Nimue Brown's Blog, page 339

Imagining an ideal world

Generally I try to avoid complex hypothetical conversations. They tend to suck up a lot of energy whilst achieving nothing. However, unless we take the time to imagine how things could be, we can only follow the trajectory we’re on, or be steered by someone else’s vision. Here are some thoughts about what my ideal world would look like. If the idea interests you, please do post you own vision. I think there’s a lot wrong with how humans are doing things right now, but we’ll only change that if we undertake to think differently.

I believe that no one should be able to make a profit out of resources and services that are essential to life and essential to the functioning of society. I furthermore believe that every one of us who is capable of working, should be working some percentage of each week on making sure these essential things are in place and available to everyone. However we organise it in terms of money, we should be aiming to make sure that everyone has all the essentials covered. No one should be allowed to avoid contributing to essential work on the basis of wealth, and being able to buy your way, and your descendents way out of usefulness should be wholly unacceptable.

If we were all contributing to providing essential things for all people, no doubt there would be some people who felt called to do that full time, which would be fine, and they should be rewarded for that. Everyone else would then have time to study, to create, to produce things that are not essential but that improve quality of life and cause happiness. Anyone should be entitled to do this for profit if they want to. I think this would cause a shift away from wealth for the sake of it and create more interest in quality of life, and as a consequence, a better quality of life for more people. There would be more room for socialising, relaxing, resting and being physically active in playful ways.

If the core principle of a culture is that everyone is sufficient in the essentials, we’d stop creating pressures to buy and own based on ideas of scarcity. We’d become less fearful, and probably as a consequence more willing to share, exchange and gift rather than wanting to put a price tag on everything. We’d be wary of, if not immune to people who want someone else to do all the work for little gain while they rake in the profits – if everyone has enough, there’s a lot less room for exploitation.

I think we’d start to see those who want to do little and have a lot as the parasites they really are, while the myth of the feckless poor would soon disappear. If everyone is contributing to doing what’s necessary, and you have more people power than basic needs, you can just be a bit more ambitious about the baseline. If everyone can make a meaningful contribution to their culture, and if we were really interested in helping everyone contribute in the best way they could, it would soon become very obvious who wanted to participate, and who wanted to freeload. I think (based on assorted surveys about attitudes) that a good seventy five percent of us would easily engage with this way of living. Maybe more. It would be the people who feel a sense of entitlement who would be least willing to roll up their sleeves and participate, I suspect.

My approach would destroy the idea that having money is a kind of social virtue, and would instead focus us on contributing to society in more immediate ways. Doctors, firemen, engineers, scientists, teachers, farmers and the like would be highly valued for doing essential things. Creative folk would be highly valued for increasing quality of life. If most of us took our turn emptying bins, caring for small children, filling in potholes, picking fruit, etc, we’d value those jobs properly too. In fact most of us would be in a position to really value each other. Hedge fund managers and the like might seem a lot less useful as members of society.

Reasoning the need

“Reason not the need” is, if memory serves, a line from King Lear in which the King is declining to discuss what he needs in terms of entourage now he’s retired. Of course he doesn’t need a vast horde of people to follow him round, costing his hosts a small fortune, but he wants them, and so he doesn’t want to talk about need. It’s an interesting example in which being reduced to having to talk about what you need feels, for some, like a loss of identity and dignity. To be important, we have to feel that we have far more than we need.

I think reasoning the need is something we could all afford to spend more time doing. Both in terms of identifying what we don’t need and could cheerfully do without, what we really do need, what we actually don’t need and would be far better off for freeing ourselves from, and what we want alongside all of that. It’s also worth asking why we want, and what meanings we are attaching to our wants. Are we, like King Lear, inclined to think we can’t be ourselves, and can’t be respected, unless a great deal of material goods, or in his case chaps with swords are part of our setup? How much are cars associated with identity and status, for example?

The question of need is one I revisit, regularly. Partly because it changes, partly because my understanding changes. In the last six years or so I’ve come to recognise how much I need good quality sleep in a bed that feels safe. I’ve learned that I need very little space to live in, but I also need access to a great deal of outside space in order to be happy and well. I need people in my life, but I also need quiet – a balance I’m constantly trying to figure out. I need to be active and I need to rest. I need intellectually stimulating experiences, and I need to minimise the unnecessary drama.

It doesn’t matter so much whether what I think I need is available to me – figuring it out helps me to shape my life. It helps me move towards the things that actually serve me, and to recognise the things that, to carry on my Lear references, mostly result in wandering round in the cold and dark feeling very confused about things. We’re constantly sold a lot of ideas about the things we can’t do without – things marketing departments wish us to purchase for the seller’s benefit, not necessarily our own.

What King Lear thinks he wants is his retinue, his pomp and ceremony and kit to give him a sense of status and significance in retirement. By the end of the play it’s obvious to him and the audience alike that what he’s wanted all along is the love of his daughters, but he’s far too proud to admit it, until they’re all dead. Life is like this. Most of us won’t make an embarrassing shambles of dividing our kingdoms and end up with war and madness to contend with. Most of us will get caught up in the surfaces of our lives, in the superficial wants that we are willing to convince ourselves are needs, so that we don’t have to even look at the needs, which might make us feel small, vulnerable and powerless.

Illustrator of unwritten books

Nimue Brown:

Things my lovely chap has been up to – in addition to being in this quarter’s Pagan Dawn! Which was very cool indeed…

Originally posted on The Moth Festival:

Hello again! It’s funny how this works out. When I have time to blog, I don’t have much new art to show you and when I’m too busy to blog, the new art stacks up a bit. I hope you have all been embarrassingly well in the meantime!

I seem to have  developed a specialty in illustrating as-yet unwritten books.   Not something I set out to do at all, but The Raven’s Child which I drew for  Tom Sniegoski last year was only an outline and ten or so pages of script when I started on it. He was writing the most recent Remy Chandler book (A Deafening Silence in Heaven) at the same time. After I finished the art for that, I got a message from Steven Savile (who I have also wanted to work with for quite some time) asking if I’d like to do a book with…

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How voices change stories

All stories, be they written, spoken or sung, imply a voice. When a story is spoken, read or sung, there is of course an actual voice airing the implied one. I’m fascinated by how this changes the story itself.

Many folk songs imply the narrator of a story – all too often they start something like ‘as I roved out one morning, all in the early spring, I overheard…’ separating the singer from the story to be told so that gender and age don’t impact on the telling. Not all folk songs are about voyeurism, many are told in the first person, and the actions of that person imply gender. Pregnant and abandoned lamenting women aside, gender in folk songs isn’t always straightforward. If a lass sings a song about how her lad went off and got killed in a war, the song sounds very straight. If a chap sings it, we might not be clear if he’s singing on behalf of the female narrator in the song, or if he’s singing it as a gay lover mourning for the lost soldier boy.

There are a lot of folk songs about girls who ‘dress in man’s apparel’ and run off to join the army, follow lovers across oceans, or who are just there for the sheer hell of it. The songs themselves make it clear that the surface appearance of the character is not always the whole story.

In this last week, John Holland and I have been picking stories for Stroud Short story competition, at the end of which we found out who had written what. I noted that my perception of the narrator was not always correct – there were two occasions where I’d inferred a male voice, but the writer was female, and several where I hadn’t know either way. Some of those stories will be different stories to the ones I first read, because of the gender shift. It will alter where the sympathies seem to lie, and that will be decidedly interesting to hear.

Gender plays a big role in how we perceive each other, and it features heavily in the stories we tell. It’s the most obvious way in which a voice can change a story. Accents can also have an impact, especially if there’s a class or racial aspect to a story. Something profoundly working class voiced in an upper class voice might easily sound condescending. Voicing someone of a different ethnicity can easily turn into a racist caricature. Putting a voice to a story when the voice does not seem to match the story at all, can create new possibilities, opening the way to different takes on what the story means and changing what it can reflect. I think this is one of the reasons people keep putting Shakespeare plays into different cultures, times and places – the stories can be caused to say something different if you change the voices expressing them.

Do we put on voices to create an effect when voicing a story, or do we use our own voices, and let the impact of that voice  – whatever it is, and however it fits or clashes with the material, do what it does in a more naturalistic way? And of course even if you use your own voice in all things, the choice of material you make will decide whether you’re playing to type, or pushing at the edges in some way in order to let a whole new story in.

Pillars of the community

When people in positions of power abuse others, what tends to happen is they are helped to cover it up. We’ve seen it with the Catholic Church protecting paedophile priests, we’ve seen evidence lost in a current case about child abuse amongst the high and mighty. The likes of Jimmy Saville and Bill Cosby should be on everyone’s minds. Of course it’s not just at the really top ends of things, and it’s not just those in power protecting each other.

Yesterday I had a conversation about a man who has broken data protection law, broken the rules of the organisation he’s involved with, lied, manipulated and bullied people. “But he’s done so much good,” his defender said. “And I don’t think he realises what he’s doing is a problem.” A pillar of the community, this man who has done so many things that are not ok, is defended because of his work.

We see it in the creative community – how do we judge a creative person when their lives are riddled with issues? Consider H.P. Lovecraft’s ghastly racism, consider the acting out of modern celebrities. Is it justice to weight the work someone does again the harm they cause, and to consider the balance?

I think not. I think this because it allows powerful people to get away with raping, and then silencing their victims. It allows powerful people to bully, use and abuse those around them. How much of the work that we celebrate has been achieved by using others? A self-proclaimed pillar of the community can look like a splendid achiever, but if someone is in the habit of lying and taking, there’s no guarantees they are honest about who really did the work.

Sometimes it’s because we convince ourselves that we need them – the unchallengeable pillar runs an event, or an organisation, and so we feel obliged to turn a blind eye and pretend we didn’t see the signs of trouble. We tell the people who want to complain that we just don’t want to hear it – I’ve had that happen to me, and it’s an awful position to be put in.

Perhaps we believe that people at a certain level deserve to be cut some slack. A sense that those above us are entitled to use and mistreat, so long as we can pretend we don’t know it’s happening. Feudalism is alive and well.

Of course for every rotten apple who makes it to the top, there are a lot of good folk, working with honour and integrity, and doing the right things for the right reasons, and not abusing their power or position in any way. It’s not an inevitable consequence of power. Certainly, power can corrupt, but it doesn’t have to. Every time we accept corruption and moral bankruptcy from those in authority, we’re also delivering a quiet smack in the face to the people who are better than that, and who deserve our support. Most communities have multiple pillars, after all, and if the abusive ones are supported by the community, the harm done to the non-abusive ones is considerable.

When corrupt, unethical, immoral and abusive people find their way into places of influence, we should not go along with them. We should not excuse their epic failings on the basis of ‘good work’. If something is wrong, it needs taking seriously and we all need to keep a careful eye on who we support, and what they’re actually doing.

Drama versus intensity

I’m a very intense person. I feel things keenly, and emotional experiences stay with me. I love fiercely, throw myself into things heart and soul, am tortured by anxiety and depression, and I get my heart broken all too often because I care deeply about things. Recognising that I can’t have the highs without having parallel lows, I have long since accepted myself as I am, and while my responses perplex people now and then, I have no desire to change them.

Looking at other people, it has been difficult to tell whether I’m seeing drama, or intensity. No doubt people looking at me have the same problems. To some, I probably seem excessive and melodramatic. I’ve suffered considerably, and repeatedly by being drawn into drama. I’ve noticed a distinct pattern, and the more time I spend around people who are also intense, the clearer the pattern has become for me.

Like all the other intense people I know, I hate drama. I hate getting things overblown for the sake of it and the relentless effort to turn all molehills into mountains. I can be reduced to tears by a painting. I’d much rather be free to get on with that, and not being reduced to tears by people for whom that’s a spectator sport. People who like drama manufacture it. They create crises that require everyone else to run around. They may weep extravagantly, yell, stomp feet and act out a great deal of emotional expression, but instead of being exhausted from so much emotion, they feed on it, and they feed on the exposed emotions of those caught up in the play, and so they keep making sure these things happen. With a drama enthusiast, things never settle down, never become calm and workable.

Based on observation, there are a number of possible motives. The drama enthusiast is always at the centre of the whirlwind, and the centre of attention. Drama makes sure the world revolves around them, and anyone in their orbit is kept circling and attentive. There are clearly ego temptations in being the centre of attention. Intense people who are in extremis are more likely to slip away and try to do it quietly, without the added burden of attention and other people’s reactions to deal with. The drama enthusiast needs to feel important. They seem to derive a kind of pleasure from all intense emotion – especially other people’s. They may have a vested interest in being seen as temperamental and passionate – it fits in with an identity that appeals to them.  They tend to be attracted to arts scenes and spiritual spaces, where a heart on a sleeve can look a lot like authenticity and it’s very hard for anyone to challenge them.

I have repeatedly mistaken drama queens for truly intense people. I like the company of other people who feel too much because there are things I do not have to explain. Intense people shun needless drama, and tend, I have noticed, to try and bring situations down to more manageable, bearable levels rather than escalating them. Intense people are a lot more reliable as friends, too, and less likely to throw a hissy fit and run off over some minor thing.

I spent a lot of years being told that I’m unreasonable and melodramatic. I guess on some level I internalised this as meaning that I belong with the unreasonable and melodramatic people. Except that I hate all that stuff. I like quiet, reflective, thoughtful people who feel things too keenly to want any unnecessary screaming and shouting in the mix.

Sleeping with the seasons

Getting up in the dark is one of the things I find hard about this part of the year. I’m invariably sluggish, rising at the call of the alarm clock, and reluctant to face a day that hasn’t really shown up yet. In summer, I become a much earlier riser, often active by six. It’s not about indolence or failure to be a morning person, my body resents getting up in the dark.

Of course this whole business of having to get up in the dark to go to work and school is relatively modern. Back before electricity, before gas lighting, and street lighting and the industrial revolution, people more usually got up with the light, because there wasn’t much point doing anything else. Only in emergencies or those few lines of work calling for overnight vigil, would people be getting up before the sun.

It’s a fine example of the double edged nature of progress. Yes, having energy for lighting makes it possible for us to do so much more. And what do we do? We work longer hours. We work night shifts. We haul reluctant teenagers up at times their bodies are especially clear just aren’t a good idea. We live by clock time and not by the inclinations of our own bodies.

If you don’t have modern artificial light, there’s not much work you can do in the near darkness of firelight, and you need good quality candles to be able to read, or do any of the more fiddly crafts. In the absence of light, winter evenings must have been a time of conversation, music, storytelling, or just gazing absently into the fire. Progress means we can now each sit in a brightly lit room and stare at the screen of our choice to find out what everyone else’s evening meal looked like. I’m not sure in what way this counts as progress, I am increasingly confident that we are no better off for these uses of our technologies.

This morning I had the luxury of being able to rise with the light. It creates a more relaxed pace. I work more effectively when I feel settled in myself, starting later can mean getting more done. However, our culture has little interest in effective work, or efficient, or clever work. What we celebrate is hard work and lots of it, where putting on the lights to work longer is simply the way it has to be. Where being ever less natural is seen as a virtue. These are things we need to be questioning.

Journeys to mythical places

Over the last few days, I have entered the Legendary Middle Studio, and The Potionary. As with all places with mythic aspects, knowing the myths is critically important for appreciating the location. Some places are so striking that they suggest, or attract myths anyway, while others become important through association with events. I’m a big fan of knowing how stories connect with landscape, both old stories, and new ones. However, the reasons for these two locations being important to me are not as famous as they deserve to be.

The Legendary Middle Studio belongs to BBC Radio Shropshire, and every Sunday evening, Genevieve Tudor broadcasts a fabulous two hour folk show from this building. You can listen live, or after the event, online if you are further afield. Most weeks there are live performances, and these take place in the Legendary Middle Studio.

I’ve known Genevieve pretty much my whole life. Nearly five years ago, Tom, the lad and I moved onto a narrow boat. At night, in the darkness of winter it can be a bit lonely out on the canal, and all we had for contact with the rest of humanity was a small wind-up radio. We discovered we could pick up the folk program via BBC Hereford and Worcester, and so it became something of a lifeline. I’d gone from running a weekly club, to having no live folk in my life at all, so it also provided an important sense of connection. For the two years we’ve been in a flat, we’ve continued listening. Seeing the place where it all happens was a really interesting experience.

The Potionary is also in Shropshire, at a much more secret location. It is the space where the Matlock the Hare books and art have been created. I’ve been a big fan of Matlock the Hare for some time, and of the lovely creative duo behind it, so when they said ‘do you want to see The Potionary?’ I of course squealed and said yes. And it was splendid.

Everything happens in a place. We don’t tell history in terms of place location, unless you happen to be at a tourist spot. Myths and folk tales can go either way – some are very specific ‘There was once a farmer from Mobberly way’ and some have an ‘everyman’ quality that means no matter where you tell them, it all occurred just down the road from here and involved the friend of a guy in the pub who told the story teller the tale in the first place.

I think that when we lose the connection between narrative and place, we lose the sense of the place being important. Over the last few days I also saw the ruins of a number of industrial buildings. Some had history boards to explain them, some did not. If it’s just a tumble down old place, it can be left to rot. If we know it was the first, or the biggest, or the most important at one time, if we know it was the centre of working life in a place, or something else like that, the past connects to the living landscape and it becomes easier to feel a sense of connection and significance. Not only does this change a person’s perspective on a landscape, it also shifts how settled that person feels in a place. How real, or unreal the stories are, and no matter how old, or how recent, having stories of place makes a lot of odds.

Earth Memories

I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading Llewelyn Powys’s collection of essays: Earth Memories, from the 1930s.

Some of the writing is exuberant and gorgeous, some is weighed down with despair about the inherent cruelty of the world. There’s an innate Paganism to it all that I think most modern Pagans will find utterly delightful. Below is a short excerpt by way of illustration – the words are so very relevant today, as are many of his observations…

“The way of the senses is the way of life. It is the people with their hands in the till and their eyes on heaven who ruin existence. There should be open-air temples in every town and village where philosophers could expound this soundest of doctrines. Why is half the population tormented with restraints, obedience to which in no way furthers the public good? Because the priests for generations have been confederate with the money makers, and they both know very well that if natural happiness were allowed the generations would no longer accept their shrewd worldly maxims, no longer be so docile, so easy to be exploited. Without doubt, half the ethical rules they din into our ears are designed to keep us at work.”

I found it an odd read in one regard – the assumption that the reader is male, which as a female reader left me feeling quite odd at times.  Otherwise, a wonderful read, and well worth your time.

Why I am not in politics

I spent last year being quite politically active at a local level, and it taught me a lot. One of the main things I learned was that I couldn’t sustain it past last autumn. I’m not good at late nights. By about 8.30pm my concentration is generally very poor, and late nights have a dire effect on my body. Can’t do it. Local politics means Party meetings (evenings) Council meetings (evenings) council committee meetings (evenings) and I looked at how I was coping with two meetings a month and realised that there was no earthly way I could keep doing that, much less add to it.

So when the opportunities came along to stand for seats on the local council, I did not step forward.

I’d like to be politically active – my Gran was part of a town council for years, and I care about politics, local and national. I want to make a contribution. I would dearly like to follow in her footsteps, but she was quite a powerhouse and I am not. I get very tired, and I can’t concentrate at night well enough to do meetings.

Of course it isn’t just me. Lots of people have little or no scope for getting involved. There are reasons that a lot of people in local politics are older – no young children at home to disturb or accommodate. People who are retired often have the time to spare, and the means to handle the meetings. Try getting into politics without a car – it was obvious I’d have serious trouble standing as a parliamentary candidate in a rural constituency with little public transport. I didn’t stand – the party picked the older guy with the car, who is better at late nights than I am, although in the end he didn’t make it to voting day either. Of course having a car helps with those late night meetings, but you’ve got to be able to afford it, and not everyone can.

It’s not easy combining politics and child care. Politics and anything more involved than a 9-5 job. Shifts are not feasible. The very nature of the system makes it very hard for a lot of people to step up. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of people in politics are older guys from affluent backgrounds. They are the people for whom it is most feasible, and so it probably never occurs to them to look at who can’t work with this system, which voices are silenced by it, who is excluded. I think a bit of reconsideration would go a long way. If we don’t hear from a more diverse range of people, we won’t get a diverse range of issues and concerns properly represented.