Nimue Brown's Blog, page 379

The dangers of normality

Anything we understand as normal, we tend not to question. We are more likely to pick on things we think are abnormal about us as places to seek change, than to work on the things that make us the same as everyone else. We are less likely to challenge any feature of our lives that is a dependable constant. Thus the person who has been gently subjected to escalating patterns of abuse won’t feel there’s anything odd at all about being hit. This is why victims stay, and people who have not been victims struggle to understand why anyone would hang around for such abnormal treatment.

If I challenge directly over something you consider normal, the odds are you will become defensive. ‘Normal’ is our baseline for how reality works, so having it challenged is always uncomfortable. It feels threatening, so the desire to protect it is both strong and entirely natural, but that makes certain lines of though almost unthinkable. So let’s do one, by way of an experiment.

If you want to have a happier, richer, more rewarding life, live greenly and generally be a better Pagan, get rid of your television.

I know perfectly well that for many people, the television as been a lifetime companion. The defences – that some programs are good, that it is entertaining, comforting, sometimes educational will leap to the forefront of your mind. This may well be true of any number of programs, but once it turns into a conversation about how Star Trek inspired you to live a better life, what we don’t get to do is talk about television as a wider issue. The social and psychological impact of television is considerable. It’s now normal for young people to feel that they could not live without one, or without their beloved phones.

Television is a good case in point because if you watch regularly, you also get the daily normalising of our unsustainable culture. You’re looking at other people’s houses, loaded with certain kinds of stuff. You’re hearing about products, and seeing them sparkle. You’re seeing how people dress. All of these things create and reinforce your reality. It is a reality of unsustainable consumption, but we’re carefully not telling each other that so as to be able to keep doing it. Around you, everyone else is seeing the same TV reality and manifesting bits of it in their lives, dialogue, consumer choices etc. Music goes to number one in the charts because of TV, sometimes because of adverts. TV supplies content for our conversations (as a non-TV person, I really notice these).

We have lives full of material riches beyond anything our ancestors dared to imagine, but we’re not happy. We are consuming resources at a rate this planet simply can’t support for the long term, and the odds are that in our own lifetimes, there will be radical change forced on us and we will have to learn to live very different lives. Are you ready for that? Do you know how you would cope? Do you have the skills, the emotional resources and the intellectual flexibility? Can you imagine what it would look like?

If the world without television in it seems like a threatening idea, that’s a thought to spend some time with. If the idea that in the future we might not be able to cope with the energy expense of television seems outrageous, do ask yourself if you would feel differently had you’d watched a program recently envisaging how television might be impacted by a low energy future.

It’s a lesson with implications far beyond the television. You can play the same game with your emotional responses to any piece of technology. Your phone, your car, your computer. I know perfectly well how much I would struggle without access to the knowledge base and people the internet gives me. If I had to choose one piece of technology to save for the future, I would give up every other 20th century device for the sake of computers and the internet. Which one would you pick?

Letters, hats and a video

Things I have been doing…

 

 

Some of the hats are mine, several were loaned by my son, who is also a bit of a steampunk. In some ways this is also a snapshot of what the inside of my head is like when I’m writing.

Nothing Changes in Stroud

Last night I went to a Spaniel in the Works production – Nothing Changes, part of the Stroud Theatre Festival. It’s an updated take on Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, re-written by John Bassett and much to my surprise, there were songs in it. I’ve not read the original book, but it’s on the kindle awaiting a day or ten when I have time to do it justice. However, after poking around online for a plot synopsis, it’s evident this hundred year old tale of poverty and inequality didn’t need much re-jjgging to fit in a modern context. As the title says, Nothing Changes.

You’d think after a hundred years, we might have made some headway, but the horrendous social setbacks this country has endured under Tory leadership are in many ways enabled by the same issues that were apparently at play a century ago. Considering the ways in which we do it to ourselves, is not a comfortable business. Without the co-operation of its workers and consumers, big business would not be able to pillage so successfully. We are still far too willing to accept that the affluent somehow earn or deserve their massive bonuses, government handouts, and disproportionate share of the profits. Those of us nearer the bottom than the top will all too readily buy into the idea of a natural order of things that put us here. We know our place…

One of the things the play explores is the way in which creating a profit margin contributes to screwing the masses. Profit is the difference between what a thing costs and what you can sell it for. To achieve profit, you push down the costs as far as you can – that invariably means paying your workers as little as possible and giving them as few benefits as you can get away with. Then on the other side of the equation, you have to get your buyers to pay as far above the actual worth of the product as you can. Meanwhile the difference between cost and price delivers cash to shareholders, who did not contribute a great deal of effort to the process. The money that is invested is given a far higher value than the work, by such a system.

If you reward people for having money, you will inevitably keep the money flowing towards the people who have it. That’s what we do. As the saying goes, if it was hard work that led to wealth, African women would be the most affluent people on the planet.

Is there anything natural, inevitable or unchangeable about what we’ve got? I don’t think so. Neither, evidently, did playwright John Bassett. Change is possible. However, to make changes we have to stop buying into the existing system, and stop assuming that there are no other options. We have to imagine that money itself might not be the thing to prize most highly. The profit orientated exploitation system inherent in capitalism is not the only way. Co-operatives, crowd sourcing, small companies, local projects… there are better, fairer and happier ways of underpinning an economy.

More about Stroud Theatre Festival here – http://www.stroudtheatrefestival.co.uk/performances.html

Anger management

There are two ways of getting anger wrong that I want to ponder today. One is the explosion of unhelpful, destructive or inappropriate rage. The other is the crushing of anger in the face of injustice, cruelty and the like. The more I think about it, the more certain I become that these two problematic responses to anger have similar underpinnings.

When anger comes as a sudden and disproportionate response, we didn’t get there all in one go. No one goes from calm to blind fury in a heartbeat because the loo seat was left up, or a small mistake made. Equally, no sane person ignores manifestations of tyranny, abuse, or mistreatment. Most of us may do one or the other, many of us do both. Consider our eco-suicide, toxic politics and the obscene wealth of the 1% and I suggest most of us spend a lot of time not getting angry about the right things.

The right things to be angry about are huge, terrifying, overwhelming. Little wonder if for some of us the process we prefer is to redirect all that fear and frustration into shouting at an employee, harassing a checkout operative, yelling at our partners and using bullying strategies when driving.

Other mechanisms are also available, and I think the most important ones are to do with the meanings we ascribe. We all tend to infer meanings from the words and actions of others. Most often what we’re looking to do is translate a situation so that we understand what it means for us. What do they think of us? Are they friendly, or hostile? Do they reinforce my sense of self or challenge my fragile ego? Is their world view comfortable? We can personalise our interpretations to a degree that really makes them wrong.

For example… imagine that my partner leaves the toilet seat up, and I don’t like it up. I have said so and he still does it. This is proof that he is ignoring me, does not care about what I think, need or feel. Every time I see the raised seat I treat it like a personal attack. It’s a slap in the face, a reminder that he doesn’t really care and feels he can treat me any way he likes. He’s just taking me for granted. And so each time I see the seat raised, I’ll get myself a bit more hurt and angry until eventually I explode. It may just be that he’s absent minded, and that when I explode over something he thought was no big deal, he will think I have had enough of him and am just looking for excuses to break up with him. (This is not my life, it is just a story.)

We can build towards explosive anger by telling ourselves stories about what situations mean. We can also go the other way. Here’s another illustrative story (also not Tom), also to involve toilets.

I’m the only one who cleans the toilet, and he leaves it in a terrible state. I have to clean it most days because there’s urine down the back of it and it’s covered in crap. He never flushes. Sometimes when there are guests he does this and I have to keep checking, cleaning, worrying. If I challenge him at all he gets really upset and tells me he’s ill and it’s not his fault or that I’m picking on him. I feel guilty about saying anything, and so each time I just clean up, and I feel a bit smaller, like my own worth has been chipped away at. Eventually I stop mentioning it. I stop asking him to change. He takes to pissing in the hand basin.

In both cases, what informs whether or not we get angry is the story we create for ourselves about what this whole situation says about us. The point at which you explode, or crumble, is not really the point to try and do any work with this. The trick is spotting the stories as you are creating them. Noticing the way you rack up offences and infer slights. Or notice the way you learn to roll with the blows and not make a fuss. Time taken to think about how we respond and why can help break the cycles of habitual thinking and behaviour that can make us needlessly angry, or powerless in our inability to express needful anger.

Zero waste

There is no such place as ‘away’. Everything we throw out winds up somewhere. Landfill is not a viable solution, and making things just to bin them is not a sustainable way to run a culture. We need a zero waste economy. There’s a lot we can do as individuals, with the whole reduce-reuse-recycle mantra, but that only works when you have the right materials in the first place. A disturbing number of important foods only seem to come in non-recyclable plastic packaging.

What to do?

Companies give us this stuff because they have convinced themselves it’s what the public wants, needs, expects. So we have to have clingfilm on cucumbers and re-sealable packets, and little plastic windows so that we can see the donuts inside look like every other fried confectionary we’ve ever encountered… it becomes normal so we expect it which justifies the idea that we expect it so they have to provide it.

We have to break that circle. I think we can.

I had a chat with @sainsburys on twitter recently. I’ve also started poking Quorn. I’m looking at companies I buy from and am commenting on how disappointing their packaging is. Doing it in the public domain – twitter and facebook are good – it draws attention. I had a lot of support from other social media folk, out of the blue and with nothing organised. If enough of us tell them that recyclable packaging is what we want, they may listen.

We pay for this stuff, twice over. We pay to buy it. Then, we pay for our councils to send it to landfill. With cuts eating into essential services, it is not acceptable that we should be spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money on burying refuse the supermarkets and others have forced on us. Rice, pasta, seeds, dried fruit – dried, basic, storeable things, are not reliable available in recyclable packaging. This has to change.

So, consider what’s in your bin, and who helped you put it there, and then drop them a polite and friendly line in a public space. ‘I am not happy’ is a good tone to take. At this stage its worth seeing if we can get some co-operation. If there isn’t much movement, petitions can work wonders, and we may have to consider posting clean waste back to the people who created it, explaining that as we can’t recycle it and don’t want to send it to landfill, returning to source seemed like a good idea.

Working with myths

One of the things that makes a truly archetypal story so powerful is that you can change a lot of the superficial details and it still holds up. There’s something in the essence of the story that can bear being stripped of its original details, and will still make sense. It enables retellings, and the translating of myths into more familiar settings where we can be readily reminded of their relevance. It can also be fun and playful. For these reasons there’s a lot of borrowing from established greats.

Artistically speaking this creates a number of challenges. Firstly you have to figure out what you think the essential parts of the story are. If they don’t automatically make sense in the context of your re-telling, you have to work out what parallel thing they can become. Secondly, retelling needs to be more than transforming the surface details to fit a new setting. It has to speak to us, showing us why this story is interesting, or relevant. As a creative person you can’t just rehash the familiar, you’ve got to try and bring something of your own to it, as well.

Back last winter I was asked to write a series of short stories for a podcast. Curious to see what potential listeners would like, I floated out a request for themes and suggestions on facebook. One of the things that floated back to me was the idea that I could do a modern re-telling of Beowulf.

How do you make Beowulf make sense as a story in a modern context? First and foremost it is a tale of a lone hero overcoming the monster that has decimated a community. We have the hero, the mead hall, the killer, the fight leading to the torn off arm, the premature celebration of victory, return of the deadly return of the monster, perilous journey, the pool, the monstrous mother and finally, success. In a Viking narrative world, all of those features make sense because they are how reality works for the people inhabiting it. I could see the space to go a bit Clive Barker on the monster side, but everything hangs on the set up that will get you to suspend your disbelief just far enough…

And if you’re curious as to what I did, you can listen here…

Mr Grendell Requests

Think Positive!

Or don’t. There is no tidy, one size fits all and solves everything answer to anything, ever. That assertion is one of my key bits of dogma, along with ‘shit happens’ and ‘there are always choices of some sort.’ Positive thinking can be really helpful. It can carry you through challenges, inspire you to do better, it can nourish, uplift and enable. You probably know that because the productive power of positive thought is rather self announcing. It may require effort and minor discomfort, but when it works for you, the payoff always makes that feel reasonable.

There are times when positive thinking doesn’t work. I‘ve got some examples from my own life which I can talk about easily, but no doubt there are other forms and manifestations out there, too. Sometimes, positive thinking is a trap with really sharp and pointy teeth.

Looking for the best in things, and in people, being upbeat and hopeful that things will get better, and that everything happens for a good reason and that there are life lessons to learn… I tried that in one context. I tried it for years, and it helped me do the following. I was able to stay positive about the way in which my life was getting ever narrower. I was able to work with the increasing demands being placed on my body, and on my emotional self. I learned how to roll with the knock backs, the put downs, and the physical pain. I saw the best, and I encouraged it, and in so doing I made it really easy for all the shit around me to continue. I was so busy being positive that I did not challenge over the negatives, protect my boundaries, deal with the massive problems in my life and I was not happy.

Only when I let myself admit that it had all gone to hell did I make the choice to get out, and only on getting out of that situation did my life stop going downhill exponentially and start improving. Sometimes, a hearty dose of negativity, failure, and giving up will save your life.

Then there’s the one that I pick up more casually, in the flows of online conversation. Those friendly ‘think good thoughts and you will attract good stuff to you. Be positive and you will heal. Your own negative energy is what’s getting you down and making you sick.’ I am not (I am encouraged to think) to speak of the stuff that depresses, frightens or ails me because that’s dwelling on the negative and will bring more negative energy into my life. The reason it has fallen apart for me before is clearly that I’m not positive enough (see above, if only I’d tried harder!). But when you’ve given your all and it wasn’t enough, and your body is just plain ill, and you need the human relief of speaking about the things that hurt… other people waving the power of positive thinking can be a bloody alienating experience.

Which is interesting, when you stop and think about it. The whole New Age think positive attract good stuff philosophy is supposed to be inherently good. It’s supposed to make everything better. How can something that is good have the effect of alienating, depressing and feeling like an attack if you are in a vulnerable place? The measure of a philosophy is what it actually does, and if a big part of what it does is knock people down, then it’s not a benevolent philosophy, no matter what it claims. So here’s The Real Secret.

Shit happens.

Sometimes we bring that upon ourselves a bit, sometimes we don’t.

Sometimes we can fix it, sometimes the best answer is to quit.

Some things you will get over in your own time, others less so. Your attitude may have a role in this, but there are no guarantees. It is ok not to get over things if you are, for whatever reason, not able to get over them.

There are always choices. Sometimes none of those choices are good ones.

Sometimes there is no win, but only the person who quits is definitely beaten. Sometimes quitting is the only thing that can save you.

Shit happens, because the universe is a big place with a lot of different stuff going on and most of it isn’t personally aimed at you, whether that shows up as good stuff or disaster,

Shit happens, and when we are gentle with ourselves and each other and don’t use philosophy as an offensive weapon, the shit is a tad easier to bear.

My body is a temple

Forgive me the misleading title. I don’t have a great relationship with my body. Never did. It’s never moved well enough, or fast enough. Always been too fat. Not reliably been able to keep up with demands for output, work and energy. It gets tired easily, (I think) it hurts a lot, sometimes it doesn’t bend enough. And yes, I know there are implications in talking about my body as somehow separate from me, but that too is part of a whole-life issue. ‘Me’ is not this unco-operative pile of flesh I am required to shunt about in order to get anything done.

My body is not a temple, because with temples there at least is normally a period after construction when people feel enthusiastic about them. As a consequence I struggle with pretty much everything in Paganism calling upon us to recognise the divine in ourselves, honour nature as it manifests in us and so forth. Other bodies, sure. This one I struggle with.

Normally this is not something I poke around in much. I push against my limits, apologise for what my body is not, and what it fails to sustain. I try to keep it in passable working order – decent food, sleep, exercise, not too much alcohol, etc. What I’ve not been doing much of through my life, is thinking about why I relate to myself in this way. I have taken it as self evident that my overweight, can’t run, gets tired body is just something to try and overcome and apologise for.

It’s not entirely about me, I realise. It’s very much a response to other people’s demands and expectations. What other people wanted me to do, how they want my body deployed as a resource, what they want to be able to do with it. My relationship with my own body has been shaped almost entirely by the utility it has for other people. For an assortment of reasons (some pertaining to my body, some to the nature of the other people involved) I’ve spent a lot of my life failing to meet expectations. Rather than getting angry with anyone else for the impossible demands placed on me, I’ve internalised it as self loathing.

There was a patch, to take one example from many, when one set of obligations and duties had me up and busy until gone midnight reliably, while another set required I get up at 7. I don’t function well on reduced sleep, but the idea that something else in that situation should give a little didn’t even cross my mind at the time, and it certainly wasn’t on offer.

We all judge each other. If someone is struggling or claiming to suffer, we make judgements about whether we believe them. Some people seem to naturally attract sympathy and compassion. I have tended to attract assessments that I am lazy, trying to get out of things, making a fuss and not really making an effort. If I tried harder, that might help, I get told. I also tend to find that my body-problems are frequently assumed to be of my own making. Too fat, losing weight too fast. Too sedentary, too busy, eating wrong, eating too fast, not relaxing, not managing my time well enough, not making the effort to be well. Or that it is imaginary. At so many points in my history, any problem I’ve had has been my responsibility – blamed, shamed and pressured. It’s only in the last few years that the idea of being gentler with me has entered the equation.

The story I have been telling myself my entire life is that if I was thinner and prettier, people would be more sympathetic. No one is troubled by the aches and pains of the ugly sisters. I don’t treat anyone else that way or apply those measures to anyone, but I don’t put up much self defence. That’s just ‘making a fuss’ and it goes with the melodramatic and lazy accusations all too tidily.

So I live my life running, always trying to do more and better and faster, partly to appease the voices I have internalised, and to squash the fear that I am everything I have ever been accused of. To change that, I would have to entirely unpick vast swathes of my sense of self, and replace that with something. It’s a large task, but even to consider that it might have value is to step away from those old stories about who and what I am.

Relationship in Druidry

The idea that Druidry is all about relationship comes up a lot. Often what’s expressed is the idea that we should seek honourable relationship with all things. Though admirable, this is tricky because the vast array of non-human presences out there are not able to express their opinions, needs and preferences to us. We are obliged to guess much of the other side of any relationship. In practice although we could ask, we also tend to guess and infer the other side of our human relationships, too. Sometimes we don’t get much choice, because the relationship is indirect, brought about by consumption or pollution.

The one thing we can most easily scrutinise is what we bring to our side of that Druidic relationship. What are we looking for? What do we want? What shapes our side of the interaction and what informs out inferences and interpretations? As a case in point, many people have held for a long time that other creatures do not feel pain as humans do. Research is starting to tell us otherwise, but for a long time, the consensus inferred that animals felt little. What we brought to this inference was the collective inclination not to have to worry about how our treatment of animals might impact on them. As lab creatures, farmed creatures, in zoo and circus, in small cages at home, hunted for sport and set on each other for entertainment, our history of relationship with animals has some distinct biases in it.

It’s very easy to imagine that, as enlightened, spiritual people, we don’t do that sort of thing. Except that we do. We bring assumptions to our relationships all the time. Often we are more driven by a desire for status and respect within our own communities than it might be comfortable to accept. But then as people pointed out on a recent post here, we’re basically still monkeys, and there’s no shortage of baboon culture in human interactions. How do we relate to the consciousness of plants? How much landfill waste do we generate, alongside our quest for honourable relationship with the earth? How much of our own behaviour are we carefully justifying and excusing because it suits us to do so, not because we’re upholding honour?

Landfill is an issue much on my mind at present. I send about a carrier bag’s worth of stuff to landfill every week, and every now and then there is more, when a large, non-recyclable, worn out thing needs to leave. I try and squeeze full use out of everything. Reduce, re-use, pass on, recycle… but some items just don’t fit there and eventually I end up with a landfill contribution. Much of my waste is from the kitchen – I’m in a flat, I’ve had no way of composting and food waste isn’t collected here. I’m getting a wormery to deal with that, which leaves the non-recyclable plastics from the foods that I can’t figure out how to get by other means. Each plastic wrapper represents oil taken from the earth, and earth that I will pollute by disposing of it. Each plastic wrapper is a failure on my part to be in honourable relationship with the land.

It would be easy at this point to play up the things I do well, the areas of strength, to claim an offset, a state of ‘good enough’ or to suggest that it is an issue for wider society, not me as an individual. Where is my honourable relationship if I pass the buck on this one? Why do I feel entitled to inflict my waste on future generations? It’s not good enough.

It is easy to bandy round terms like ‘honourable relationship’ in order to feel good about what we do, and bloody hard if not painful to live and breathe that moment to moment and enact it in all things.

None of my relationships are truly honourable. All of them are flawed, partial works in progress and in all of them, there is so much scope to do better.

Introducing Letters Between Gentlemen

When I first saw Professor Elemental in a youtube video, I thought what a wonderful person he would be to work with. It was just a pipe dream, back then. And yet, a series of opportunities came my way, and here we are, here he is, and the book we wrote together is now available.

although that’s not quite how I tend to pronounce my name, but just as I don’t call him Professor when we’re not in a performance context, he tends not to call me Nimue. It’s actually my middle name, and not always the name I use at home, but when in use, I prefer the three syllabled Nim-oo-aye, to rhyme with ‘hay’.

Letters between Gentlemen involves a lot of messing about with history, for purposes of giggles and subversion. I have read a lot of published letters and journals from the Victorian era, a time when the letters of important men were frequently published. Of course many of our characters are women. There’s quite a lot of playing with gender – at least six cases of mistaken gender identity across the whole thing, in fact. I hadn’t stopped to count before, that’s actually rather a lot…

There are some esoteric bits – what is faux Victoriana without some dabbling occultists? In this case, it’s all about the Hermitic and Scientific gentlemen’s club. Or was that the London club of scientific, hermetic gentlemen? There are splitters, it makes it tricky to keep track. Watch out for John the Retriever, the floating mystic of Covent Garden as well. The Professor himself walks a fine line between magic and science, in that what he does claims to be scientific but frankly can only be explained by magic.