our rootless, rudderless world, in which worship is not absent but directed to lesser lights (or even lights that are not lights) that do not deserve our worship; and which, on account of our worshipping them, bring us down to less than we could be, and less than we are. But it is not, ultimately, my choice for life’s purpose. Why? Because of the meaning of worship: namely that as an emotion and stance it is a one way street. We are expected to worship God. Does God worship us in return? I think not. And if, ultimately, our destiny is to be intimately united with God, sharing his reality in a world permeated with his presence, then the preconditions for worship will have broken down - namely that God is distant from us and, essentially, both different from and superior to us, a different order of being on the other side of the abyss. In such a fraternal, equal relationship: the one depicted in Genesis 3 before the fall, the one strikingly, unmistakably desired by God in Jesus, worship has given way to love: humanity’s voluntary love for God, and humanity’s love for itself and the creation, energized, made possible, by God’s indwelling love in us for us and his creation. To absolutise God’s desire for worship is to deny God’s desire to draw ever closer to us. While it is necessary, now, as a means to focus on God in the midst of a palpably Godless, loveless world, to say that life’s purpose, in and of itself, is to worship God, implies, surely, that God is a narcissist, that he created us so that we could praise him, presumably because he was insecure in some way. Or that’s how I see it.

Your second choice for life’s purpose is that life has no purpose. I refer you to my previous post, in which I explore how having a purpose can have two different meanings and applications. After that, what can be said? If life has no purpose for you, I wonder how you get up in the morning. If you are depressed, your lack of purpose might be the cause. If you are not depressed, are you sure your life has no purpose? But if you mean, rather, that life in the grand scheme of things has no purpose, nothing given to it from the outside, by God for example, then it’s interesting to explore what this might mean. I imagine this cosmic purposelessness could be reflected upon in either a gloomy, limiting and pessimistic, or cheery, liberating and optimistic, light – depending on who you are. Maybe God’s grand, finely worked out, detailed scheme of things was your life’s best hope. Now you’ve come to reject it as a lie and are bitter and morose, if not resentful. Alternatively, for whatever reason, maybe you’ve always seen God and his metaphysical system as oppressive, both in and outside of the bedroom. Now you are overjoyed that neither he nor his system exists, except as a human fantasy. Or maybe you are indifferent to whether life has a grand purpose or not. But in that case, I’m curious why you chose the purposelessness of life as your primary understanding of life’s purpose. Why care so much?

The Gold medal of purpose is a Socratic one. While not most of you, at least the largest group amongst you, seek ‘knowledge, wisdom and understanding’. I also believe this would be nice. But, to me, far better than to know reality as a mental scheme, as a map or set of propositions, or ethical principles, placed against reality in an exact fit, would be to be united to reality in a more thorough, holistic sense than is suggested by these mediated qualities. Meanwhile, we must wonder: whose knowledge, whose wisdom, whose understanding? That which is known, acted wisely towards and understood may very well be reality as it is in-itself. But even if it is, even if our knowledge is accurate and truthful it is still knowledge seen and understood from our perspective, by way of the limited, contingent conditions and potentialities of our minds. A ‘pure’ knowledge uninfluenced by the fact that we are the knowers of it: a knowledge science supposes exists and seeks, is impossible. And a good thing too! Only by factoring out our humanity, by knowing the world as a void, could such a knowledge even theoretically be possible. But since such a knowledge is impossible we needn’t worry about such a humanity-excluding knowledge. So why bother with it even as a dream? Knowledge will always be our knowledge. This is why knowledge changes, because we change – in ourselves, and in our abilities to discover. This is not to attack science as a means to manipulate matter, to allow this virtual communication between us to happen, and to achieve its other accomplishments. It is only to criticise science's epistemological ambitions, especially with regard to what we derisorily call ‘metaphysics’ (which is only metaphysical because we can’t see it yet ). Seeing through a glass darkly is better than not seeing at all – and this is our knowledge. But when the glass is removed, the knower and known become one – we transcend the limitations of our condition and are reconciled with the infinite and the eternal. Humanity has often been a story of presumptive, premature, disastrously abortive self-apotheoses. But this does not imply we shall never merge with the Godhead, or that our desire to become God is misconceived. After all, these things go both ways. God wants to become human too. Why else do you think he created us? How else can the incarnation be explained?

Which brings me to my own choice. Number Ten. Ok, I phrased it eccentrically, but in this I agree with the great nemesis of gloomy metaphysicians, Friedrich Nietzsche: the only fundamental purpose that life can ultimately possess is joy. Presuming that God exists –and yes, you may have guessed, I presume this – and presuming again, as I do, that God is not so insecure and vain a narcissist that he felt a need to create an army of worshippers to help him feel better about himself, what other purpose could our existence have? Why else bring particularity into existence from the abundant ocean of the one? That something went wrong in the creative process, somewhere along the way, seems to be the case. While orthodox Christians accusingly heap the blame for this exclusively on our shoulders; and while Gnostics attribute the problem of life’s joylessness to the fact that our world was created by a lesser divine emanation, if not the Devil himself, they both agree that something went wrong. The question of life’s cure, of course, is a whole other issue; but without knowing what life should be: a non-suffering field of not boring delight, it’s impossible to know where we are headed, or should be.

Of course I could be wrong. There could be no God, and life could have no grand purpose. It could all be random strangeness, from the bottom up and sideways. But I have no reason to think so that convinces me and plenty of reasons, subjectively experienced, scientifically non-verifiable, I accept, for thinking otherwise.

By the way I'm composing this in a youth hostel in Shanghai. The humidity has beat a welcome retreat, along with the heat. A very welcome event. More from the Orient anon.

Thank You

2008-09-24T12:50:00.006+03:00

Thanks very much to the twenty-five people who have so far answered my questionnaire - about life's purpose. As I reflected on the questions and the answers people gave, however, it struck me that I hadn't been as clear as I might have been about my meaning. This was confirmed recently in Northampton when Lee and Nicola revealed that they weren't sure how to answer. Their uncertainty concerned the question of whether they were supposed to consider the 'objective' purpose of life, according to some consideration of a grand design (or lack thereof); or whether they were supposed to consider the question of their personal, subjective purpose, whether or not this was reflected in the Universe in-itself.

To answer that life has no purpose is all well and good if one thinks objectively - if one supposes that there is no God, that life, the universe and everything in it, is the consequence of random chance; that life, on this planet at least, assumed the shape it did according to an unguided process of rigorous selection and advancement of forms of life most capable of surviving an essentially hostile environment. But if one thinks subjectively, how is the objective non-existence of purpose relevant to our lives; to the needs we face, as individuals, to find direction and aim? Subjective purpose: having wants, having plans, hoping and if possible striving to make life better for oneself and one's environment. These are all normal features of normal humanity. This means that to those feeling these emotions life does have purpose, whatever be the nature of any attendant cogitations that are, or are not, experiencd about the bigger picture.

I'm not denying that, subjectively, people's lives can be pointless and purposeless, especially in the West, and at least in their own perception. But that is so, if it is so, for personal reasons that have little to do with the status of life in general. In addition, many who deny life's deeper telos, can still, very happily - or so it appears - find purpose in their lives, that sense of a direction that can generate a sense of meaning, even in the midst of the void.

So anyway, it struck me that my whole slew of questions could be construed as ambiguous. Yet, then I reflected - does this matter? Perhaps for some people objective and subjective purpose are identical. In any case, people answered according to how they interpreted the question. How they interpreted it, at least to them, is intriguing and revealing in-itself. A point may be, however: would they have chosen differently if I had spelt it out that they had to think about things only subjectively and personally or only objectively and impersonally?

Orientalised

2008-09-22T14:45:00.005+03:00

The first major impression is the humidity. Although much cooler than Kuwait, it's much more uncomfortable. In addition, there is far less sun, while the air conditioning, less desperately required, is inferior in its performance and range. I want to suppose not all of the mist is caused by pollution.

Waiting around in Shanghai for my flight to Ningbo was helped by taking a trip to the centre of town. Strangers, as well as friendly, were helpful, giving directions, writing out the destinations in Chinese, showing me which buses to take, and how to use the Underground. One guy paid for my ticket because I didn't have the correct change. Another carried my bag as he showed me the way through an alternate turnstile after the first one wouldn't budge. A fellow teacher thinks they were like this because I gave off a 'new guy aura'.

It was good to see the 'Bund', the heart of the largely European 'International city', a non-Chinese association reflected in the architecture.

I'm still jet lagged. I haven't taught yet. This begins tomorrow but next week I have a holiday which I wasn't expecting and which is nice. Unfortunately, however, I cannot leave the country since I have a temporary single entry work visa. So I may go to Beijing instead, or just explore Zhejiang province.

My flat is in a staff hotel. It comes with a kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom. It's fine, but I may move on soon. Alas no bath, but I got used to that in Kuwait. There is also no oven, oddly enough, but apparently this is normal, given this is the land of the Wok. I live on campus, so am surrounded by other teachers and loads of students, who also live here. I have yet to explore Ningbo or any of its unknown attractions. Nearby, there is a sacred mountain and an island of some repute, so I hear.

My friend, whom I know from Slovakia and who's also here, tells me to avoid talking about the 'three T's'. From his look he expected me to know what they were, which shows he's been here too long. They mean (of course!) Tiannemen, Tibet and Taiwan, the latter being the most touchy. I must remember that Taiwan is not a separate country. Curiously, the Taiwanese agree, so explain the problem to a five year old! Happily, most websites I like are unblocked, but I haven't been able to surf much yet. We shall have to see.

I don't seem to have any significant troubles with my chopsticks.

My News

2008-09-15T10:08:00.004+03:00

My news was expressed in a recent email I sent to a dear Slovak friend:

'My news is that I decided just to stick to 10 months in Kuwait, and am now moving on to China to work in a University near Shanghai. So that's a step up in the world of TEFL in any case, into something called EAP (English for Academic Purposes). More my line, for sure, than that kind of elementary scouring of the barrel that I did in Kuwait with students who, as far as I could tell, just looked upon the lessons as a joke and an opportunity not to have to work (in many cases anyway).

To summarise Kuwait in a nutshell would be to refer to oil, starbucks, the neon glossiness, the oppressive, omnipresent Islam (but it's not that bad, not like Saudi), and the extreme heat of the sun that really makes little sense that far north of the equator. Scenically, the camels roaming free on the sides of desert roads were the highlight. Actually, I loved my time there, met some amazing ex pats, and had a lot of opportunity not to be distracted by western commercialism, since there really is so little to do (unless you like to shop, as I don't). I got out at the very last minute. I was meant to start my new job in Kuwait on August 23rd, but got the China offer on the 19th. A close run thing!'

Once again I surprise myself - by how my writing style changes according to whom it is I think I'm addressing. When I write to my readers on this blog I don't know who I'm dealing with. In one sense this is liberating. It allows for an open vista, because I haven't needed to mould and adjust myself to any particular known and understood personality. In another sense, however, that blanket sense of the void left lingering before my mind; that sense of not really writing to anybody in particular, induces an impersonability into my blogging voice. While such an impersonability might well be considered tasteful, and a noble safeguard against the embarrassment of overfamiliarity, it must nevertheless have some drawbacks...if for no other reason than that, surprise surprise, I am a person, just as all of my readers are persons.

Who knows, maybe you can't see any differences in the prose styles. Maybe it's just me. But it seems commonsensical that not just what you say but how you say it is intimately influenced by whom it is you suppose yourself (accurately or otherwise) to be addressing.

Does this harmonise with what Wittgenstein meant in his latter, post-Tractatus days, when he said that language is a tool, an implement to get things done, namely to communicate - and essentially little more mysterious than that? If I understand Ludwig aright.

Class War and the Hope of Utopia

2008-09-03T04:18:00.006+03:00

'It is now no utopian fantasy to suggest we can live in a world without waste or want or war, in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation. That much is assured. We certainly have the science, the technology and the know-how. All that is missing is the will – the global desire for change that can make that next great historical advance possible; a belief in ourselves as masters of our own destiny; a belief that it is possible to free production from the artificial constraints of profit and to fashion a world in our own interests. And how soon this happens depends upon us all – each and every one of us.'

I read the above over at Class War. What am I to think of it?

Well, I'm very sympathetic, to be frank. That said, I don't understand myself primarily in the political terms the writer does. So I don't feel comfortable sensing his or her desire that I interpret my positive response to his words as a signal that I ought to become a 'Socialist'. Moreover, I suspect my interest in the transcendent may leave him more than a little cold. Presumably, I am up to my eyes on opium and high as a kite in earnestly irrelevant ways...?

It seems often in life that people can agree about diagnoses, but then part company over prescription; when it come to the recommended courses of action, to suggested modes of alleviation, to routes out of the abyss.

The author is totally right that there is no material cause for anybody any longer to be starving to death on the blue planet. As I see it, that they do so is only because humanity, the collective, does not care about all of its parts, about all of its particulars. The negligence of holism at the collective level is evident and manifest.

Medicinally, we also now have the power to both improve and save many more lives than we do.

As for the so-called population problem. Firstly, this is a problem only in certain parts of the world. That in-itself means that through demographic mobility, it need not be a problem, as vast areas of emptiness can receive the excess. Secondly, where it is a problem, action through birth control, abstinence and education can drastically reduce the rapidity of growth. Thirdly, integral to the understanding that there is a problem with an an excessive demographic is an understanding of how human beings must live - that is, as exploitative consumers and destroyers of the ecosystem. And yet they need not live like that at all. That much is obvious.

'All that is missing is the will – the global desire for change that can make that next great historical advance possible'

Indeed, this is the case - in one sense. And in that sense it's certainly the case that many, many people do not care, for whatever reason, either about the present or the future of the human race - except insofar as it relates to their immediate environment, be that, at a stretch, their particular nation or tribe or local community, and more commonly, their friends and families only; if not, in the more extreme cases of narcissistic self-enclosure, nothing but their own egos.

But are we sure that the will is enough? Personally, I am not. Through a programme of State sanctioned coercion, for example, we could always brainwash the multitudes into having the appropriate and required, 'virtuous' will. Such has been tried before, in Russia, in China and elsewhere. Would we like to repeat the experiment? Are we sure?

Call me a pathetic dreamer if you like; but I'd say that what has to change more fundamentally than the will is the heart, that stony lump of unresponsive insularity within. That deathly heart, that makes us care so very much about our personal particular statuses and triumphs, and what we have to lose; or is it, what we only perceive we have to lose. That heart of ungenerous, defensive prickliness, that thorn in the rose garden of the possible.

With an illuminated and transfigured heart, however, with a will animated and restrained by its counsels, we might indeed then, and successfully, harness the resources of our practical knowledge to make this planet less of the disaster zone that it is.

On Money and God

2008-09-01T08:39:00.003+03:00

It's a bit of a cliche to say that in today's world Money is God. But this does not stop it being true.

What else can be said, however, in elaboration on this theme?

I was just today struck by the thought that people now want to 'get into' money in the same way that in the past they wanted to 'get into' God. And by 'get into' I'm not talking about becoming fascinated by or being a besotted fan of, but literally storming and conquering the surrounding walls of -whatever it is that you want to 'get into'; in this case money.

I was thinking this because I was thinking of the banking system and how incredibly defensive and frenetically vigilant it has to be, on and off line, because of what it's in possession of - vast amounts of money; and because getting their hands on vast amounts of money is precisely the sort of thing most people want to do.

God, when he mattered more to people than he now does was also somewhat extravagantly defended. A flaming sword held by Cherubims blocking the way to the Garden was just the start of it. God, so it seems, has never much liked people presuming, in all their mortal ordinariness, that they had automatic rights of ownership over what he/she/it is; or liked it when they claimed or even sought an existential equivalence to him.

And yet, in Jesus, all this is overthrown. The abyss between humanity and God is abridged and filled in. The veil in the Temple is torn. Not only does the uncreated I AM become a human being like us, but he dies, nay, is murdered by us, an act which he then forgives us for. In Jesus' resurrection he prefigures our own future freedom from the shackles of damnation and death, the liberation of the universe, it might be said, from its intense disappointment with its own obvious flaws.

I wonder, will there be a similar removal of that veil standing between the multitudes and the untapped, unharnessed material abundance of the earth? Of a type as restorative of, as ameliorative towards, our physical and material condition, as has been the tearing asunder of the veil in the Temple to our spiritual condition. Might we come to walk with God in the abundance of a transfigured Earth as readily as we can now walk with God, through Jesus, in the exalted, yet bodiless, domains of the spirit? That would be nice. Thy Kingdom come, after all, On Earth.

Is this what Paul is referring to, moreover, when he writes that we wait for the redemption of our bodies?

The Stars of Order

2008-08-29T02:05:00.006+03:00

Recently I've been rifling through my old stuff stored in one of Mum's sheds in Suffolk. Most of this is books and old VHS cassettes destined for little future in the DVD and post-DVD world.

Some of the detritus is going to jumble, some will be thrown out. My Mum needs more space. My dear little niece presumed today that the shed was mine. Yes, in a manner of speaking I replied. Bemused, I elaborated. Most of what's in it is mine but the room itself is Granny's.

Hidden away in a carrier bag in an old gramophone cupboard I found some of my old notebooks. I would say about 60% of these scribblings have been typed up at some point over the past twelve years in fits of little better to do. Much of the rest had been forgotten about. This from the mid 90s, for example, found in an A5 notebook manufactured by 'Europa':

Where have the galaxies of light, the enfolded, woven
threads of the beauty gone.

I wish again to know you
out past bounded fields of pain
taste again your smile
feel and hold in hands
warmths of flesh.

When you're gone
the framework in the head is shaken
spears and daggers of the abyss within
shed blood from the stars of order.

On the opposite page is an (unsent!) letter to a girl I got rather involved with (not her real name).

Dear Michaela,

I have nothing to say to you except:

STOP MASHING MY BRAINS.

Love

Jon

Crikey.

Aphrodite's Divided Heart

2008-08-23T08:49:00.005+03:00

“Oh, but don’t mention love. I’d hate the pain of the strain all over again”

One of the inherent disassociations in modern, western culture, is that between our erotic and our emotional lives.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it said: “Sex is not Love. Love is not sex”. It’s not a small number. It’s one of the many mantras of our times. It reveals much about our contemporary condition, namely the Wasteland.

As it happens, on the other hand, I don't deny that some people can veer wildly to the other extreme, saying that sex is love and that nothing but sex is love. But that may be for another post.

To my knowledge, the perspective which says that sex is not love and that love is not sex is often held by people interested in ‘progressive’ or ‘emancipationist’ views of sexuality, whatever they are understood to be. The underlying understanding, as I see it, is that if I want to get love I don’t need to have sex to get it. And that, on the other hand, if I want to have sex, I don’t need to feel a pre-existing love for my sexual partner first. I can use his or her body as I might a motorcycle, upon which I might be taken to my sunset of sensual joy. Presuming that they had consented to play the role of motorcycle, of course.

Actually, when I look at the first of these understandings, that one can get love without sex, I don’t have any difficulties at all. On the contrary, I entirely agree. I can give and receive love without sex being involved. After all, I myself love and have loved many people whom I have not even kissed, let alone exchanged bodily fluids with. This is just as well, given my low score rate with the ladies. If I had only loved people I had had sex with, I wouldn’t have had much love in my life.

It is only the second understanding, that sex can be had lovelessly, that causes me to ponder and reflect.

Call me a wild-winged hypothesist. I can’t help wonder about the roots of this understanding. Why should someone want to set themselves up to think of the interrelationship between sex and love in such a divided way. It seems unnatural to me; forced, strenuous, a ‘disconnect’, to polarise these aspects of life in this way. This essentialist understanding, which asserts that sex and love are distinct, not to be confused: it wants to see the sexual-emotional life of humanity as something divided. I wonder why.

I see three reasons. The first relates to a reaction amongst secular progressives to what has been understood, with fair justification, to be the ancient sex-hostility on the part of the Church towards consensual sexual acts between adults. The Church logic rebelled against, I think, has been something like this: If you want to have sex, you will need to get married first. If you want to get married, you should first love someone such that you will want to spend the rest of your life with them*. To look at it algebraically then: Love (Horse) + Marriage (Carriage) = Sex (Joyful journeys hither and thither).To break out of this necessity, weakening the causal nexus between Love and Sex, naturally becomes a cunning strategy to get more sex, or to get sex at all.

The second reason motivating the sexual-emotion split, relates to a felt need amongst those engaged in casual sexual relations, so I speculate, to defend themselves from the unwanted emotional consequences they feel and fear might arise from their intimate, compromising actions with relative strangers. Even though I’ll be coming inside of her; even though I’ll be penetrated by his phallus, none of this will hurt me. After all, it’s only physical. My heart I defend behind a wall of confident disassociation. Until such time, of course, as I choose to open it to someone, or more adventurously to those, I share my bed with. In this regard, I am reminded, as an extreme example of this split, I grant, of how many prostitutes (or so I hear?), while they will happily have all and every orifice phallically serviced to procure money, will not allow their clients to kiss them on the lips. The irony that this defensiveness implies, on the contrary, - that a link between sex and love is unwittingly acknowledged by the very people who might deny it - should not go unnoted, I feel.

The third reason relates to a recognition that, given the relatively loveless nature of our contemporay, highly disappointing world, feelings of love in general between the people that one meets are seldom experienced. If one is only to have sex with people you meet whom you also happen to love, so it might be thought, you would not have very much sex with anyone.

People can, and perhaps will, believe that sex and love are separate. Perhaps for them they really are. Ultimately, I can only speak for myself.

Speaking personally (yawn, cringe, shudder), and maybe it’s just me, what can I say? That I cannot imagine not feeling an emotional bond, at least of some kind, with a woman I might come to sleep with; just as I know that I do feel emotional connections, at least of some kind, and always a special kind, with the relatively few women that I have slept with. I can see how I might want to deny this in order to cope with certain unfortunate realities, but this wouldn’t make the denial true, would it?

This does not mean, as it happens, that I am angling after imitating or recycling Paul’s threatening implications regarding the iniquities of extra marital sex, in case you were wondering. It just means that I was saying what I said: that I do not believe that sex and love are separate.

* I realise that feelings of love have not always been considered a prerequisite for matrimony, and that considerations of family status and connections, the right religion and good health, have often been far more important, whenever arranged marriages were the rule, at least, and especially in the higher classes. In any case, I speak of marriage in relation to sex as it is understood in Occidental Christendom today.

My Socratic Readers

2008-08-20T08:21:00.005+03:00

It seems so far, from the questionnaire, that 'acquiring knowledge, wisdom and understanding' is the most popular purpose in life amongst my readers.

I'll leave it a bit longer before commenting on the results and revealing and explaining my choice. I'll wait and see if I can get 20 voters. Hmmmmm.

Meanwhile I'll continue to enjoy the countryside. This enjoyment, and other diversions besides, explains my recent less than fulsome commitment to this blog, as may have been guessed.

All this golden success in the Olympics reminds me very much of the early 80s, when the likes of Coe, Ovett, Cram, Capes, Goodhew and Thompson gave the Union Jack a similarly vibrant outing. Of course, we were helped in Moscow in 1980 by the absence of the Americans.

But that just makes our current success all the more significant.

Will Boris be playing Vangelis' theme tune from 'Chariots of Fire' over loudspeakers in Trafalgar Square, I wonder, when we have the day of celebration that he has planned for our team? Or for that will there first need to be more success on the track?

One Week On

2008-08-16T11:20:00.005+03:00

I have had a wondrous time in the past week. Leaving the Ishmaelite realm has yet again instilled in me feelings of levity and freedom. How this is to be explained, and what this means, is another matter, but that is the feeling.

I am supposing that according to the so called law of diminishing returns, the luscious delight I feel in wandering my homeland, and sensing its richness, both cultural and natural, will diminish if I move back and settle and become an established part of the system. Sigh.

Must one always be elsewhere in order to be here, to be abroad to appreciate home?

The Brits grumble about the weather. I understand why the farmers do - because it interferes with the harvest, but the rest of us? Rain is lovely, just ask the grass and the trees.

Ok, maybe that's not such a good idea:).

Bratislava

2008-08-11T12:39:00.008+03:00

Speaking of Slovakia, on my way to the pub I had a brief chat with a Hungarian at North Greenwich tube station:

Jonathan: So you’ll just need to change at Bank. Where are you from?

Hungarian: Hungary.

Jonathan: Budapest?

H: Yes

J: Nice. I used to live in Slovakia, in Bratislava.

H:Ok

J: Or Poszony, as you’d say..

H: Yes, exactly! (he joyfully exhorted with great vigour), that’s right! (big smile).

J: Ah…(I sighed internally, while smiling).

J: You know, in 2002 it said “Pozsony” not Bratilava on railway station timetables in Gyor. I wonder why it now says Bratislava. I suppose the EU put pressure on the Hungarians, what do you think? You know, to recognise Slovakia's rights.

H: Pozsony is Hungarian, it was built by Hungarians.

He obviously wasn’t that interested in the finer details of why Hungarian claims on the soul of Bratislava/Pressburg (the pre 1918 German name) had been symbolically knocked back. I felt tempted to ask if he was a Hungarian nationalist but desisted, sensing the question might be taken as a rousing provocation to a tension I didn't want to experience as I looked forward to my first pint.

So I hear, many Hungarian families have maps of the old Hungarian pre-WWI Empire. At opportune, heart swelling moments they might bring them out and show them to guests, waxing misty eyed over the "true" size of their country. While I’m sympathetic to the pains relating to the decline in status and self-respect the loss of an Empire can bring –after all it happened to we British– are we sure that coveting the formerly possessed lands of foreign peoples, in order to compensate for a perceived diminution in ones own ethnic-national prowess, is entirely called for. Can't we see through all this?

Or to put it differently, if it’s ok for Hungarians to want Slovakia back, as well as large tracts of Romania and Northern Serbia to boot, is it also ok for the British to want India back, or our African former colonies, or indeed Canada, Australia and the states of New England?

Personally I'd say no, surprisingly enough, perhaps; for all kinds of reasons to do with stepping beyond outworn paradigms of domination and coercion. And if it's not ok for us to recycle our old dominating ways, I presume it is also not ok for others to do the same –or is that me being naive?

The George and Dragon

2008-08-10T18:17:00.004+03:00

A perhaps unforeseen advantage of the smoking ban is that interiors of pubs can be less crowded, as smokers sit or stand outside.

So it was at The George and Dragon near Gt Portland Street. This charming, real ale hostelry, on its own admission is the 'best kept secret in London'. Here, on Thursday night, as many people were standing outside, spilling over the curb and onto the road, as were seated inside, enjoying the wooden tables and the old world decor. A welcome, wondrous consequence of which was that on a Friday evening in central London I had an entire table to myself, as I waited for my friends, former colleagues from Slovakia, to arrive.

Initial Reflections on Returning to England

2008-08-08T18:56:00.008+03:00

The emphasis on customer service. The implied belief in the power of the consumer.

Seeing 'Tel Aviv' next to 'Kuwait' on a Baggage collection screen. The unmentionable land casually, unselfconsciously mentioned.

Seeing more Afro-Carribean people. In Kuwait there are few. Filipinos, Indians and other Arabs comprising most of the ex-pats.

The omnipresence of advertising and the marketing mythos -rendered in a language I can understand and so not escape from. Alas.

The security announcements and warnings -instructing me to be loyal to my bag. Will these ever end?

That you can't smile and wave at strangers and get welcoming, or at least unfreaked out, responses.

A certain levity and liberation in the air, in the spirit, in the general atmosphere.

A greater quiet - even in London.

Beautiful English women with radiant eyes and flowing blonde hair.

The vivid, fresh colours of my homeland. In the brick, the trees, the telephone boxes, the terraced houses.

A sense that it is very different, and makes me feel different.

A happiness to be here.

A certain reluctance to return.

The thought to stay.

Questionnaire

2008-08-05T07:32:00.005+03:00

I wonder who will do my questionnaire. It's on the left and might be there awhile. I had it on a purple background before but it was garish.

I ask what the 'purpose' of life is, as opposed to the 'meaning' of life. I do this because to me 'meaning' implies definition. Things are defined in relation to what they are not. We are not aware of that which is not life (ok, except death), so I do not see how we can define life in terms of something we know nothing about. I am supposing here that life encompasses God, if only with regard to our relationships to God.

Purpose relates to our motivations, be they ones we find ourselves necessarily driven by or those we consciously choose.

Obviously, there may be other options you might want to fill out but can't. But I tried to be as comprehensive as possible, without giving too many options.

Out of the Desert

2008-08-03T21:47:00.002+03:00

I’m traveling back to England on Friday. I wonder what I will think of it, what I’ll get up to when I’m there. It will mean so much more to me, I suppose, than it does to people who are there all the time. Especially since I’m crossing a boundary between civilizations and returning out of the desert.

Be Thou My Vision

2008-08-02T11:42:00.006+03:00

"Be Thou my Vision" is one of my favourite folk songs. It’s Irish and its words were written by one Dalln Forgaill in the 8th century, but were translated into English and versified in the early Twentieth Century by Mary E.Byrne and Eleanor Hull. As for its music (a tinny version of which can be heard here), it is of unknown ancient folkish provenance, or so I believe.

I have to confess to a dastardly terrible vice. I am moved on occasions (though not often) to playfully interfere with the lyrical integrity of songs not my own (I have no songs of my own). I am presuming, perhaps incorrectly, that as long as I do not make any money out of such violence, I am not going to have my ass sued to hell and back? Especially if a certain sufficient number of decades have passed since the composition, or the death of the author, in any case? Anyway, I would always in no way presume that any alterations I made had been attempts to either supplant or claim an objective superiority over the original. Only, rather, that they were different songs. Ok, relying on the same music, but not as such an attack on the original, if this lawyerly wind-baggery makes sense and persuades.

Anyway, here are the first two stanzas of the famous “Be Thou my Vision”:

"Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;

Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.

Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,

Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;

I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;

Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;

Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one."

Good lyrics. And for a hymn, acceptably rid of grovelling sanctimoniousness and sentimental effeteness. Still, it is nothing if not ‘old fashioned’ (shock horror!..so I sense my traditionalist readers, Griff and Reynard, reacting?). I should make myself clear that what I sometimes react to with hesitation about the ‘old fashioned’ in general, is not that it is rooted in the past or that it fails to be enthusiastic about our modernist obsessions with the Brave New World of the 21st century; but rather that it can be merely inaccessible. For what, pray, is the purpose of communication, if it is to be stifled by inaccessibility?

Beyond the form, I am also less keen on the content than I could be.

For example “Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.”

This particular line seems to express very unambiguously something which I consider - in all my boundlessly unauthorized subjectivity - to be an erroneous understanding of the desired effects of Christian devotion upon the life of the Self. The life of the Self, that is, in the context of the world, and most especially, of other people. It is stating, after all, that nothing should be important to the Christian believer except God.

Hmmmmmmm…? Are we sure that this is what the Christian life is about? I had thought that the point and purpose of being a Christian was to be a light in the world, to love and serve your fellow men, be they your friends or your enemies? While I would never deny that such a love, being essentially unnatural, is impossible to achieve with much efficacy, without the transfiguring effects of God’s indwelling love active and shining within you, I would also suggest that maintaining that God alone is important to the Christian could tend to undermine, if not potentially contradict, such an understanding?

Secondly, in the second verse, we see a beautiful expression of the intimate relationship that exists between God the Father and the Christian believer as that believer partakes of the Sonship through his identification with Christ. I have no objections to this at all. I only wonder if a rhapsodic Hymn such as this is, is the best place for the expression of an esoteric theological truth that may in no way be accessible or believable to a non-Christian, who might indeed even be alienated by the expression of such an abstract strangeness. “What on Earth are they talking about”, is a thought that might arise, I’m thinking, when they sing or hear this song.

So what, you may think. So what if they don't understand? But is such a question really one to ask when the effective celebration of the transcendent is at stake? Or are you advancing the cause of a kind of Christian hermeticism, a Christian isolation from worldly relevance?

And so with trepidation and a robust desire not to rouse the spirit of Diall Forghill in acts of haunting vengeance against me, or that of his accomplished translator Mary Byrne and versifier Eleanor Hull, I humbly offer up an alternative version of the first two stanzas, which I myself, nevertheless, shamelessly prefer. Isn’t it weird the way we are not supposed to like our creative, or should I say in this case re-creative, acts?.

Be assured, I make no claims as regards its objective quality or worth. It is if nothing else simpler and more repetitious in its use of 'Be thou' as a refrain. While I can sense that some might feel it to be ‘wet’ (especially non-Christians) this is not what I intend it to be.

"Be thou my vision, be thou my true light
Be thou ever with me, and keep me at night
Be thou my saviour, be thou my delight
Be thou my energy, in the midst of the fight.

Be thou my wisdom, be thou my true light
Be thou revelation, in the darkness of night
Be thou my splendour, be thou my delight
Be thou my happiness, and the love in my life."

NB..see comments

The Higher Light

2008-08-01T23:05:00.006+03:00

Does not find peace boring
Does not see evil in people
only sickness and ignorance
Does not condemn
but only grieves and is wounded
Delights in innocence
and is bored by conflict and hatred
Is never angry
And laughs a lot of golden laughter.

An Interesting Lyric

2008-08-01T13:09:00.004+03:00

You know your problem

You keep it all in

You know your problem

You keep it all in.

From "You keep it all in" by The Beautiful South.

The rest of the song's conceptual content appeals far less, but this line swarmed pleasantly through my head while travelling as a youth in South America, although I'm not sure I credited its meaning with the significance it deserved at the time. It is normal for me to find the lyrics of modern songs far less attractive than the underlying music and timbre of the singer's voice in-itself. But sometimes, the splendour of the actual conceptual meaning will break through and charm. While this has happened most reliably with the work of Jim Morrison and Steven Morrissey, it sometimes happens with other lyricists too.

Usually, though, I'm just lost in my own reveries, not attending to the meaning of the sung words, using the music as mere fuel to delight my imaginative, restorative adventurings.

But the line above is a good one, and deep, even if it doesn't particularly mean to be.

I should collect together all my favourite lyrics from the world of popular music one day.

On The Lambeth Conference

2008-07-31T23:03:00.010+03:00

Last week my brother, a Vicar in The Church of England, met Bishop Gene Robinson for a twenty five minute chat. He won’t, slightly irritatingly, tell me what they said to each other, but fair enough. I even assured him I wouldn’t publish what they said on this blog, and I wouldn’t have. But it didn’t fly. Anyway, my brother typically prefers to discuss theological issues face to face, despite the fact that we usually have far more substantial and detailed exchanges by letter or email. No matter.

Gene Robinson, in case you didn’t know (why should you if you are not an Anglican Christian) is the ordained Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in the Episcopalian Church in the United States Of America. The US Episcopalian Church is one of the thirty-eight provinces of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which at the moment is holding its once a decade Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, England.

Recently, here in Kuwait, I’ve taken to watching BBC World. I used, more commonly, to watch Al-Jazeera. But these days I become increasingly interested in what’s going on at home.

A short while ago, in amidst all the preoccupation with Radovan Karadzic, I saw Gene Robinson speaking.

Afterwards, an African Conservative Bishop was interviewed about homosexuality and Christianity. He referred to the sense (with which I agree- regrettably to you, perhaps, if you disagree) that the Bible is clear that homosexuality is not what God wants for human beings. Then, as if this was relevant, the journalist ran past him the following idea.

That:

“One Bishop’s sin is another Bishops love and tolerance”.

What to think about that? I am supposing that this is intended to convey the idea that if a Christian believes that a particular action is a sin, that is wrong, that he might also therefore not be loving or tolerant towards those who commit the sin. And that, in other words, the erstwhile, noble principle, that one should ‘love the sinner and hate the sin’ is not valid. That to love the wrongdoer one must deny that there is a wrongdoing in question. While I would absolutely maintain that homosexual deeds are far less sinful than murder or rape, does this mean, I wonder, that if we are to love murderers and rapists, as indeed is our Christian duty, we need also to deny that murder and rape are wrong? Only asking.

The following thoughts also came to mind. They express the core of my feelings on this, relatively speaking, irrelevant issue, which currently faces the Worldwide Anglican Communion (though try telling that to the media).

Regarding the quote that “One Bishop’s sin is another Bishops love and tolerance”:

Is this supposed to be imply that Bishops who don’t sin are not loving and not tolerant. What does tolerance mean, anyway?

Is love and tolerance the defining essence of the Gospel? No, it isn’t. Aah…that was a line asking to be taken out of context now, wasn’t it? Love and tolerance are, indeed, fundamental and central to the Gospel, but they are not its core essence, which, surprisingly enough, is God’s incarnation and self-sacrificial love on the part of the world.

Besides, the meaning of love and tolerance are not stable, not clear. Whose love and tolerance? What is meant by love and tolerance? They are just words. Also relevant to the question of what love and tolerance is, is the love and tolerance of liberal fascism, for example, or the love and tolerance of the restrictive, banalising nihilism of political correctness? Or to put it simply: is the value of all forms of love and tolerance absolute?

The absolute, objective love and power that resides in the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not linguistically dependent. It exists prior to and independently of the words used to refer to and describe it. For this reason, words do not merely arbitrarily concoct or devise that Gospel to be whatever someone, using words, might want it to be – through words. Rather words may, or may not, refer to and capture the Gospel accurately.

And some other more general thoughts arose:

The idea that opposing the institution of actively homosexual clergy for the Anglican Communion is ‘homophobic’ is strange. This idea is, I would suggest, often inaccurate and also, when it is inaccurate, insulting. Yes, some straight men, including Christians, do fear homosexuals for irrational reasons. But most, I would suggest, do not. I, for one, would never deny that gay men are very often pleasant and agreeable. Indeed, I have often, beyond that, admired the manner by which they have moved beyond our typically hideous macho male, competitive templates regarding their general approach to life. To me, certainly, they are not frightening, unless they choose to be. Why else would they be my friends, as they are? But not thinking, as a Christian, that they are frightening - and so therefore not being homophobic towards them - doesn’t, surely, necessarily imply that the Christian not feeling such a fear, should then necessarily believe that active, practicing homosexuals should lead congregations in their worship of God. And that, and that alone, or so it seems to me, is the issue in question.

The separate question of granting and maintaining liberty and protection for homosexuals in society in general (which I certainly support and defend) is, of course, entirely separate -but so for that reason not relevant to an internal debate regarding the Christian religion.

And if anyone out there thinks that because I am not blandly, blindly swallowing the liberal consensus on this matter, I am therefore something along the lines of a homophobic intolerant bastard, well, they can go right ahead and eat my shorts. Though I'll have to find them first.

Be with Me

2008-07-31T18:34:00.002+03:00

Be with me my Lady
Be with me tonight
Be with me with the rising sun
Be with me at night

Be with me in strength my Lady
Be with me in truth
Be with me in your heart my lady
Be with me tonight.

A Poignant Question

2008-07-30T09:02:00.005+03:00

Recently, my dear Slovak friend Miroslava spent some time in the UK on holiday with her boyfriend. She spent a lot of time around Windsor, but also went to London.

When she wrote to me about her time there, she asked a poignant question. It reminded me of the still enduring old school innocence and charm of the Slavic sphere, the moral integrity of which has not (yet?) been as corroded as has ours.

“I’m wondering how many possibilities for having fun young people have in London.”

(How endlessly sweet)

This was how I replied:

"Young children having fun in London? Well, I think there are two things to note. First, that for some kids, ignored and cast adrift by their parents, having fun means roaming around in wild packs, pissing about, being a menace and possibly stabbing people (have you heard about the recent 'Knife Crime' anxiety?). Secondly, another type of child has parents who worry about: a) the other wild and dangerous children and the safety of the streets, generally, and b) Paedophiles. In consequence, they keep their kids locked up at home all the time, and so consign them to the virtual worlds only of the computer and the games console.

I was lucky. When I grew up there was still a relatively low level of public fear about the safety of kids. Yes, I was told not to 'talk to strangers', but other than that I could do pretty much what I wanted after about the age of nine, within reason. I walked to school and back every day alone, and would go into Cambridge town centre on my own. Nowadays, 'respectable' parents increasingly won't let their kids have this kind of freedom. While the ones who will are those who, as it were, dont care about them.

Sad, but I do see this as a reversible trend. But it will require the return of moral values, something which is impossible without a spiritual awakening (and I don't mean an Islamic spiritual awakening, mind, just to be clear).

Good luck in your exams, my dear

Jonny"

By the way, 'Jonny' is the name my family and some friends call me. I don't mind anyone calling me it, as it happens (as did Mutley on a recent comment), but I can see that it might seem a bit 'wet' (though not as wet as 'Timmy', I would wager?). It is also far too familiar, I think, to use as an official moniker, as May from Italy led me to see.

On Money and Power

2008-07-29T00:14:00.009+03:00

This evening on my way to work I had the following conversation with a Bangladeshi taxi driver.

Taxi Driver: Where are you from, Boss?

Jonathan: England. You?

Taxi Driver: Bangladesh…

Jonathan: Ah, Dhaka.

Taxi Driver: You know Dhaka?

Jonathan: No.

Taxi Driver: Bangladesh is a beautiful country. Very nice weather. Bangladeshi people are poor. We are a poor people. Very poor.

Jonathan: Yeah, I’m sorry about that.

Taxi Driver: We are poor. And so we are happy.

Jonathan: Ahhhh….?

Taxi Driver: Poor people are happy. Rich people are not happy.

Jonathan: Interesting.

Taxi Driver: Poor people eat and have a roof and work. Everything is simple…everything is good. Rich people are not happy, Kuwaitis are not happy. Rich people always problems, not simple - with food, with life.

I suspect he wasn’t trying to state in some kind of categorical, definitive way that it’s always good to be poor, however poor poor is; or implying that all rich people must inevitably be unhappy. All kinds of questions might also want to be asked, about what he meant by happiness. As a Bangladeshi earning perhaps 800 dollars a month here in Kuwait (so about twenty five times the average Bangadeshi income), it might also be pointed out that in relative terms he’s pretty rich.

In any case, a noteworthy exchange – summoning all kinds of cliché-questions and cliché answers about what the ‘really important things in life’ are. Yet clichés are not invalid just because they’re dull, or places we’ve been before.

It put me in mind, moreover, of something I’ve often wondered. Something I specifically ask myself when I encounter vitriol fuelled invectives against the ornately wealthy, denunciations diabolising them as callously evil, selfish swine. In an attempt at their defence, seeking understanding, I don’t want to join the deafening chorus of leftbeam opprobrium. I suspect too much that this scorn is motivated, too much of the time, by mere covetous envy, and not much else. It is not the wealth that they hate, but that the wealth is not theirs. Instead I want to ask – why do the rich want to be quite that rich, quite as rich as they are? Why must there always be, as it might be put ‘yet another yacht, yet another penthouse’. Or why is enough not enough? These are not questions, mind, motivated by a Socialist’s passion for redistribution (though it’s true I do want everyone to have enough). They are reflections of a certain vertiginous curiosity about how such an indigestion can be stomached. How it can be lived with. Doesn’t it lead to a heady bloatedness? Isn’t it self-alienating? Is it really quite that important, all that wealth? Are you sure? Don’t you lose yourself, scatter yourself, fragment yourself in your attachment of such an incrustation of material wealth onto the carapace that is your ego, beneath which you hide your soul? Only asking, Guvnor.

A related question regards power. Why do people want power? Or why do people who have power, want even more of it; or, at the very least, want very desperately not to lose the power that they have. This is the question that comes to mind when I hear about the conspiratorial cabals that, so we’re told, control and oppress the world in the name of power. Ok, though I question (though do not dismiss) the truth of what’s alleged, I also wonder: ok, supposing you’re correct – so what? Again, are you as incensed as you are because you’re envious? If not, well, I can agree: power lusts are unrighteous, unbecoming to the dignity of man. But isn’t pity as appropriate as condemnation, if not more so? The slave owner, after all, is not less enslaved to his role than the slave is to his. He’s just another kind of slave, as enslaved as the slave, only differently. Ok, I grant, he sleeps on more comfortable sheets.

Are these curious individuals who covet wealth and power; are they evil, or are they just, well, boring, a bit or a lot limited in their interiority; shallow, lacking in imaginative, metaphysical flair?

It is time for me to make some honest statements:

Firstly, that I myself don’t know, as friends or relatives, any of these seriously wealthy, seriously powerful people. I could indeed, therefore, be barking up a host of erroneous trees. Secondly, that I myself, yes, would definitely like to be richer than I am (though power, understood as ‘coercive potentiality’, will always, I hope, leave me cold). And thirdly, that, yes, I could well imagine that, on achieving a degree of wealth significantly greater than that which I currently possess (I could probably keep myself going, sans income, for about two to three years, at a stretch), I myself might very well be persuaded to feel partial to a little bit more….? I am indeed ‘only human’, or so it’s said.

But what I yet want to ask myself, in soul interrogatory mode, is this: what would I do with such wealth? Speaking now, as one not yet (presuming I ever would be? Ha!) put in a position to be open to the temptations of soul-corruption that wealth presumably carries, I know only what I would want to do. Which is:

First, be free of ‘the system’. We all know what I mean by this, do we not? Suffice it to say, the phrase ‘wage slavery’ sums it up nicely. The condition of being free of the need to work, as opposed to the condition of desiring to work, which, in the face of the limited joy attaching to ‘lounging around’ in the Roman manner, would, I trust, endure.

Second, do with my wealth all kinds of fine and dandy things for the betterment of my fellow man (and woman). No, not with the caveat that I myself would derive no self-gratifying frissons of meaningfulness, self-respect or delight from my largesse (why, oh why, do we think that giving has to be self-denying?) but with, nevertheless, the defining characteristic that what I did with my wealth would in fact, and not in merely spinned out appearance, actually have to be for their betterment. Not, mind you, with all my wealth – I’d need to keep some back for myself (shit, this man is so human). After all, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be free of the system now would I?

As to what I would do exactly – that’s another story, though the thought of the University I wrote about continues to interest me. Another might be a genuinely independent, self-funded if necessary, source of media revelation, in a manner reminiscent of Citizen Kane’s undertaking. People need to be fed and clothed and housed, too, and healed from all manner of nastiness.

Yeah, you’re right, it’s a pipe dream. You’re right, I’d get corrupted. Yachts and penthouses and decadence would prevail – a thoroughgoing kneeling at the foot of Moloch ensue.

Then again, maybe it wouldn’t. Hmmmmm.

If anyone out there with ‘an awful lot of wonga’ wants to put me to the test, they should feel assured that they should go right ahead. We could even work some sweet little disclaimers into the deal, such that you’d get your money back if yachts were witnessed!

And if you don’t (don’t worry – I do understand, I’m not that mad), could I maybe just ask you a favour?

Could you consider spending a little less of your money on yachts and penthouses, and persuade your friends to consider this too?

Don’t worry, I’m joking.

Are you?

The Controversy that is Homosexuality and The Hope for the Higher Light.

2008-07-27T09:39:00.013+03:00

I’ve been reading a very interesting article articulating a seldom heard perspective.

It was written by what might be called an ‘ex-homosexual’. In keeping with the convention that everything surrounding homosexuality has to be controversial, especially in the context of Christianity, I'm aware the very term, ‘ex-homosexual’ may rouse certain people to fury.

People do not choose to be gay, it is said. Nor do they choose to stop being gay. The orientation is innate, congenital, "God given" even. The term ‘ex homosexual’, therefore, is pure homophobia. So it is thought.

I don’t really know what to say. If someone wants to think of themselves as ‘ex-homosexual’, why shouldn’t they? Despite the fact that I’m happy with the term, I 'm not aware of harbouring any irrational fears of homosexual men myself - though I suppose if gay men wanted to frighten me they could conceivably succeed, though I’d hope not. Besides, I have gay friends and I'd thought my recent illuminating (and enjoyable) trips to gay bars in The Castro might constitute at least supporting evidence for my quasi ‘right on’ credentials, not that I seek any.

Anyway, please read the article if you feel animated by this issue. While I’d object to some of the things Ronald D.Lee says - sometimes he seems cruel and insensitive - I found it a very refreshing perspective. I found these lines especially interesting:

“From Mark I have learned that two men can love each other profoundly while remaining clothed the entire time.

We are told that the Church opposes same-sex love. Not true. The Church opposes homogenital sex, which in my experience is not about love, but about obsession, addiction, and compensation for a compromised masculinity.”

I don’t know, I'm guessing that according to a certain hermeneutical script, when an ‘intrinsically’ gay man discovers he's no longer gay, it must be, it has to be, it cannot otherwise be but, that he's been brainwashed by dastardly interfering heterosexual sex suppressors (Christian, no doubt, the bastards!), who've robbed him of the truth about himself that had been so hard won – regardless of what he might actually have to say about it.

It cannot just be that he came to certain conclusions on his own, as a free man, as the writer of this article did, for example. It cannot just be that such an ‘ex-homosexual’ might have decided, for example, that he’d never actually had the innately compelling, nay, pre-determining, erotic desire for other men that he’d hitherto felt he’d had (or is it been told that he’d had?); or, for example, that despite the fact that he continued to feel an appreciation for rippling male biceps and thighs he nonetheless wanted, out of an expression of free will, to cultivate a more fertile, life promising interest in the Daughters of Eve – to renounce, in any case, the totalizing demands placed upon him by the ‘identity-centred’ nature of essentialising sexual politics.

As it happens, despite my failure to be up in arms in defence of the homosexual community, I'm against all punitive repressions against, or intolerance towards, homosexuals. Why do I need to spell this out? I am against cruelty and coercion at all times, and so necessarily will be so regarding the self-appropriation and self-discovery of one's existential identity. In return, however, might militant homosexuals be persuaded to ‘pipe down’ a bit? Is this asking too much? That they stop bothering and harassing certain heterosexual perspectives and understandings, seeking to forbid them the right to exist?

Oh dear: That voice in my head is screaming at me again:

Shut up you homophobic bastard! Stop oppressing us. We are proud to be gay!

To which I say: why is being gay anything to feel proud about? Does this mean being straight is something I should feel proud about too? If so, ok, I will. But pride is overrated and has certain consequences, let us not forget.

Look, honestly, I don’t care if men want to have sex with each other. Why would I? So long as it isn’t my genitals in the mix, why would I get defensive and prickly? From my perspective, in all honesty, however, I find homosexual sex puzzling and odd (how quaint I am). I mean, why can’t homosexuals just shake hands and call each other ‘Sir’ as I do when I’m overwhelmed by affection for another man. Heavens, they could even hug one another if they wanted - at highly poised, significant moments for maximum effect. Anyway, that’s just me. This is all very subtle and complex I realise. As indeed is sex itself! Though try telling that to the Neo-Darwinians of the world, or to the producers of "Reality" TV shows.

Unfortunately, our society’s gross, simplistic approach to sex lends me little support in my desire to approach sex with delicacy and nuance. But then, what is society but a changeling, hurtling through history from thesis to antithesis, blindly or otherwise looking for a story. Who knows, maybe we’ll rediscover the higher light, and in the not too distant future, too. I for one certainly hope so. Then things might get seriously, sublimely interesting and joyful for a change. We’ll see all this genital posturing for the tedious, distracting, limiting, and above all irrelevant, seediness that it is.

In connection to this, I'm reminded of some great, yet sad, lines of the much under-esteemed wordsmith, James Douglas Morrison. He is too often dismissed as ‘just’ a rock star. They are taken from ‘An American Prayer’. My vision of this work is that it is a 1960s American echo of T.S Eliot’s 1920s Anglo-Centric elegy on the death and decay of Western civilization: 'The Wasteland'. Both minds were aware that in the absence of the higher meaning that tends towards eternity, all we have are each other’s bodies to cling to on the road to death.

We live, we die & death not ends it

Journey we more into the Nightmare

Cling to life our passion'd flower

Cling to cunts & cocks of despair

We got our final vision by clap

Columbus' groin got filled w/ green death

(I touched her thigh & death smiled)

As an alternative vision, I refer to what I wrote recently to a friend:

“God, The Prince of Peace, wishes his children, the men and women of Planet Earth, to love one another and to live in peace. This means that he wants, not only men and women, the two halves of the human family, to love one another, as they do not too much of the time; but that women love women and that men love men. The purpose of this love is not that we should experience rhapsodic epiphanies of sexual delight (though these on occasions might occur as a spin-off), but that hatred, fear, oppression, cruelty and suffering should be banished from the surface of the Earth.”

That we do not want such a love to define and transfigure our collective lives. It is this lack of desire which, for me, defines and indicates most perfectly the reality of Sin in the world.

Science and the Nature of Faith

2008-07-25T20:49:00.008+03:00

I read a great post today on McCabe’s site about “Scientism”. As can often happen, I found myself putting into words, in response to somebody else, something that I might never have written down if I hadn’t been so stimulated and provoked.

Gordon McCabe made quit a few interesting points in his post. Actually I don’t know what manner of believer or anti-believer he is, but he’s certainly critical of Religion.

Er….aren’t we all, I reflect internally as a theist -though I didn’t say that to him. Wasn’t Jesus, weren’t all the Old Testament prophets, as well as all the reformers, critical of the religious establishment? But yes, I know, that’s a whole other shindig.

What engaged me most was what Gordon had to say about the nature of faith. He criticises religious faith on the grounds that it is a “belief without evidence or reason”. For his second point, I will let him speak for himself. In his view:

“a worldview which includes a moral system based upon rationality rather than religious decree, a scientific understanding of the physical world based upon reason and evidence, and a fully-rounded population, appreciative of the arts, philosophy and literature as well as science and technology, is the means by which the human race will be capable of progressing.”

This was how I responded:

"I like the way you write. With energy and yet in a moderate, calm tone. Powerful and respectful of those you disagree with.

To me faith has three possible meanings, I think. One is what you say it is: a 'belief without evidence or reason'. In other words, I want to win the lottery tonight. And so I will. That is my belief.

But it could be something different, though similar: Again a 'belief without evidence or reason' - but here the evidence or reason that is lacking is not any possible kind or type of evidence or reason, but that type of evidence or reason demanded as sufficient by a particular epistemological community (i.e a western scientific one).

Thirdly, faith is much closer to 'trust'. I trust that my Mum will pick me up when she said she would because I know her, and I know that she loves me etc. Here her existence is presupposed and undoubted and a lot more besides. I think this was what Jesus meant by 'have faith'.

Odd besides, that the Protestants of the world should have to be tainted with brushes applied against the Magisterium and its pronouncements (i.e that made against against Galileo’s heliocentrism).

As a theist, to me, solar-system-wide heliocentrism is no problem at all. Why would it be? Surely it is humanism not theism that puts man at the centre of the world, if you know what I mean?

Still, I know what you mean about the shame that attaches to theism for many theists. Maybe if they were listened to and ridiculed less by those hostile to metaphysics and faith, this feature would be less apparent?

Your closing lines are sumptous and wonderful. Again, as a theist I have no issue with that optimistic vision, and nor does God, I'd suggest.

We must always return to the question: What is meant by this 'God' that we are denying the existence of?"

On the Iniquity of Our Young

2008-07-22T22:49:00.010+03:00

While I can see that it might smack of shameless self-promotion to post comments on my blog that I have left on other people's, I do think I want to do this sometimes. After all, most of what I write is elsewhere. Sometimes I find I express myself better when I engage with a particular 'lead', as it were, than when I write into the 'heart of light, the silence' in that kind of a way one does when one isn't focused in ones 'writing sights' on a particular addressee.

Rachel North, who survived the 7/7 bomb attacks on the London Underground, has written a book about her experiences, and also now contributes articles to leading UK Newspapers. While I could in no way agree with everything she wrote in connection to the recent knife crime incidents in the UK, I agreed that adults, not children, are ultimately responsible for our children being the monstrous, highly disappointing brutes they so often are (my words, not hers).

"It's certainly true that children learn how to live from the adults they are surrounded by. Often we teach them indirectly by our example to do the opposite of what we explicitly teach them to do in our pronouncements. That we then condemn them for not equalling the explicit standards that adult themselvs flout, is as underving of respect as is the lack of respect they show for these standards.

Believe it or not, but young people actually want to learn from adults whom they can admire and who can teach them boundaries and grant them a vision of what life is, and what it is for, namely creativity, understanding, peace and love.

The 'right' is correct in attributing the cause of youth anarchy to our general nihilistic cultural-spiritual implosion. That the right is unjustified in its cruel and hypocritical stance towards kids who are not being guided in life does not, I believe, negate this essential fact.

Wisdom from the 'right', compassion from the 'left', might come close to my approach, I suppose.

But it is time for us to move beyond inhibiting polarities of 'left' and 'right'- French revolutionary terms, I believe, highly out of date, I would have thought?

Or is politics, indeed, only about parties wanting to achieve and mantian power as our cynics maintain?

Thought for the Day

2008-07-21T17:15:00.001+03:00

Without God, it is embarrassing for men to love one another, unless they are gay.

The New Metaphysics

2008-07-20T13:32:00.007+03:00

If, on a whim, as Laura did all those years ago, you look at me and declare: ‘say something profound’, I might have very little to offer. I tend to freeze and flail when asked to perform to order. Of course, on the other hand, if pushed I might do one party trick I know and rattle off a certain Ronald Grimsley quote I love. I read it first while taking refuge in my temporary lodgings the evening before my doomed interview at Oxford, on account of which I was banished to Durham. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon was playing in the background.

When I read this:

‘The movement which began as a vigorous attack on Hegelian Metaphysics is, therefore, metaphysical in another sense, since the dethronement of an essentially conceptualising rationalism in favour of a more existential approach which accords greater importance to the testimony of affective human experience, is intended mainly as a way of compelling man towards a new awareness of being.’*

I burst out in fits of laughter, which entirely destroyed the amorphous ambience Waters had intended to convey. I think I found, and find, it as funny as I do, for three reasons. Firstly it is long and complex, and dextrous as a cobra on heat. Secondly, its metre is jaunty and springy, yet tight as leather trousers. While thirdly, it is actually brilliant, not at all verbose, even though it will be considered to be. On the contrary, every single word is necessary. What it says is also fascinating, besides: that existentialism, so often associated with atheism and materialism, can in fact be understood as metaphysical in a new way, and the reason why. I think it's possibly a strange thing about me that I will often laugh at something uproariously precisely because I admire it, or think it brilliant. I like to think this laughter might have been similar to, or the same as, what Nietzsche called ‘Golden laughter’. It is the opposite of derisory laughter, cynical laughter, the laughter of the vengeful. It is a little orgasm of the soul, as it encounters something that must be celebrated, now, and with more than just words.

And yet when people hear me laugh in this way they sometimes think my attitude is to mock, as opposed to take delight. This disjunction can be confusing and embarrassing.

* Apologies to the friends, families and associates of Professor Ronald Grimsley (RIP) if I quote him incorectly. I am recalling from memory.

Affairs Of State

2008-07-18T17:57:00.012+03:00

Recently, as one does of a Friday morning, I was wandering through the blogosphere, looking for things to read.

Eventually, I wound up at www.englandparliament.blogspot.com.

Here the case is put for an English Parliament to offset the new Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament, created in the early years of Blairdom. This case relates closely to the West Lothian complaint: that sense that the Celtic countries of the UK have an unreasonable influence over purely English affairs. I may write further about the West Lothian question at a later date, as well as the related proposals to establish an English Parliament for English issues. This morning, however, I was given to meditate on the deeper, broader question of the identity and constitution of my country as a whole. That is, England, the largest country of the as yet still, just about, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

I was fired up to this end after reading about how, in Chris Abbott’s opinion, Alan Duncan, the Shadow Trade Secretary, had been insufficiently concerned in a recent article he’s written, to safeguard and consider England’s interests, inclining too much to emphasise Britain’s identity above that of England’s.

Chris Abbott took umbridge with Duncan’s emphasis on the so-called ‘Regions’ of England. Yorkshire, said Duncan, was a region, when in fact, of course, well at least as far as England is concerned, as opposed to the European Union, it is a county (or three counties, to be precise). Then after quoting Duncan as saying this:

But we still need to do more to target areas of the UK that are failing to keep pace with the rest of the country.

Abbott replied: The UK - a country? Surely it's a Union of countries?

At which point, not disagreeing but feeling the Realm shattered and broken, supine on the floor beneath me, I felt encouraged to take up me ‘pen’ (if you see what I mean). I then proceeded, it might be supposed, to have ‘gone off on one’, as the curious idiom would have it:

Yes the UK is a union of countries, not regions. Just as England is a union of counties; and counties, so one hopes, a union of cities, towns and villages, each of which are unions, or so one hopes, of neighbourhoods and families - which are, again, or so one hopes, unions of individuals who don't hate each other too much.

This, to me, is the natural, healthy order of things. No I'm not saying 'There is no such thing as Society', but we do need, I feel, to return to our roots, to the familiar, to what is most at home about ourselves.

The UK is essentially two things: The shared face that our four countries show to the world, and a statement of our common bonds of cultural affinity, bonds that understand themselves as rooted in the lands of the British Isles and united around a common allegiance to the Crown.

To me The Union Jack is a Monarchical expression of the Union of the British peoples around the Crown. It is not the flag of England, and obviously not the flag of Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland (though these nations (except Wales, alas) express themselves through it). There really should be no tensions or confusions regarding this matter.

Personally, I have no problem being both English and British. But I am not Welsh, nor Scottish nor Northern Irish. Indeed I would expect a person from these countries to get upset with my presumptiousness if I ever claimed that I was.

But the problem is, if you take away my right to be English, this will mean either that I will have to become Welsh or Scottish or Northern Irish OR that all of our British peoples will also have been deprived of their rights to identify themselves with their respective countries.

Is this what Europe wants, I wonder?

Actually, my comment has not yet been approved. Maybe the webmaster thinks I’m some kind of nutter.

Or maybe he’s a Republican. Not sure that that should matter too much, though. I would question the relevance of this issue to the basic bond of English patriotism that we share. After all, the role of the Crown is to defend the laws and liberties of the British Peoples, so Monarchists and Republicans should always be able at the very least to agree that what is most important in our form of government is that it discharge this duty to our freedoms and our dignity.

As for why I would prefer Monarchy to a Republic, that is a whole separate question. But it is perhaps instructive to remember that the last time we experimented with a Republic, the experiment came to an end not because the Monarchist forces wrested the country back from the Roundheads by force, but because the Army, fearing anarchy, asked Charless II to come back. And even before this, let us not forget, Cromwell himself had been offered the Crown, though he declined it, assuming its functions in all but name. Our innate preference for Monarchy has already been shown – and this preference, despite the best efforts of a scurrilous and vapid media to sell newspapers through scandalous reportage, seems, despite all modernist suppositions that it should not have endured, to have nonetheless endured.

On the other hand, maybe Chris Abbott didn't post my comment because he wants to see a dissolution of the Union?

Professor Tillotson

2008-07-15T22:25:00.006+03:00

I have a friend in Santa Cruz, California, a virtual friend, whom I have neither spoken to nor seen. Yet now and again we have very stimulating 'finger chats', courtesy of Yahoo Messenger.

She calls me handsome a great deal, and the like. Ironic, given the dearth of visual stimuli we share, though it's very welcome anyway. I don't normally get such compliments from the ladies, he said as a matter of fact.

Anyway, narcissism aside, we had just got onto the subject of transgenderism and what it was. Then she had to fly. The next day she asked me to remind her what we'd been talking about, but I had to fly. But not before suggesting that she write me an essay. About what, she said. About transgenderism and what she thought of it. She'd always seemed interested in gender issues, after all. She said, ok Professor Tillotson, but you need to be more focussed. So I gave it some thought and, wanting to give her some choice, came up with these nine tasks.

You will note that the concept 'Transgenderism' is painted with a think, broad brush. I mean everything that challenges conventional, traditional, gender-role, mission statements.

Give an overview of how feminism in American culture has changed in its ideology and expression since the 1960s.
How have women in America reacted to the various ways in which men have tried, or have not tried, to respond to feminist critiques against them and to change, or not change, their behaviours towards women, both in the workplace and in the 'dating game'. Do women want pre 1960s men back?
Does the American homosexual community in America have an agenda other than to merely not be discriminated against and oppressed?
To what extent do modern American women want to dominate men, as opposed to just be their equals.
Why don't women make the first move more than they do?
Why is it both impolite and so often ineffective for a man to ask a woman for sexual relations directly, as opposed to ask her for sex indirectly through courtship rituals and discourse?
In what ways do women not understand men.
What do women want? (Not very original I know).
Give an account of the reasons why the birthrate is dropping amongst Caucasian women in the Western World.

It goes without saying that if anyone out there wants to write me an essay on any of the above they should go right ahead. My email is on my profile page.

Let's Talk About Sex

2008-07-12T01:09:00.007+03:00

"There are a lot of female sex writers these days. Honestly, I don’t know why. All I know is that for me, sex shows us who we really are." From The Reverse Cowgirl

Although expressing a common perception, it’s interesting that of all the avenues granting us insight into the human condition, sex is often considered the most important.

“Understand sex, my good man, and you have grasped the very root of the matter.”

I have a friend who believes it’s very important to talk about sex. He believes sexual energies emerge from the very heart and center of who we are as persons. On his reckoning, if we don’t talk about ourselves in sexual terms, we’ re not really talking about ourselves at all.

Crikey.

What do I think of all this, then?

Firstly, I’m confused. I’m not sure if Reverse Cowgirl wants to imply that nothing but sex can show us who we are; or if she feels that sex must be included as an important, but not the only, ingredient in any method of understanding we might employ to illuminate humanitas. Maybe these distinctions are not relevant to her. Maybe I’m ‘splitting hairs’.

But anyway, what is sex? I’m not asking as an essentialistic, natural theologian might, eager to move you through circuitous pathways of rhetoric and suggestion to an already established, waiting conclusion that sex is what I, what Nature or what God deem it to be, not what you feel it to be.

I mean, what is sex, existentially, in the experience and architecture of the self? Leaving aside every gloomy, moral consideration of the age old question: "What is to be done with our genitals", what place, what role, what potency, what importance: sex and the self?

Even though I’ve narrowed the question down a bit, I’m still not sure we know what we’re talking about. What do I mean by this ‘sex’ that is relevant, existentially, to our lives? Am I talking only about acts of genital interaction with others or oneself, and our fantasies, the sex we’d like to have with others but can’t (too unattractive, too shy, too incompetent, the other’s unavailable) or won’t (our own moral compass). Or, on the other hand, am I talking about a certain order of energy in the body, something that is always there, which combines with other energies in the body and self at all times, or, as some might suppose, is the only real energy of the self, which only pretends sometimes to exist under other names?

If sex is more than our genital deeds, after all, we can no longer maintain that there can be some people who do not ‘have sex’. Even if your celibacy achieves the high, exacting standards set for it by the Magisterium of The Roman Catholic Church, and you don’t even masturbate (something progressives confidently tell us is impossible), on this reckoning, one is still having sex because sexual energy, and the relevance it possesses in the self, is still having you, moulding you, shaping you. Hurrah! You need no longer feel exiled and banished by the morays of the modern! Even you –involuntarily sexual celibate that you are or adventurous climber of the mountain heights of ascetic equanimity that you have become – even you are having sex, deny it as you may.

I am no sexpert. My thoughts on sex are highly subjective. Oddly enough, this seems somehow appropriate. The heart of sexuality, after all, what Gurdjieff called the ‘sex centre’ and other Asian physiologists call the 'sex chakra', is tangled in amidst our digestive tract and lavatorial infrastructure. Like our stomach aches and customs of egestion, it is an intimate, private affair; of little importance to the public weal – despite the contrary impression its status in the public imagination and public discourse seems to give it in these post-Freudian, oh so liberated, funky, dunky days.

Sex used to be done in private while prayer used to be done in public. Now sex is done in public. Even in the privacy of ones boudoir it is done in public, given the extent to which an obsessiveness to conform to media decreed templates of sexual convention has invaded our psyches. While prayer, if it is done at all, is increasingly done in private, according to a shattered randomness reinforcing the egotistical isolation that spirituality had originally sought to correct. The “anarchy of individual belief”, my lecturer at Durham Colin Crowder used to call it, quoting somebody else I believe.

Things sure do change. Perhaps in the future eating will be the new taboo. People will take their spaghetti bolognaise into the water closet with them so as not to be seen. They will gather to gossip and exchange pleasantries as they relieve themselves.

When I reacted to Reverse Cowgirl’s line, it was because of what I imagined she implied about the range of human identity; namely that it doesn’t extend that far beyond the sexual, if at all, except perhaps through pretentious flourishings of sublimated dishonesty and repression (her thinking perhaps allied to the old “everything must be dumbed down and demystified in the name of sex” imperative). Maybe she didn’t mean this. No matter. I’m sure a lot of people do. You don’t have to be unintelligent to think like this. Why, you can even be a highly accomplished figure in science and academe and maintain that all we are is sexual, and nothing but. That our sole meaning and purpose in life is to fuck and keep going something the purpose of which is to fuck and keep going, so that it can fuck.

Do I mind being thought of as a sexual being? Why, not at all, my good lady. While it is true that sexual happiness can hardly be said to have been particularly visible in my life so far, I don’t think my portion of sexual dissatisfaction has been that remarkable or outstanding. As I believe it has been said, far more people are bored by, far less people satisfied with, the sex they get than one might suppose. While the existence of involuntary celibacy and the prevalence of misery and heartache occasioned by the often maleficent effects of sexual relationships gone awry, can together speak of a lack of access to sexual experience, and a darkness and deceitfulness wrapped up in sex, moreover, that our society’s concerted efforts to trumpet sex as the ultimate pinnacle of human meaning and fulfillment tends rather too often to obscure.

I am not, I feel obliged to protest, anti-sex. I don’t feel I have had sufficient reason to be. A lot of people suffer from sex more than I do. Either they lack it more than I have (I speak here of interactive sex, not just masturbation, that solitary consolation). Or they are hurt by it more than I have been. While I do not believe that attitudes in support of celibacy will necessarily reveal an underlying hostility to sex in general, I think they sometimes can. Speaking personally, I don’t have that requisite degree of bitterness about sex, of ressentiment as Nietzsche would put it, to have become, as I believe some others have become, someone who wants to put sex into cold storage and banish it from human experience.

I am, so I suddenly hallucinate, being perceived right now as someone who is being defensive about sex. Let us call him my hypothetical reader.

You protest too much. Why say you are not anti-sex unless subconsciously you know that you are anti-sex?

I don’t really understand how I can wriggle out of that one; how I can escape from that pin fixing me, wriggling to that wall, other than to say that I’m not defensive about not being anti-sex.

I happen to suspect that the reason my hypothetical reader supposes I’m being defensive is that he and I actually have a disagreement, not about whether or not sex is good, but about whether or not sex is all that we are. He thinks it is, or at least that sex is what we are ‘most essentially’. I do not. He sniffs out and senses that this is the root of the matter. That ultimately we are disagreeing not about physics but metaphysics. He doesn’t want to accuse me of having metaphysical beliefs, however. That would be too easy. He knows I have them already. And he knows that I’d only plead guilty if he did. He wants to go to the next step. To his understanding, it’s not possible to have such metaphysical beliefs and at the same time be positive about sex. Therefore, discerning my spiritual anchoring, he takes the metaphysical commitment for granted and leaps to his inference, and conclusion, that I am anti-sex, and asks me knowingly if I am. He is so certain, so confident that I am anti-sex, moreover (whatever anti-sex means – hang on, that’s another quagmire), that he won’t take no for an answer. Assisted in his own mind by the suspicion that I am uptight and nervous and fidgeting, distractedly, as I write this, he concludes that I must be in denial. He doesn’t believe me when I say that I’m not anti-sex. So he plays his unanswerable masterstroke, and tells me that I don’t know my own mind because I am governed by my subconscious, a subconscious that is unknown to me and that pulls my strings from within. Oddly enough, even though he is not me, and so for that reason even more at a remove from my subconscious than I am, he knows the contents of this occult, esoteric me better than I do. Remarkable! He is the master of my dreams. Should I give him my money?

Let’s talk about sex.

Ok, why not. But to me sex is just a part of who I am. For this reason, alas, I am not going to be able to talk about it as if nothing else mattered, as if it and its permutations and possibilities are not always linked in to and informed by aspects of my self, considerations about myself, that are not sexual. That are, for example, emotional, intellectual or spiritual. While I accept that, yes, one might want to maintain that these words merely refer to qualities that are but dishonest sublimations of the same sexual sex that we see vividly displayed in empirical matter and expressed in our erotic deeds, this is not what I maintain. Yes, everything about us is inter-connected. But that doesn’t mean that everything about us is identical with what the Neo-Platonists amongst us might want, rather derisorily, to refer to as our lowest common denominator.

Yes, I know, I must be a boring person to talk to about sex. Sigh.

The belief that it is in this way identical, that everything that is crucially important about ourselves is sex, and a sex, besides, that is resolutely materialistic and stubbornly unsubtle or untranscendental, seems to be pretty widespread these days. As I might put it to my dear friend Lee, possibly laughing in a way only he would understand, with respect to the belief that sex is God and Lord of all: ‘There’s a lot of it about’.

I’m not sure after all that, that I'm any closer to answering the question of what sex is. But I feel at least pretty sure that I know what it is not. And that what it is not is everything.

Something of a cliché, you might retort. But if that is the case, and we all know this to be true, why do we talk about sex in the ways that we do?

General Synod

2008-07-08T11:20:00.008+03:00

Currently my brother is attending the annual General Synod of the Church of England at the University of York. My brother is not a bishop or anything like that. On the other hand his 14 years of experience as vicar have set him in good enough stead to attend this year as a humble member of the assembly.

This year it discusses if women should become bishops, that is, holders of the most senior positions in the Anglican Church, except for the two Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and The Queen, who is Supreme Governor (and a woman, funnily enough).

If you live in the UK you will probably know about the Synod already. Our media tends to drop its customary lack of interest in the spiritual health and affairs of the nation when some controversial point affecting the Church of England can be set upon to incite scandal or reflection on its allegedly beleaguered fate and advancing decline.

But what interests me is how utterly bizarre and bonkers, if not sinister, this must all seem to your average, everyday post-Christian. Their knowledge of the gospel, after all, floats somewhere between non-existent and a stable, a star, some shepherds and three Kings gathered around a manger.

Are Christians aware, I wonder, of what these people must think about a gospel they know nothing about when all that they’re told about it by their favourite media outlets is that the principal institution in the land subscribing to it doesn’t like gays, doesn’t want to employ gays, and doesn’t want women to break through any threatening glass ceilings?

Don’t worry. I am not advocating censorship of the press to advance some rosier, less prurient Canterburian presentation. I set my colours firmly to the mast of our hard won, post-medieval liberties of conscience. I do not seek to imitate the authoritarian ambitions of certain other Godly paths I could mention.

Nor, just to let you know, do I believe, as a Christian (of a kind), that there is no place for a discussion of sexuality, homosexuality or the role of the ‘sacred feminine’ in Church debates.

All that confuses and perplexes me is how Christians have allowed it to come to pass that their faith can be seen by the wider, general, unbelieving public as something primarily, if not only, preoccupied with such secondary and, relatively speaking, irrelevant matters such as is homosexuality wrong and should women celebrate the Eucharist.

Just as I have no problem at all understanding why someone might not believe in the existence of God if they have had no experiences of what they take to be God, especially in light of the obvious sufferings of the world; so I have no problem understanding that if you are an atheist, or if not then a believer in some self-styled divinity of your own devising, you might very well, according to the lights of your own notions of virtue, see no reason why the Church's teachings on homosexuality, for example, can hold any water at all; how they could be anything other than a mere ideological justification for an ancient, hysterical homophobia.

Christian morality is morality for Christians. That is a logical utterance that seems robust enough for me. And when I say Christian morality I mean Christian morality, not Christian sexual morality – which is a mere outworking and expression of Christian morality, as is Christian business morality, Christian martial morality and Christian table manners for that matter.

Asking or expecting a non-Christian world to understand or embrace Christian morality without being Christians first, is a bit like criticizing players of baseball for fouling up the performance of cricket when they are not even trying to play the game.

First invite people to become Christians. First explain to them, present to them, show to them, demonstrate for them the glory and splendour and majesty and freedom that resides in the Gospel of Christ. Only then, if they become Christians, can they be expected to behave like Christians. Before this point, what justification can there be for Judgement? You tell me.

Why moralize to the outsiders when they don’t know what your’re talking about.

To Hijab or not to Hijab

2008-07-07T14:17:00.010+03:00

Legally, Kuwait does not oblige women, Kuwaiti or ex-pat, Muslim or non-Muslim, to wear the veil, or as it is said, the hijab. By the hijab, I mean one of three things.

Wearing only a headscarf:

Wearing a headscarf and abaya or long robe:

Wearing, in addition to such a total body covering, a face covering to cover either everything or everything but the eyes:

The legality of veillessness is one of the ways Kuwait, while certainly the second most conservative country in the Gulf, is different from Saudi Arabia, its larger, considerably more restrictive neighbour to the south.

Nevertheless, most Kuwaiti women choose to wear the veil – of one kind or another at least some of the time. To an extent, this is because 99.98% of Kuwaitis are Islamic*; and as we know, Islam favours the hijab, especially in its more conservative expressions.

But Islam cannot be the only reason. If it were many Islamic, Lebanese, Egyptian and Syrian ladies in Kuwait, as well as a noticeable minority of Kuwaitis, who proudly and unself-consciously display their hair, would be considered, and would consider themselves, to be making anti-Islamic gestures. But they are not. Nor, I’m sure, would they be allowed to make such gestures if such a semiotic meaning attached to them.

Some Islamic militants, of course, think it’s anti-Islamic if women, especially Muslim women, don’t wear the veil. But this is not a mainstream, Kuwaiti perception. Yes, not wearing one indicates a less than all-consuming religious fervour; yes, it might be thought, ideally, you really should wear one. But that’s not the same as decreeing that if you don’t, you’re rejecting or attacking Islam. For now, despite the advancing rise of religious conservatism in Kuwait - reflected in the recent acquisition of an additional 50 seats in the Parliament by religiously motivated MPs - a perhaps surprising degree of relative freedom, not only in matters of clothing, exists in Kuwait. Especially if one considers the misconceptions some in the West might have about how conservative it really is here. It is very conservative. I would never doubt that. But it’s not that conservative.

Women can drive, women can vote**, women can walk the streets alone, women can sit with men who are not their relatives, and talk to them in public. In private schools, girls and boys can be educated together, and classes are mixed at the State University (though this may change). Freedoms exist that while unremarkable in most of the world, are deprived women just a few kilometers across the border.

Recently, I talked over the question of hijab with a charming, engaging and Islamic, Somali woman whom I’ve recently been fortunate enough to befriend. Outside of work, she does not wear the veil, except occasionally. I’d heard that Somalia was very religious. So I was a little surprised about this.

Actually, I didn’t ask why she, a devout Muslim, doesn’t always wear hijab, as that would have seemed rude. It was she herself who made illuminating remarks about why women, given their freedom not to wear hijab, nevertheless do. Clearly, many women wear it for religious and cultural reasons which they choose voluntarily. As I understand it, the rationale seems to lie with the understanding that a woman’s beauty belongs to her husband. It shouldn’t be devalued by being shared between too many eyes in a circumstance, one supposes, that compromises its scarcity and therefore value. If the woman is not yet married, then her beauty exists for no man, except, innocently, her male relatives at home. The veil is an extension of the home’s walls, formally delineating the private, as opposed to public sphere. On the other hand, and unavoidably related to this, is that a woman’s beauty is understood, reasonably enough I suppose, as an inducement to male sexual covetousness. While Islam is relatively free of the specifically Neo-Platonic, anti-carnal associations that have regularly pitted Spirit against Flesh in frenzies of insanity in the West, Islam does have a keen appreciation of the vigour and zeal of male, sexual lust; and most relevantly, its distracting potential when it comes to the male’s choice between congress and God. Notions that it is the responsibility of the male, inside his own conscience, to restrain and order his lusts, in spite of female fleshly appearances, being relatively unemphasised, it has thus come to recoil as a duty upon women to assist the uncontrollable in controlling themselves and directing their attentions to God, where they belong.

A second reason my friend suggested for wearing the veil was fashion. Some of the headscarves can exude a stunning elegance, especially when set off by the right kind of hypnotic, facial beauty, accentuated by the very concealment that surrounds it. Some headscarves and robes come adorned with precious stones, moreover; while cursory internet searches reveal the many coloured options for headscarves on the market.

The final reason was one that had never occurred to me, but that is striking in its obviousness. Some women wear the veil, they assume the means of legitimate, public concealment, not to minimize but to maximize their freedom of movement and expression. In a culture, like every culture, where, if you are a woman, eyes can conspire to keep tabs on you, a hijab in return, as long as it be sufficiently concealing, can conspire to promote an invisibility of a quite different kind.

* Out of a population of 1.1 million Kuwaiti citizens (figures vary) there are, apparently, only 250 Kuwaiti Christians. These are drawn from a handful of families that converted to Christianity when Kuwait was under British control, whose past choice of religious conversion, a fait accompli as it were, is now respected.

** Kuwaiti women were granted the vote in Kuwait for the first time in April 2006.

Not Used To Boasting

2008-07-02T10:39:00.012+03:00

“Jonathan is experienced and proficient at improving students competency in English to the standard required for University study, be that study in the field of the Humanities or Business. By utilizing a strongly learner-centered approach, he is aware of the importance of flexibility in targeting his teaching to the aspirations and needs of his students. Above all, by sharpening and refining their powers of expression, he wants his students to grow in intellectual and analytical self-confidence so that they will excel as much as they are able, in both their University studies and the workplace beyond.” Jonathan, 2008

"In the world as it should be, men would not chase women. Women would chase men. Men would chase the Kingdom of Heaven." Jonathan, 1991.

"The problem with you, Mr Tillotson, is you need to live in a more gracious age than this." Father Anthony Meredith, SJ, 1994 (quoted from memory).

Recently, I've had some news. This news is still secret from my Kuwaiti boss. I have about five bosses in my company by the way, but it’s the Kuwaiti one who pays. The news won’t be secret much longer, however. Even though the chance of his reading my blog is quark-sized, amongst the few who care about my Most Royal Obscureness, word begins to circulate. I have a future and it isn’t him. This news might wing its way to him somehow.

Before long he will need to be told. He needs his notice period. The bureaucratic wheels of residency and work visa transference, which I have worried, possibly without cause, he might obstruct - hence my delay in informing him - need to begin their croaking, labyrinthine circuits. Actually, I’ve nothing against him at all. I have always found him rather charming, the two times I’ve met him. He has treated me well. But in the Game of the Gulf, so I sense, when in doubt, fortune favours the silent.

The words that I recently wrote, above in italics, are for some PR literature for my future employer. It felt weird writing it. It always feels weird, having to sell myself. I do not like doing it. I can’t help feeling it is in poor taste. But here, as in interviews if I want to stand a chance of succeeding, I had to force myself.

Actually, in this case the energy and zeal I mustered to get my new job surprised me. Typically, my efforts to secure work are less than half-hearted. Begrudged, weary expressions of resignation to wage slave reality are usually my style. Might it be, can it be believed: after seven years of not wanting to be a Tefl teacher, am I finally coming round to the idea?

There might be some truth in this. I’m not sure. Let me sit on that thought awhile. In any case, do not take this fancy as a cancellation of my invitation to you to suggest, or better provide, rosier, more meaningful avenues for my talents and potentialities – howsoever you may perceive them. As I have written before, I’m happier to be bought than to sell myself.

Where did I acquire my aesthetic, visceral, aversion to boasting. I realize what a feminised psychologist would say, dripping, oozing matronisation: You lack self-esteem. You should be more confident. You were not loved enough as a child. Don’t be so wet.

Whatever the status of these presumptious, intimidating observations, what interests me are the cultural, intellectual influences that might underwrite, shore up, justify my, admittedly, existential reluctance to boast, to loudly sing my own praises; especially to sing them where they belong to be sung, or so we’re told: in the two fields of endeavour that are supposed to matter the most to male egos keen to reproduce their genes and maximize their impact: before the faces of ladies, and in the search for employment.

I like to think I get some justification for what I like to consider not my weakness but my attachment to a gracious, sublimely higher life, from the life of Jesus Christ. Though clearly certain, if not arrogant, about his own importance when pressed, in his behaviour he was very humble; both preaching and enacting examples of altruistic service towards others (albeit a service that made him happy as well; well, until Gethsemane). The boasts he did make, when he made them (expressed most repetitively in the Gospel of John), tended to be made after he’d performed some outrageously cool miracle or delivered one of his heart warming wisdom speeches, stunning his audience into an imploring curiosity. He didn’t market himself as someone who should either be taken on trust, or found interesting to the exclusion of others. On the contrary, that we might be interested in and make space for others, was exactly what he wanted; that we should hunger and long for the happiness and joy of others, as God, with whom it is true he identified, hungers and longs for ours; for the happiness of his creations, their liberation from the dark consequences of their own self-chosen, self-enclosing, selfishness.

In a defence of myself against the accusation of betraying a wetness ill-suited to our shamelessly self-centred age, beyond Jesus, I would defer generally to a long tradition of thought in Christendom; a tradition which at least in its explicit intentions has sought to promulgate and promote ideals of self-sacrificing service and love. I acknowledge that such thought has not always, or even often, materialized in practical action; that charges of hypocrisy and failure to deliver are absolutely justified on occasions. But not on all occasions, I would hasten to insist. What we should remember about hypocrisy, moreover, which many Westerners, resentful and disenchanted with their own culture, seem not to want to see, is that at least hypocrisy reveals the existence of some standards, even if they are not kept. Not being hypocritical, not failing to be who you aspire to be, as a culture, is all very easy if what you aspire to be is exactly what you already are, or even less.

I tangentialise, if that's a word. Should it be? I think so.

What I want to say in conclusion is that I dislike asserting and promoting my qualities in the abstract - by speaking of or referring to them (whatever they may be). I would prefer, unselfconsciously, to just show them, by just embodying them, to those who can or wish to see them. It is not for me to relate to you my value, whatever it may be. It is for you to perceive it, insofar as it is valuable to you. That goes as much, I feel, for a woman who might want to mate with me, as for someone who might want to give me money in exchange for some activity on my part.

If this leads you to suppose I should want to live in a very different world, then, in which, amongst other features, women were more proactive in the courtship processes ( there is no modern equivalent for 'courtship') and employers were more upfront in selling themselves to potential employees, whom they would conclude from their own perceptions were suitable for them, you would be right.

Such a world, sublime, gracious, abundant, sacrificing no standards of excellence on its altars of co-operation; peaceful and advancing according to a higher dialectic; in which the interactions of opposites occur through love, not war. This is the world that I come from, if I might be mythological for a moment. The world I want to see.

Diversions

2008-06-29T10:57:00.004+03:00

Questions taken from Reluctant Blogger's website

WHAT WAS I DOING TEN YEARS AGO?

I was living in Tooting Bec, London, with my school friend, Adam Lidster. I had recently split up with my girlfriend, a super market check out girl and mother of a two year old boy, who lived in a somewhat medieval looking village in Suffolk. I was working for a backstreet company making display cases for shopping malls. Most enchantingly, no joke, this could involve me pulling a gypsy wagon by hand from the Oval all the way to Covent Garden through, and in spite of, the morning traffic.

WHAT ARE 5 THINGS ON YOUR LIST TO DO TODAY?

I don’t keep such lists, but I’ll not be a pedantic twit. To have lunch. To hang around the office, in which I have no work to do, surfing the internet, drinking coffee. To organise papers about sundry, official matters relating to next year. To go see a flat in a colourfully named place – Mahboula - in Southern Kuwait. To consider the question of dinner.

THINGS I WOULD DO IF I BECAME A BILLIONAIRE

Consider at last that Justice had been done!

No, seriously. Provisionally, I would feel very happy, indeed! I would not immediately give up my job but certainly would, soon enough. I would not, I hope, tell anyone I’d miraculously become a billionaire for at least a few weeks, except for a financial advisor. I would not, I think, want to give away too much of the actual capital (though I might change my mind). Rather, so I could give away permanently, I would want, annually, to give away most of the interest earnt on the money. I would give money to people I admired and felt needed the money, to specific individuals in dire need and to humanitarian causes (as directly as possible. I distrust charities and the Governments to whom they sometimes have to give through). Possibly, I might want to found an unashamedly elitist University, open only to those who can score highly according not only to intellectual, but moral and spiritual, criteria. My own personal lifestyle wouldn’t change much, though presumably I wouldn’t have to worry any more about vulgar, boring things like ‘financial security’.

FIVE PLACES I HAVE LIVED

Cambridge. 69 Barton Road in Newnham, near Grantchester.
The majestic, ethereal city of Durham, Seat of the Prince Bishop’s. Place of congregation of noble, undecadent spirits. Before Elberry’s time, just.
London. Tooting Bec, Tooting Broadway. Islington
Slovakia. Bratislava, including the very famous and imposing Petrazalka.
Kuwait. Salmiya, above a bakery, a toyshop, many Indians and Bangladeshis, and a very busy road.

THREE OF MY BAD HABITS

Not sure I’m qualified to say…how about –

Eating too much
Not having enough sex
Eating sardines direct from the tin; hating housework, generally

FIVE JOBS I HAVE HAD

Wine waiter
Barman
Gypsy wagon puller
Telesalesman (less than a week)
Teacher of English

HOW DID YOU NAME YOUR BLOG?

It is supposed, I believe, to be some kind of conceivably pretentious aspiration to live in the eyes of eternity.

Sisyphus

2008-06-27T19:04:00.002+03:00

Reading today on the Reluctant Blogger, I came across an affecting piece about suicide. Reluctant is right that suicide is taboo. Talking about it is not easy – well, except to suicidal people who on the whole rather like to talk about it, often too much, their burdened, less miserable audience might feel.

Society’s default position on suicide is that it is ‘selfish’. This fashionably modern defect is the vestige of a historical scorn for the deed that, regrettably, used to be far more severe. Failure to be buried on consecrated ground, you know. You can’t get more resounding an expression of contempt than that.

Setting aside the outstanding, logical difficulties presented by an act of self-destruction being understood as an act in service of the self, other objections can be mentioned. Reluctant invited feedback and perspectives on suicide. The comments are thoughtful, touching and insightful. I recommend them for anyone interested in the subject.

I added me ‘two cents’, as it is said. Where did that phrase come from?

'Suicide is a selfish act, but this, in my opinion, is because the suicidal state of mind that leads to it is so often that of a mind inaccessibly cut off from the capacity to feel its living, relational connections to other people.

When you are the only reality that you can feel, it is to be expected that you would behave in a selfish way.

So I'd say that while suicide is selfish (and depression itself a selfish emotional state), this doesn't mean I don't feel a deep, fully forgiving compassion towards those who wish to, or do, commit it.

The atomisation of human society into isolated individuals bereft of a sufficiently organic, shared sense of belonging to a community, is, I would say, the fundamental background reason for the possibility of suicide.

The wealth of reports from those who say they are glad that they didn't commit suicide after wanting to, together with psychiatrists belief that ambiguity and ambivalence of resolve very often characterise the suicidal mindset prior to the deed, tells me that suicide intervention is a justifiable policy, albeit, I accept, complicated in its implications.

Pathetic as it may sound, my suspicion is that suicidal people just aren't getting the right amount of the right type of love in their life. Medication and analysis is often incapable of providing such love, alas. This is not to blame their friends or families, however, for not loving them, as being loved and feeling that you are loved can be very different things. Besides, love should be more readily available and present in society in general.

Another interesting perspective is to think of suicide in terms of the age old tension and conflict between the 'ego' and the 'true self' - a dialectic usually, but not necessarily, conceived of in spiritual terms.

The ego, our superficial sense of self, our personality, built from our projections, ambitions, fears and attachments is, I would suggest, universally dysfunctional. Spirituality is the quest to transcend this and access the timeless, deeper, unconditioned self which is only love, only peace, only joy. I think many people try to access this purer, more authentic psychic ground through activities such as, for example, alcohol, drugs, the passionate love of art, political or religious fanaticism, extreme sports, orgasm and the rhapsodies of romantic love -things which unite them to something larger than themselves.

We are trying to escape ourselves in order to find ourselves, because something in us tells us that this - our humdrum everyday ego-bound, conflicted, consciousness- is not all that we are.

Understood in this context, I see that suicidal people, then, are not so very different. The difference is a question of the degree of the desire to escape, not a different kind of desire.

Since atomised societies tend to increase ego strengthening, narcissistic tendencies, this confirms, to me, my original thoughts about atomisation and suicide.

This is a really sympathetic, thoughtful post of yours. Tragically, yes, suicide is taboo."

Ok, more like two dollars, than two cents.

Yosemite

2008-06-25T22:19:00.005+03:00

Alas, I didn’t get to see any bears in Yosemite. Or rather, I did but only ones climbing in an out of car windows on the promotional videos shown to alarm new guests at the Curry Village camping ground.

It felt almost military, assiduously obeying the finer details of how to keep these invisible bears at bay. Absolutely nothing to be left in your car; no food, no toiletries, no drinks, no trash. All food and odorous items to be stored overnight in lockers outside the tent door, only water to be taken inside. Most exciting. It felt hardy and noble to be camping, too. Even though I had to insist, for an extra 30 dollars, so I could get at least some sleep, that my tent - equipped like all the tents with bouncy mattress and bed - be a heated one.

Despite the bear disappointment, Yosemite was definitely worth the drive. All the sickly sweet, tourist guff you’re liable to encounter about the ‘Spirit of Yosemite’. It’s all true. That said, if you want to see the waterfalls - a major highlight – you need to go, as I did, before the summer, when the mountain snows haven’t finished melting. Best to go, too, during the week, unless you have a particular desire for human beings amidst your cliffs and redwoods.

The Gay Misogynist?

2008-06-04T09:18:00.004+03:00

I was nervous about going into one of the gay bars on Castro’s main street. It looked crowded and was pumping, raw and raucous. I could hardly see inside. Homophobic ghouls whispered fearsome scenarios in my ears.

Starbucks had no free seats, so before long I swallowed my fear and propped myself up at the red, brightly lit bar. The male staff’s attire conformed to the rippling, muscle-hugging stereotype I had expected to find.

I looked round and noticed the customers were young and predominantly, but not exclusively, male. Were the ladies lesbians, I wondered? This might fit the location. Or were they straight and keen to escape the otherwise inescapable gaze of desirous male eyes (such as my own, unluckily for them)? Or, less drastically, were they here because gay men are ‘nice’ and like to, or at least can, talk about shopping and makeup and men? Or maybe, if straight, the bar was just nearby, or they were visiting friends. In any case, unlike the men, they were not kissing each other – if that means anything.

A couple of young women, pretty indeed, sat next to me. On my account? - I wondered, in a wild moment. But they made no efforts to engage me, nor I them, as the intensity of their mutual involvement fenced me out - as it did not the barman, whom they would regularly embrace and call ‘darling’. A part of my brain had wondered if women in a gay bar might be more forthcoming than normally at initiating conversations with men...or with me at least.

I sat there drinking four pints of beer, remembering I was not in Kuwait, staring at people in an innocently vacant way, feeling pretty good about things, wondering occasionally if I should read my book.

A bar three doors up the road was very different. The crowd was older - middle aged- and exclusively male. Again I sat at the bar, this time next to an elderly, moustachioed gentleman, primed in the sixties I should think. Like Tiresias from the café, he lamented the passage of time and the decline of The Castro. I remarked that it was bizarre (for me) to be in a bar packed only with men, gay pornography aflame on overhead TVs. You should have seen it in the early days, in the 70s, he replied. Large screen performances of harder stuff than that, the audience sucking and fucking festively beneath; not timidly reconciled, as now, to the respectability and acceptability that the victory of gay rights has wrought.

Clearly, there is no pleasing some people.

He explained that the other bar I’d been in was for a younger, mixed crowd, that a generational gap within the gay community explained the differences in atmosphere. Whereas the men next door were younger, camper, more ‘feminine’ – closer it might be said to the stereotypical gay boy; here, men were still ‘men’ in everything other than their sexual preferences, being unashamedly masculine, if not butch.

This was confirmed by a man standing to my left. Though he added another observation I found very interesting.

Nowadays, San Francisco is ‘run by women’. These women, because of their newfound self-confidence and power, are in a position to demand from men certain characteristics and attributes. These, on the whole, are feminine, and the heterosexual male majority, keen as ever to do what it takes to seduce women, agree to do and be what it takes. In consequence, many straights are now more feminised even than the camp gays next door! Only amongst the men of this bar, he suggested, could true masculinity be found. Only amongst those who don’t have to, because they don’t need to, mould themselves to the designs of the new woman.

An interesting perspective. And where could I find a lesbian bar, I asked?

They are around, he answered. I would be welcome but I won’t find any men there, gay or straight. As for the gays, they don’t mix much with the lesbians. They work together on questions of rights and social issues, of course, but that’s about it.

The Castro

2008-05-28T11:23:00.006+03:00

The last time I’d visited the Castro area of San Francisco in 2002 I sang “Sing" by Travis in a gay Karaoke bar. I have no idea if the clientele automatically supposed I was gay. I’m not sure how many straight men tend to go, alone, to gay bars of an afternoon and behave in this way.

It must have been off one of the side streets, up the hill. I had no idea where it was when I walked along the main road, half-heartedly trying to remember.

With an irony that makes one choke, the Castro is often called the ‘Mecca’ of the gay community. Rainbow flags, tactile male couples, gay sex shops, including one boasting a six foot phallus, clearly mark out the area as a unique part of the city.

I sat down at an outside café and opened a conversation with a middle aged woman. Well, I say woman but I wasn’t really sure. Nevertheless, there was something definitive about the hairstyle and lips, and the hat she wore, as well as the boots, that left me feeling that even if she wasn’t a woman, she wanted to be taken as one. Such suspicions were confirmed when I saw her chest protruding beneath her shirt.

I wanted to know if she lived in the Castro (she did) and, as one does, asked her what she ‘did’. She told me she bought and restored old vehicles and pointed proudly to the 1972 BMW parked nearby. I mentioned my mother’s Morris Minor, which is slightly older than I am, and we moved onto the subject of driving in the States. Yes, I should definitely hire a car if I want to see Yosemite as the buses don’t go to enough places there. There is far more to it than the valley, after all.

Unlike herself, who liked to drive manually operated vehicles, I told her I preferred automatics and that I was, yes, confident driving on the wrong side of the road.

It seems she has lived in the area for decades; has seen the house prices rocket, as elsewhere, and along with the gentrification, witnessed a far more mixed and heterosexual, even family based, demographic moving in. She spoke with a certain nostalgia, a sense of loss, as if the best days had gone.

I asked about the hippy era and learnt she’d been in the thick of it, a genuine 17 year old flower child. That made me think of one of those cute little maidens swaying in the breeze, smoking pot and staring into space that one can see on old footage, but all the while I continued to be unsure about her gender. It wasn’t just the things she said. It was something about the way she held her head and spoke, how she moved her hands, and later how she walked, as well as some unidentifiable quality in the face that intimated male with more than mild conviction. My uncertainty then became whether she’d had a sex change, and if so with what degree and kind of surgery or hormone therapy. Or was she a true born hermaphrodite, a type of individual which, apparently, is far more numerous than one might suppose. Or was she a he and dressing up?

I’ve read somewhere how young babies can instinctively determine, long before they can speak or even see properly and simply from the outline of the human body, whether adults or even other children are male or female. I forget how the scientists established this but I certainly remember always being aware of this reputedly crucial divide. When we meet people, long before we decide if we like them or not - though perhaps not before we decide they’re a threat or not- we categorise them as male or female, a designation centrally influencing how we relate to them.

Maybe that was why I felt so weird talking to her. Something basic in my mind’s orientation hadn’t been configured. I felt lightheaded and giddy, uncertain of my stance. Evidently, in some fundamental way, I do not talk to women as I do to men. So how should I talk if I don’t know who I’m talking to?

If you’re a prickly, politically correct sort of person whose habit is to get offended on other people’s behalf, you may want to suppose it's insulting of me to question a woman’s gender just because she seems a bit male.

Thing is, while we were discussing the evolving indeterminacy of sexual orientation and identity (again, as one does), it was she herself who declared that I had probably noticed something uncertain about her gender. To which I, sensing her kindness and strength, replied, yes, and that I still wasn’t sure if she was a man or a woman, a frankness that didn’t throw her at all.

Apparently, so she told me, I have to learn not to care about such things.

Subterranean Afternoon

2008-05-19T13:35:00.007+03:00

One day in North Beach I gravitated to a British pub, presumably out of some kind of patriotic impulse. Nothing about the venue’s decor was British, everything Thai, but the waitress charmed me which compensated, especially in light of the five pints of British ale I sank.

For some reason, to do with my libido I should think, I found myself going into a strip joint round the corner.

Not getting ripped off in such venues is a significant duty, I find. It makes one feel less of the loser that with due reason one is supposed to feel oneself to be for venturing into such domains in the first place. I was told it would only cost me ten bucks and though I knew damn well it wasn’t supposed to only cost me ten bucks, I determined that it would indeed only cost me ten bucks.

Oddly enough, they didn’t persuade me to break my pledge by offering me a beer, but imposed a no booze, endlessly free soda ruling that baffled and bored. The puritanical underbelly of the American psyche, presumably, can not be truly escaped, not even in the company of dancing, semi-naked flesh.

Usually in Europe in these places, which I attend far less frequently that you might imagine, the dancers will leave you alone for awhile before swooping in for the high intensity, personalised pitch. Here I was entreated no sooner than I’d laid eyes on the main event. No rest for the wicked, so it seems.

For 60 dollars, I was repeatedly told, despite my gentlemanly assurance that I only wanted to watch, that I could go upstairs for a private show in the VIP room. All but one of the women were relatively easy to turn down, but the last had eyes redolent of misty mountains and a touch and a smile to be killed for. Very tempting, though what would have happened in the privacy upstairs wasn’t explained and will now never be known.

I left with my ten dollar dignity in tact, which left me feeling oddly triumphant, as it happens. One girl had asked for a dollar bill, which I thought very reasonable of her, but alas I lacked change and she vanished.

The Haight and The Bridge

2008-05-18T18:59:00.008+03:00

I never got to drive up and down San Fran’s crazy angles. I just had to wander. Haight Ashbury’s Victorian mansions were colourfully fun. They line the streets of a district of America where anarchist bookshops make ambitious claim to a tradition of left beam radicalism one might struggle to find elsewhere.

I missed one of the walking tours promising to take me to the sight of 67’s famous ‘Be In’, but enjoyed the armchairs in the consciously chilled cafes, smelt the Mary Jane from the joints of the disheveled, and felt, somehow, the glimmer of the past, collective, experimental event. But its essence was dispelled by 68, so I learnt, not long after it began, routed by the commodifiable consequences of its success. Stick a label and a category on something and the shadow will fall. This we know.

A little later I took a walk from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Golden Gate Bridge. Supposing California’s sun would be no match for Kuwait’s, I wasn’t expecting my face to get burnt as I lay down in green grass for a rest along my way.

Since its construction in the 1930s, over a thousand people have leapt to their deaths from the iconic Bay- spanning landmark. There’s a film called ‘The Bridge’ all about it. Debate mounts over what can be done, whether or not fencing it off, which would no doubt happen in Europe, would too drastically interfere with civil liberties and views of the Bay (which are wondrous). Meanwhile, emergency telephones offer avenues for indecision, and bold, macabre signs, conceivably encouraging as much as discouraging in their effects, read ‘the consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic’.

Personally, peering over at the succulent, soft, shimmering curls of the water beneath, I didn’t think that was obvious at all, but maybe I’ve seen too many movie stars launching themselves from gallant heights.

I wonder, with respect, if any of those who died were just wanting a swim and fancied their skills as a diver.

Reflecting

2008-05-10T22:48:00.006+03:00

Being now back from America, I wonder now if it is too late to write about my time there.

I shall try. But not in this entry.

The below is perhaps something I 'should' not have written.

Recently a friend commented that my posts tend to be unstructured, and too absorbed in the mere presentation of the workings of my psyche; of interest, no doubt, to me (this is true) but not really, in his estimation, to the general reader. He even summoned up the analogy of a man talking to himself on a bus to represent why I may not be of much appeal.

This has discouraged me and made me wonder that this may be the reason, rather than just bad luck or cosmic injustice, why I get far fewer comments than he does (yes, I know, it remains to be argued why quantity of comments necessarily signifies much anyway). He even suggested that I might find it difficult to change, which led me to wonder whether he felt that I should give up the whole blogging enterprise. Maybe I will.

I am thinking that the context in which to situate his reaction involves two questions. First, is he correct in saying I am unstructured, and very self-absorbed, or self-revolving. Second, if he is correct, does this matter? This second question implies, for me, the related question: am I boring as a writer, especially to those who don't know me from my personal life.

Ultimately, the practical corollary of this is: Should I change, and if so how should I justify this to myself in terms other than that I have merely submitted to his critique?

It is an awkward, slightly painful issue. I have always had difficulty accepting criticism. I don’t know why. Maybe it is a response to a perceived lack of needed love. Or maybe it’s because I am grossly narcissistic and imperialistic, as it were, Caligula to anyone who would question my self-imagined glory (yet this would not be an answer in-itself, but must be explained at a deeper psychological level). For some reason, I am inclined to identity a focussed criticism of some aspect of my existence with its entire refutation; a defensive all-or-nothing engagement with my critic that can leave me struggling for my life. Presumably, this would be put down to some kind of core ontological insecurity.

Often I go on the offensive, which is probably extremely annoying to my critic. I sometimes want to get the critic to examine the basis or bases of his criticism such that he might then question it or even withdraw it. This won’t necessarily mean that I denied all validity to what he said but is I think an attempt to abridge the abyss of separation that I often note arising when a critic resorts to pass judgement.

Oh well, I told him I might try to be more objective, but I wonder if I do this how this blog might start to become less and less mine and more that of an abstracted, fictional persona; you know, the kind we use to write academic essays, or to write to relatives out of duty, or to the bank manager.

I suppose as in much, the answer between internal and external, subjective and objective, personal and public, is balance.

What do I know, apart from that 2+2 is 4 (because of the rules implicit in the terms we use).

Another Country

2008-04-23T20:23:00.006+03:00

Strange the way I can feel a sense of duty when I go travelling – to keep busy and active, to visit all that there is to visit, see all there is to see. Am I living my life for myself or am I on stage being watched and judged by some audience? Is there no getting away, even outside work, from the examining eye of assessment, in this case an eye driven purely by the superego, by nothing conventionally official.

Possibly because of the enervating effects of a lingering, waning depression (I trust), my interest in summoning up a fervent commitment to be ‘engaged’ with the Bay has been less avid than it might have been. To an extent, this makes me feel guilty. But then I remind myself that I’ve already been to San Francisco twice (in 1992 and 2002), that I’m essentially here to visit friends (Patrick and Sasha) and to relax and drift with the clouds or with whatever it is that happens here, even if it's little.

Still, I haven’t been entirely inactive. Well, except on my first day when I was undermined by a jet lag that paralysed time and wheeled it backwards. Can a day really last that long?

Seeing Patrick was weird. We agreed that in each other’s mind we both belong in another country (Kuwait); but the uncanniness was greater for him. I was merely seeing him in a very different locale, but to him I'd crossed the dividing line between his two worlds. I was pottering around in his flat, amongst his friends, in a domain that for the period of his Gulf wanderings he'd managed to keep completely separate from his life in the desert (two years in Saudi Arabia, six months in Kuwait).

Things are much bigger and wider in the States. I don’t just mean the roads and the cars. It must have something to do with the relatively low population density. England, after all, fits by land size into the USA 75 times, but the population of the States is only six times bigger. Into each square mile of Planet Earth, indeed, 928 more people are squeezed into the land of the Angles than the land of the Eagle.

Things are also, at least in the California I’ve seen, very clean and sparkly, far more so than in Kuwait at least. There’s also far less dust, and far fewer roads hacked up and being reconstructed, frightening off pedestrians. The Americans I have met so far, it must be said, have been almost entirely friendly, chatty, warm and helpful. Except for one guy, that is, at Oakland Coliseum Bart station who berated me for not immediately understanding his offer of transport to Oakland airport, and for therefore wasting his time.

More to follow…I must spend more time walking up and down San Franciscan hills.

Flowers In The Hair

2008-04-21T04:19:00.011+03:00

It's certainly a refreshing change, being out of the desert.

As anonymous might have supposed (?), California, for me, is not the most imaginative choice of holiday destination, given that Americana and the neon glossiness of the West defines one half of modern Kuwaiti culture. If it's contrast one's supposed to be hankering after, surely I could have done better than to head to the source of the cultural schizophrenia that Kuwait embodies?

And yet here I am. I'm not in the US on exploration, in quest for the exotic or the intriguing. I am here to take a break from the theocratic ambience of the lands of the hard-core crescent moon...to be somewhere, anywhere, where I might have a drink, speak openly about politics and religion, see veiless women, feel free, indeed, to talk to any woman I want to; and to take a break, moreover, from the maddeningly labyrinthine intricacies of the office politics and general climate of back-stabbing skullduggery that have beleaguered the context of my life for the past five months, bringing me down, corrupting my soul, to a level of the banal and sordid I do not remember asking to be defiled by.

In my first 48 hours of cultural reversion, of disenganement from the 'space station' (which is how I think of Kuwait), I have become sensitive to a certain lightening of pressure in the texture of my stance. As if a mist or film had been removed, some impediment to receptivity peeled away from my brain. Emerged from a shell, crept out from a shadow, a feeling of homecoming, the return of the known and accustomed, is reassuringly evident. Kuwait, though bursting with the pyrotechnics of yankee razzledazzle, is different enough in its fibres from America to make it clear that this is not Kuwait.

Indeed, no doubt, this levity to a great extent will be the mere blessedness of relief that all holidaymaking brings. It will no doubt also be due to the priveleged status I now enjoy, if only for awhile, of being entirely liberated, courtesy of the money in my pocket, from the doleful systems of work and obligation, and from the various humiliations that attend the power relations of the office.

But it's also nice to have returned to my own cultural domain, which America, despite no longer being British (haha!), is clearly a participant of.

And I say this not by way of criticism of Kuwait or of Islamic culture - each to their own, after all (even though it will probably be interpreted as a criticism); but because, believe it or not, I am not a Muslim, and the culture of Islam is not mine.

Why do I feel that someone or something is trying to make me feel guilty, and that I should apologise for what I have said, and felt?

Heading West.

2008-04-14T11:10:00.006+03:00

After having resigned my passport to my employer on January 13th so that my residency and Civil Id could be processed, I finally got my passport back last week. This twelve week period, you will agree, exceeds the four week period that I was originally told I would be illegally without possession of Her Majesty's property, by quite a wide margin.

In my opinion (and believe me there are many opinions) this process took as long as it did because the company for which I work lacks sufficiently significant Wasta. Wasta means influence. It is the informal, nepotistic matrix of interconnectedness between the various dimensions and strata of Kuwaiti society that 'binds the universe together', rather like the force did, though differently, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It allows things to be got done, if I can put the matter simply, with an effectiveness, and above all in a reasonable time frame, that cannot reliably be presumed upon if one intends to negotiate the various systems of bureacracy without it.

So there one has it. If you work for a multi-national, or at least a better company than I do, you will be without your passport for no more than two to three weeks. If not, your unimpressive location in the hierarchy of significance will receive the attention it deserves, which is not much. Nothing written, no law or guarantee, no Embassy or promise will save you from the harsh, frustrating, unaccountable realities of 'tomorrow' and 'Inshalla'.

Anyway, Its time for me to jet away from this land which, despite my tone, I do not actually mind, and in ways certainly like, but which has simply got to me after not having been able to leave it since January.

And so, after much hesitation, I go to California for almost three weeks. At least to begin with, to stay with Patrick, who has now left Kuwait, alas.

I wonder what I shall get up to there???

2008-04-07T10:40:00.000+03:00

The Nonsense of Nothing

Nothing is ever forever
Nothing is ever foregone
Nothing is solid or stable
And nothing is not going on.

By Lee James Hutchinson

On the Road...?

2008-04-02T13:50:00.002+03:00

Kuwait is designed for cars. Not to have one – as I do not have one – is to place oneself outside the circle of human existence car drivers expect all mortals to belong to.

‘Oh you don’t have a car?!”…right I see. Er…’

Why don’t I have a car? Let me see.

I don’t want to buy one as leasing will cost more per month than the cost of taxis. Kuwait is bereft of sufficient interesting places to roam around in and explore in random spontaneous ways. My transport to and from work is provided and paid for by my employer. I hate looking for parking places and parking in general. Finally, and possibly most significantly, Kuwaiti drivers are insanely aggressive and rule-defying, or should I say rule-free. Why I presume I’m any safer as a passenger than a driver, however, is, I can accept, dubious indeed.

On the other hand, when the heat hits 50 centigrade plus in the shade, even walking to the local mall might force me to go independently mobile.

Then, as must all new venturers onto the highways of this dusty land, I will have to learn the new principles of inter-vehicular discourse. Which comprise:

Not expecting cars to signal at any time
Not expecting drivers to defer to or wave you on at any time, but to exploit every opportunity to force their way in front of you
Distrusting the meaning and purpose of traffic lights.
Expecting to be overtaken in any lane at any time.
Having an annoying bleeping noise irritate you whenever you exceed the 120 Kph ‘speed limit.’

2008-03-25T07:43:00.004+03:00

Unlike God, when I speak worlds do not form
Beings do not arise
Planets do not jump to attention

alas.

What’s more,
The words I utter
Are not thought special -
Just another contribution
to the bulging mass

That
Is
The
Wordly
Kingdom
Of
Man.

Psychic effluent, clocked up, mapped
By astral clerics
One presumes.

Don’t they understand?
I want to stop time and explode space?
Not be read and understood, argued with and discussed.

I’m trying to destroy the universe.

That it can be born
That it might live

I may not be successful.

Five Months

2008-03-23T15:04:00.003+03:00

I have now been in Kuwait for five months. I cannot say I know the country that well, though I know it better than I used to.

Probably, you will have certain preconceptions about Kuwaiti nightlife. At a guess I’d imagine they’re pretty grim. You should be reassured that, if this is so, you were entirely correct in your assumptions.

This is not the place to get smashed and go crazy, chasing women or ripping up street signs. Even if such behaviour –fashionable as it is in a certain Island to the north- doesn’t get you thrown into prison - and I am certain that it will - you might prefer to take such antics elsewhere, where a more positive, participatory response from the indigenous folk might be expected. But please learn to avoid Slovakia, my former home. It’s been getting too much of your treatment recently and you are giving serene gentlemen like me a bad name.

Possibly, such loutishness is not your idea of a good night out anyhow –as it isn’t mine. But even if it isn’t, I fear you may be disappointed. Unless teetotalling meals out or caffeine- laced evenings in Starbucks or Costa Coffee are your thing.

Aficionados of Pizza Hut need fear no disappointment; and if you like your films censored, such as not to be reminded of anything that might result in human reproduction, such as kissing (yuk!), Kuwait might very well be for you. Worried that violent scenes might also be cut? Don’t be. Images of Violence and Killing are fine.

My night life is dry, mainly restricted to evenings in watching DVDs or surfing the net. I used to go out more , to the internet cafes to use my laptop, but now I have a connection at home, an apparently super fast one that is annoyingly slow (though I get used to it). I also attend various groups I’ve have joined, such as a Bible study group and a Writers circle. We’re meant to be studying ‘Romans’ at the Bible group but most of the time a South African called John takes us on detours of his own devising. He calls himself a ‘rejectionist’ and rejects every system of belief known to man in place of what I imagine he’d construe as a constructless, systemless approach in which primary importance is placed on his own lived experience. I find it intriguing that he therefore wants to attend a Bible study class. He says it’s for scholarly reasons, a matter of mere interest.

On Sundays and Wednesdays I teach three children privately. Actually I have only just started so I don’t know how it’s going to pan out. The first lesson went faitrly well though it began embarrassingly. The kindly, much abayered mother extended her hand as I entered her living room. Instinctively the consequence of 36 years of social grooming courtesy of the west, I forgot to realize her being a woman excluded her from the appropriateness of an offered response. Startled, she withdrew her hand in a panic and cried ‘Women don’t shake hands in Kuwait.’

Of course I should have known this, that women are not to be touched. Indeed I did know this. It was that offered hand thing that threw me. I wouldn’t have offered mine without it. I suppose it must have meant something else. Maybe she was motioning for me to sit down?

2008-03-12T13:44:00.003+03:00

I

I made this nonsense up
He says
To shield me from myself
He says.

Unable how to counter this account of
how the wild, expansive senses open out

left me wondering
in a broken moment,
if illusion’s ever noble, even where it’s false.

Not that falseness can be proven mind

though the onus lies on me, it seems

…for reasons unexplained.

II

What exactly is the relation of mythology to fact?
Is the benchmark of the real that you can strip it in a lab?
Did we prove that science deserves the crown it sits beneath?

What empirical test was passed
That gave it this right
To speak to us this way.

Is it merely that things work better now,
make less of a mess?

…at least in private….
What argument is that?

What Happened to Kuwait?

2008-03-12T13:31:00.004+03:00

I have not written anything about Kuwait since before Christmas. Suffice it to say I am still here. The fact that 'not much has happened' of an exoteric nature explains the inward drift of recent posts.

The desert, even in its commerical, oil rich fringes, is a good place to recoil.

I feel I may soon write more about life in the Northern Emirate.

2008-03-06T22:19:00.004+03:00

i want you to be me as I want to be you
said God
alighting his throne

but as long as you can’t reach me
as long as I'm not welcome

Behold

I leave you

The Priests.

2008-03-03T00:05:00.005+03:00

he didn’t understand who he was
or what he was doing
but pretended he did

to make it easier
on himself and others.

he hoped that the pen would fertilise the desert
bring blooms from the void
and it did

but only to himself
only in his mind.

Misandry

2008-02-25T08:45:00.007+03:00

Recently I received an email, inducing two thoughts.

Firstly that it was mildly amusing and well designed, well crafted.

Secondly that it shamelessly expressed a misandristic assumption uncritically common to our zeitgest. Namely, that it is unarguably obvious, unconquerably true that, well, women are superior to men.

I should say that in the original diagram all the little blue balls were moving around frenetically. Blogger is limited, as is known.

Ever wondered how a woman's brain works? It's finally explained here in one, easy-to-understand illustration:

Every one of those little blue balls is a thought about something that needs to be done, a decision or a problem that needs to be solved. A man, of course, has only 2 balls and they take up all his thoughts.

Obviously this is not sexism, obviously.

Obviously this is not insulting and degrading to men, obviously.

After all, men deserve a bit, or is it a lot, of payback and vengeance. That is so obvious.

But what is less clear is whether the presumably female motivation (?) behind this kind of slur against men, a slur it seems permeating the subsoil of today's cultural discourse, is merely rooted in a sense of grievance that women, rightly and wrongly, feel about their gender’s treatment by men over the millenia; or whether some women, or many, or all women actually believe in all sincerity that men, all men, including me therefore, are only driven by such a testicular monomaniacal fury..

Do women truly believe that women are that much more complex and useful-as-beings in the way the illustration suggests, or do they but ruse?

Do they joke, is this merely a reactive outworking of vengeance, an attempt to balance the scales, or are they being serious?

I am supposing and hoping the former, but sometimes one never knows.

2008-02-20T08:54:00.004+03:00

I.

people do not occupy their own space
but are projections of my mind.

A mind I do not control
A mind rebellious!

A reason to be angry!

II

he thought he was living in a comfortable zone
but he wasn’t.

Oh no!

surprising events unexpectedly trounced him.

III

she loved him from a deep place in her heart
and gazed upon him wantingly.

he liked her attention
it made it seem that he mattered in his mind.

IV

the atheist had stopped believing in god.
stopped believing in his invention, his projection.

god was very happy about this
and prepared to make his move.

V

he went to work
because if he didn’t he’d have to lie in bed all day, getting sore.

or wander between shops or café
searching for something new.

it might have also had something to do with money.

VI

he wanted to look forward to Christmas
to think old sores would not be re-opened and prodded

but he knew that they would be
and they were.

On Hermes in the Blogosphere

2008-02-17T12:39:00.012+03:00

Blogging has transformed the world of the writer.

Nowadays a writer, someone who likes writing and wants to write, not just someone who’s been accorded or has accorded themselves the sociological role of ‘Writer’, can access, potentially at least, a very wide, international readership far more easily than at any time in the past. Indeed, because his productions are free he might, theoretically at least, be read even more widely than ever since readers are not discouraged by having to pay or to traipse to the library.

Naturally, some who read only when the author is deemed ‘distinguished’ enough to wear his thoughts in a book will not be impressed by blogs. Well, except perhaps by blogs written by the same distinguished authors, struggling to forestall the possibly negative consequences of their not keeping up with the game by not turning virtual. Some readers, moreover, are averse to the screen. They like the feeling of a book in their hands, in a café over coffee, on the train, in the lavatory, in the bath. Indeed, I can sympathise. I am one of these fellows. Indeed, I am even more sympathetic to the book given that I don’t have a printer. But that’s a point. All you need do is print, and then bind as you like.

Yet, despite these readership resistances to the march of the blogosphere, to which might be added that a great deal of what is highly excellent is still restricted to the book world, I think it’s increasingly evident that blogging has transformed the possibilities for the writer.

For the writer, things can look very rosy indeed. Not only does he no longer have to traverse the obstacle course and trials-by-rejection of the overwhelmed, highly mercantile publishing industry, he doesn’t have to restrict himself to specifically targeted readers, be they friends or like-minded souls, by envelope, or more recently, email or discussion group. He can just declare himself to the world; in a space all his own - a space not imposing itself on another, excluding none other from their place in the sun - and send people a link. He might also be read by ‘discovery’, by readers stumbling upon, or being directed to him by recommendation.

The removal of publishing-space scarcity leads to the added blessing that even if a writer is not paid for his efforts he is nevertheless not required to humiliate himself, as had formerly happened through Vanity publishing when in the desperate wake of the publishers’ failure to accommodate him he had to pay for the privilege of being read in an inverse action to what should happen.

I myself very much like the fact that neither I in my composition nor you in your reading have to part with or receive money. It speaks of a spiritual cleanliness, a purity, in which I am free of your claims upon me as someone not providing what you paid for; and in which you are free of the feeling that you can only read what I write if you’re a certain kind of person, able or willing to pay.

Surprisingly enough, this does not mean I wouldn’t accept money for writing. This might seem to contradict what I’ve just written. The fact that I, as do we all, in a collective condition of acute obnoxiousness, need money, is what leads me to be a TEFL teacher; and TEFL is a profession which, though ethically respectable enough, and allowing teachers an acceptable degree of existential authenticity - it being a wallet destroying, as opposed to a soul destroying profession - is not a profession which reliably excites me.

As to how to make money from writing, this remains to be seen. Any ideas? It could be that I am just not a ‘good writer’, whatever that means, and am misguided to think that I am.

And no, that was not me fishing for compliments.

In any case, what is true is that I enjoy writing and that, for me at least, is enough.

Eighteen to Twenty Five

2008-02-16T09:34:00.007+03:00

I have little idea how many readers I get. I have not installed a site meter.

I have been told by Elberry that if I register with Blogger, hits may increase. Yet in a way maybe I wish to hide behind obscurity as a convenient excuse for the minimal attention I imagine I receive. One thinks of the man who expostulates and rants alone in his bedroom, as opposed to he who declaims on Hyde Park Corner and is completely ignored. While the latter can only avoid becoming aware of his irrelevancy to people’s lives by encapsulating himself inside a highly sophisticated interpretative worldview, from which he looks out eccentrically, the former can always maintain in his heart that he is only not being adulated by his fellow men because he is not visible to them.

For certain I know I get some readers, as well as comments. Those who leave comments should know that they are very much appreciated. Thank you very much for them!

Until July 2006 all my ‘creative’ or expressive writing, as opposed to that intended for teachers at School or University, was only done in one of two ways: in letters, especially to Lee Hutchinson and david crane, who were my two best ‘intellectual’ friends in my twenties and early thirties; and in writings which remained unshared on my computer, which to this day remain largely unread. My lack of interest in trying to get these writings published is something I can’t easily explain. In a way I feel ‘guilty’, as if by not trying to get them out there I was withholding from the world, not putting back into society the fruits that had grown as a result of my education and privileged upbringing. Yet, this presumption of a misdeed in my shyness, I am aware, itself implies a supposition I was not always sure was valid. Namely, that the writings, mainly conceived between the ages of eighteen and twenty five, were any good. Attending that doubt would follow the embarrassed lack of interest in imposing myself on publishers, of wasting their time with what they’d only reject. And it is true that I wasn’t interested in receiving harsh criticism of my writings, criticisms that I might have, and probably would have, anticipated anyway. If you are going to dislike them, I’d rather you not read them, was often be my internalized refrain.

Was this only a defensive, prickly, lack of self-confidence, should I say lack of self-assertion – one of the cardinal sins of the age, so it seems, especially in the eyes of women, especially when practiced by men. Maybe, to an extent, though I’d rather call it humility, a making of a space for others, a not wishing to bother others with ones perceptions unless one is asked for them. Or was it something else?

In my world of inner expansiveness, inner tranquility, inner luxuriousness-in-God, interior delighting in infinity, the writings I penned had seemed wonderful to me. The thing was, I was not, in my self-understanding, unhinged enough to then presume de facto that this recognition of quality was objective, shared amongst others. Yet, because I thought them precious in-themselves, I was not willing to have them negatively savaged. And this was the case, I think, not only because I considered that despite what others might negatively have to say, according to their own criteria of judgment that may or may not have had valid claim to represent objective standards of quality, the writings did in fact exhibit a genuine quality, at least of a kind. I think it was also because these writings were exercising a function for me that was more than merely expressive. They were more than a reaching out towards the eyes and ears of others. Indeed, I would say that it wasn’t so much that through them I was expressing myself to the world, as that in them I was on the one hand locating myself and taking refuge from the world and on the other trying to re-create myself through them into a different kind of a being from that which I'd been for the previous eighteen years; such as to become a person inhabiting a new, different kind of reality, a new world, one, moreover, that was altogether superior and more glorious - albeit, as it would transpire, a somewhat lonely world on occasions, and not always one that, as my mid twenties would reveal, would keep the dragons and demons at bay.

Maybe I will publish these early writings on another blog. Though I think I’d be more likely to if I was asked to, if there was an interest in them, which of course I cannot presume in the silence that there would be, or should be.

Some of these writings are already ‘out there’. The Theological notes, or some of them anyway, which I wrote as a twenty two year old in my last year at university when I should have been sticking to my course work, thinking about career plans and chasing women (other than Barbara). Essentially thay are all about hell, and I realize I need to edit them somewhat. Writing them, however, did in a way drive me crazy so I've always been a bit reluctant to revisit.

They can be read at http://www.theologicalwritings1993-1994.blogspot.com/

If thou has nothing better to do.

Valentinus

2008-02-14T11:50:00.006+03:00

At this time of year we are asked to think about Love.

Not agape, not philia, not storge not Xenia but Eros, the son of Aphrodite and Hermes, the God of lust and love. In Roman lore he is called Cupid, and is famous for sporting wings and wielding a bow and arrows.

By Eros, however, the marketing performance surrounding Saint Valentine’s day does not refer to carnal desire as such, as the prurient fear, but to romantic love, a largely modern invention, the Holy Grail of our emotional aspirations. The God of the age; well, alongside money.

Hoards abound sneering cynically at the commercialized monkey business of the St.Valentine’s Day Parade.

I need not add my voice. We know well enough already how the market thrives, all year round, on the propagation, should I say the implanting, of desires in the multitudes for the imitative and the vapid; for trinketry, for tacky plasticity, for whatever can synthetically, cheaply sentimentalise the communality we all share (that unity-as-humans that might possibly, if left to itself, be the basis for a happy, regenerated society).

So what’s so different about Valentine’s day?

I’d rather sidestep this whole debate. People must do as they please. Since I hardly ever have girlfriends, for reasons the ladies I've desired might like to enlighten you concerning, I’ve never had much cause to have strong opinions about the day. Though I did once think it would be funny to eat alone one Valentines at a mighty fine restaurant amidst couples pretending, or achieving, the appropriate displays of togetherness, without newspaper or book to distract me, opposite an enormous mirror; in an act to be construed, as you will, either as performance art, reflecting the growth of singledom in the modern age, or as merely grossly narcissistic self-pity.

It is a day celebrating Love. Be that love merely one of love’s many arms, be that celebration a commercialized contrivance of what might otherwise have become, as St. Valentine himself might have wished, a culturally instituted day of reflection on the real nature, real importance of love in all its dimensions, it is nonetheless a day focused on love. Love, which as we know, is the most important, most precious, most striven after thing in life; that which is most liable to drive us crazy, or else transform our lives into a richer splendour, however conditionally that might be.

So don’t expect Jeremiahan declamations against Valentine’s Day from me. Be it only spoken of badly, and tritely, it is nevertheless spoken of. That in-itself is good. Not for me the path of the Kuwaiti Religious authorities trying to get it banned here in their small, curious land of Starbucks and Oil.

Love gets a lot of press, a lot of praise. Much is said and written about love’s majesty; about the pains associated with its absence or withdrawal. Love is, however, taboo. Like Sex and God it’s not a topic for polite, conformist society. Well, unless treatments are mediated through other people’s loving, preferably expressed in some artform, in which love’s rhapsodies, banalities and desolations can be innocuously contained, ruffling no feathers, disturbing no power structures. Love in its own unruly vitality is liable at any moment to awkwardly challenge the rigid boundaries of what is controllable and predictable in the world.

Anyway, have a Happy Valentines Day, be you or be you not significantly other to another.

Love's oceans are not confined to romance.

Better Perception

2008-02-11T00:15:00.000+03:00

I cannot express the real nature of my experiences. Can you?

My life exceeds the language that conveys it.

Nevertheless….

There is nothing that humanity knows about God that hasn’t been mediated by the human. This does not mean that God (or is it Brian? what's in a name?) does not exist, or that what humanity has known about God is false. It means only that humanity understands its world in human terms. Just as a donkey understands its world in donkey terms. It doesn’t follow, however, that there is only the human, or only the donkey.

Was Xenophanes back to front? It is God's accommodation to our frame of reference, not his non-existence, that underlies our anthropomorphism. If you were God, would you relate to Earthlings as a Plutonite?

Anyway, whether God exists or not does not remove the relevance of the question: What is the nature of what it is to be human. Not what does it mean to be human, but what is it to be human.

Becoming an atheist changes little. You and the universe are the same. What changes is how you understand reality, about what you orientate your being. This alteration in you has little impact on the universe in-itself, which remains as unknowable as ever. It might be that you have exchanged one idol for another.

If we were to experience God directly, as undeniably as we experience water and air, it would matter not a jot if God 'existed' or not. In such circumstances even God himandherself wouldn’t care.

'Do those who know me need to believe in my existence? Do they ask themselves that question?'

Religion happens in the absence of God, philosophy in the absence of vision. In the Kingdom of Heaven there is only joy; and no Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The point is to alter the quality of experience. Not to experience new things.

To see things as if one has seen them for the first time, as it has been said. To see things as if one has given birth to them.

T.S.Eliot: ‘It is impossible to say what I mean.”

On Seed

2008-02-08T09:40:00.000+03:00

Received wisdom has it that the egg is more valuable than the seed.

Don’t ask me to wheel out the neo-darwinian arguments. Alas, I can’t be bothered. Others can do it better than I.

Apparently my seed only has value if I can persuade an egg carrier that she should unite her egg to my seed, not to that of another seeder.

In and of itself my seed has no appeal. Even if I am a nice, charming, pleasant enough guy, it exerts no allure. It might only do so if I can persuade myself to perform a certain song and dance ritual, embarrassing to my dignity, antagonistic to the establishment of uncompetitive peace amongst men; a ritual marking me out in the eyes of egg carriers as that sort of a seeder, by implication the carrier of that kind of seed, worthy of her egg.

The implication of this ‘dance, the prerequisite for seeder success’ is that the egg carrier is a passive recipient;that she cannot think for herself, outside the conventions of this dance, concerning what kind of seed she might want for her egg. She, never he, is the one who receives offers. And the offers that come, when they come, must be mediated by the dance.

The idea seems seldom if ever to float that she herself might be the huntress. Strong enough, moreover, not to need ‘warrior types’, those deemed macho enough to protect and feed her offspring. Seeking out seed for her eggs, deciding for herself from amongst the seeders she sees whom she might approach to persuade to part with their seed.

Would I be offended if a woman wanted my seed? Came up to me and asked me, saying ‘give me your seed’; seduced me, wooed me, won me. Did all the work. While my gaze was set on the majesty above, contemplating wondrousness.

I think not. If she wanted my money and my soul and the lifeblood of my mind, maybe. But my seed? Why, not at all. After all, I have what seems to be a plentiful and free, ever gushing supply!

As long as I had the right to say no, of course. Just as women currently do in their role as vetter of we males. We, who so constantly, pitifully throw ourselves at women, women primed to test and reject us.

It could be of course that I only write the above because I am a hopeless courter of women.

According to Maureen Dowd in her darkly titled book “Are Men Necessary” women feel that men who do not ‘make all the running’, do the necessary leg work, dance the good dance, are therefore for that reason selfish and narcissistic, not good father material.

Remarkable.

Since when has not imposing yourself on women, not lying to them, not bragging and boasting, not flattering them into bed, not competing with other men to impress them, been selfish?

Oh well, each to their own of course. And I know what that means, for me and my seed.

The Nature of the Unhinged

2008-02-05T08:53:00.000+03:00

The other day, suddenly, I turned round to Patrick and started talking about insanity.

I don't know why I did this. I don't suppose he did either.

I asked him what insanity was. He didn't answer.

I told him what I thought it was. He found what I said interesting.

I said the insane person is not the person who lives in their own world. It's the person who does not accept that other people live in a different world not theirs; be that different world one of their own, equally private, or be it the public world more commonly subscribed to.

I have a friend in Durham who believes things that might lead many to think him mad if they were to judge him only by the things he believes in. Yet he is not mad at all. This is because he is able to suspend identification with his exotic world view and take up the point of view of others when he talks to them.

That process of self-abstraction, I think, makes all the difference. It is also the hallmark of courtesy towards others. Even if you are certain that you're right, you can accept that your truth is not their truth, your reality not theirs.

Brighton Pavilion

2008-01-30T19:16:00.000+03:00

Despite a thorough search of Brighton’s shoreline I couldn’t find the Zap club. Apparently it closed down a few years ago. The West Pier burst into flames in 2003 and now looks like this:

The authorities want to turn it into a 183 m observation tower designed by the London Eye architects. Many of the locals do not approve.

Since Jessica's mother told me at breakfast that morning in December 1990 not to miss the Brighton Pavilion before returning to London, I’ve often felt I should honour that commitment, expressed over the eggs and the coffee, to visit properly; to see more than the outside.

So I did, and felt a circle close.

Actually, if I'd gone as instructed that morning; if I hadn't instead spent two hours writing theological notes in a hard-backed blue notebook in a forgotten cafe in the Lanes, who knows how my subsequent life might have been different.

Perhaps in our interior private narratives we all divide our lives according to specifically 'significant moments’, subjectively rendered; moments that have nothing to do with the offficial demarcations littering the public account of our lives -such as when we got our first job, owned our first car, graduated from University or bought our first house. All that Babylonian baloney, disastrously dull, existentially void as it is.

I don’t speak of those Semi-private moments we can share and relate to, moments such as when you first had a real snog, or a fag - if you did, or first got totally smashed; or when you lost your virginity or, more loftily, first fell in love, feeling the disabling hand of Eros upon you.

I mean those moments which while in themselves not constituting much - such as a decision not to visit a historical building - can, when situated in the context of the chain of events of which they form a part, assume a possibly epic importance, on account of the grand significance of what lies at the end of that chain: a life changing, life demarcating moment.

It is not that I totally regret the change that happened to me all those years ago; though nor do I entirely relish it. Something in me died that winter of 1990, something I miss and mourn, and would like to resurrect. Even though something else, entirely novel, was born and blossomed, breathing into me an ineffable splendour that took me by surprise.

My official CV is not much really, though I can boast it's pretty thin on lies (on marketed manipulation, if you’d prefer); but I think I might work on an official, alternative CV, charting the formally irrelevant, truly significant (for me anyway, from my perspective) modes and episodes of this existence which I happen to be embodying, for reasons I cannot recall. Why is it that all that we are is what we can be used for, by the world of work

By the world of generation

By the world of copulation and death.

Not Religious

2008-01-25T20:45:00.000+03:00

From my last post it seems that I am a religious lunatic.

Nicky told me when I was at Durham that I'd always have problems with women because they'd always be jealous of my relationship with God. Women, she said, want to come first in a man's life, and sense that with me they wouldn't.

Does that make God a contraceptive?

Actually, I've never understood myself as a religious person. Which may or may not make sense, given the things I write.