Nimue Brown's Blog, page 409

Blood and Moon

I hear other Pagan women talking about their Moontides. It sounds sort of romantic and appealing. I guess if you spend a few days with a minimal flow, then the bloody part of the month is no big deal, and may be a time for reflection, magic and a sense of wonder at your connection to the cycles of the moon and the realities of nature. If you have that and can reclaim it, and love it then go you. I may be a tad envious, but I will champion your right to a happy, peaceful, meaningful moontide on your own terms.

Mine are not like that. Or, if we’re talking ‘tide’ we’re talking the sort that sweeps over beaches and drowns people every now and then. There is no attaching a gentle, romantic language to what happens to my body every month. My description of preference is; I bleed like a stuck pig. I bleed a lot, it falls out of my body in quantities that are hard to manage. It depletes and exhausts me and usually it hurts a great deal. It messes with my emotions, and it can last anything up to a week. That’s a quarter of my time, can I just mention. A quarter of my life lived in significant discomfort, courting anaemia and not daring to wear anything pale.

The impact of bleeding has been used as a justification for not letting women do stuff. It underpins a lot of unfair and sexist thinking. The alleged emotional instability of women, the needing time off for it and so forth. There are a lot of women for whom that just isn’t true. Then there are the women like me, who are rendered dysfunctional. I can’t tell you whether we’re a tiny minority, about as numerous as the light bleeders or the majority even. I do not know because it’s not ok to talk about this. It is a big taboo.

In saying that when I bleed I hurt too much to be reliably useful, I feel like I’m letting the side down. My sisters who can get on with things and do not need to stop, do not want to be compromised by the return of the bad old ideas about how bleeding makes women useless. We’ve all seen the adverts with the white trousers and the roller skates, we all know it’s supposed to be like that. Crying in a duvet does not fit the modern picture of your sanitised blue rinse bleed.

For me, feminism is not about having one story about what it means to be female. To shoehorn us all into the same shape as the glorious maiden huntresses who can indeed wear the white trousers and run with dogs, is not fair. We don’t all belong in that archetype. To disempower all because some of us need to crawl into a dark cave and scream, isn’t fair either.

We’ll know that we’ve got all this gender stuff figured out, when it is ok to be honest about what happens to your body when you bleed, and ok to ask for what you need. We’ll have it sorted when no one assumes anything, and individuals are free to deal with what they’ve got. We’re all different.

In the meantime, those of us who suffer chronically every month are mostly hiding it, taking the pain killers, hoping for no awkward leaks, and putting on the best poker face we can find. Sometimes the pain is bad enough that the tears become an involuntary reaction and I cannot control it. I have been like this for more than twenty years now. Even the contraceptive pill did not render my bleeding tame and easily managed. This is the body I have. I’d like to be able to own it, however gross and inconvenient it strikes other people as being. I’d like the right to bleed the way I bleed without being called lazy or being told I’m just feeling sorry for myself and that it’s not a proper illness. I’d like not to be told that I’m making a fuss. I’m wondering if I should take photographs of what comes out of my body and show them to anyone who suggests I’m using it to freeload.

At least at home I get compassion and support, but out there in the wider world, I have learned to be silent, and to hide the blood stains.

Being Offensive

This is offered as the flip side to my recent post on being offended. How and when do we cause offence? Why do it, and what do we do around it?

There are times when offending people is both good and necessary. I think that people who are stuck in a smug cocoon that makes them oblivious to unpleasant realities need offending now and then, to shake them out of their stupor. More specifically, people need reminding about unpleasant things they would prefer to pretend didn’t exist. This usually causes offense, and to do that deliberately is to be knowingly offensive.

The easiest way of offending someone is to call them over behaviour or speech that you don’t think is ok. I challenged a local politician recently because he called me ‘deluded’ for disagreeing with him. Not cool. Manifestations of prejudice need calling out, as does abusive behaviour. The difficulty is that people don’t like having it suggested they messed up, no matter how diplomatic you are about it. Taking offence is often a reaction against that which is offensive, but you can get into some unhelpful loops there.

I find if I want to get a person to rethink, it is best to call them out privately, so as not to add the barb of public humiliation. Not having an audience improves the odds of getting a rethink. If I don’t think there’s much hope of getting change but I want to make it clear that I do not support or condone, I’ll do it publically. It is very important not to let offence go unchallenged, because if we do not speak against what we find unacceptable, we are tacitly supporting it. People who behave in shitty ways are offended if this is challenged. I have no qualms about offending anyone on those terms, but it’s really important not to abuse that power to speak out.

I’m very conscious that many people who offend do so for the pleasure of causing pain, out of a sense of superiority, prejudice or just being too ignorant to realise there’s a problem. Much sexism can occur this way, with people not even recognising the inherent sexism in their assumptions. No one asks a man with children how he expects to ‘have it all’ or to ‘juggle both roles’ while working women get asked that all the time. Calling people on accidental, cultural and ignorance based offensiveness can work. The people who get a kick out of hurting people will just enjoy the attention, will claim victimhood, and keep stomping their feet.

My yardstick is this – who has the power here? Who can make choices? Causing offense is an attack on someone. Am I dealing with someone who has a lot more power than me, and who can therefore be expected to take it? Am I lashing out in anger at someone far less powerful than me who will probably be damaged and further set back by this? I am mostly likely to go on the offensive when I see someone themselves being offensive. What I get angry about is people acting offensively towards those who have less power. As Naomi flagged up the other day, picking on vulnerable, disabled people isn’t ok.

As a Druid, one of my weapons of preference is satire. I like laughter as a form of attack, not least because it’s very effective. Laughter takes away power, undermines pomposity. It is the weapon of the weak against the strong. When we turn it around and use it to trample on those we’ve already crushed, it is a hideous thing.

Of course we all get angry about things. We get angry with people. We see things that make us want to respond in kind, or go further, or do more, or worse. Two seconds of breathing in to ask what it will achieve. Two seconds of breathing out to ask if this person has more or less power than you. Are you poised to kick someone who is already down? Are you looking at the real source of the problem, or the easy scapegoat? Are you blaming unfairly? Are you holding someone responsible for something they had no power over? Are you being hypocritical? Are you transferring your own failings onto someone else? Check. Check again.

Some situations are really easy. I see politicians blaming the poor for being poor, while passing fat deals to their chums. The politicians have power, the poor do not. It’s easy to see where to stand. In less abstract, more personal situations it can be harder. One thing I know for sure is that if I’m going to offend someone, I want to do it consciously, deliberately and for good reasons. I have no desire to cause accidental offence. I want to know and I want the chances to fix it if that happens, and that means I also have to consider that other people’s offense may have been accidental, too. I find an apology goes a long way to clarifying that one.

Feeding your soul

Most of the conversations I’ve had around Druidry lately seem to be based around ideas of service, and what we can give. However, there is a balance to strike, because no one can give endlessly without having something flowing back towards them, as well. Some service is innately rewarding, which makes it a lot easier to sustain, but some of it isn’t. The woes of the world are many, and can be totally overwhelming. The more attention you pay to all the things that need your energy, love and compassion, the more risk you take of burning yourself out, heart and mind. There is so much wrong, so much that needs to be done, and the enormity of that can paralyse a person.

In order to be able to participate in the world, we need to take care of ourselves, too. Feeding your own soul means taking time to do the things that keep you together and inspired. It’s about looking after your heart so you do not get bruised into numb incapacity.

What feeds you? What fills your heart with joy and gives you peace and a sense of wonder? What is it that reminds you of all the reasons to keep slogging away against the hard stuff? It’s well worth knowing what’s on your list.

For me, contact with the natural world is a must, and I normally get that by walking. I am fed by contact with other people’s creativity – pretty much any form. The more soulful the creation, the more benefit I derive from it. One of the reasons I don’t like plastic disposable entertainment much is that I do not find it nourishing or sustaining. The intellectual buzz of learning and sharing ideas, the company of good friends, the comfort of bed, the simple pleasures of good food and wine…

While money will facilitate a good deal, as an end in itself it does nothing for me. It has to be a good book, a good film, a good conversation. I’ve grown fussy, because giving over a few hours to something that, in nutritional terms is a bit like licking candy of a dry turd, just doesn’t appeal. I’m too aware of all the other things that need my time and attention to be comfortable throwing away hours on that which is a flimsy surface with nothing underneath, or worse than nothing…. I don’t like the candy enough to be willing to tolerate the turd.

There’s no one true way here. Whatever feeds your soul, for whatever reasons and in whatever way, is the thing you need. No one else has to like it or get it, for it to be true. If your soul food is sadistic or destructive, I have no idea what you do, and I’m pretty sure there are people who can only feed themselves on the pain and misery of others. But for the rest of us, watch out for the candy covered turds. They turn up in bright packages handed over by people who will say ‘you must have this’. Only your own soul food can nourish you, and only you can figure out what that is.

Being Offended

“It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what.” Stephen Fry.

There are things we should all be offended by, because they are innately offensive: Injustice, cruelty, inequality of opportunity, abuses of power and system.  We should be offended by people who refuse to listen to reason, ignore the evidence, act based on blind prejudice and who are driven by hate or destructive levels of greed. All too often we seem, collectively, to let this stuff pass us by in preference for taking offence over minor perceived slights.

The thing that has driven me most round the bend in the last few months, is people taking things personally, even inferring accusations that were not made, in order to justify taking offence and being unpleasant. The offended person takes the moral high ground. “You did this to me, therefore I shall harass, punish, lecture, shame and denigrate.” Never mind that the taking of offence was very much a personal process. Some of the problem is that we all hear different connotations in words. I might use ‘carefully’ to indicate ‘with care’ while someone else might hear that as ‘deceptively and wilfully misleading’. It drives me crazy because things that could have been resolved with a calm conversation are turned into epic, time consuming melodramas, to no one’s gain.

If we get on with the business of taking offence, standing up for ourselves and defending our corner, sometimes what that means is that we shut down conversation and the scope to hear something different. I’m not talking about scenarios where you’ve caught someone beating up orphans, but places of ambiguity. To take a recent example, a subset of people took ‘I do not like NaNoWriMo’ to mean ‘everyone who does NaNoWriMo is a useless piece of shit and should be fed to wolves’ give or take. It’s very hard to have a reasoned conversation with a person who just keeps shouting that you hate them and are totally unreasonable. But then, if what you want to do is shut down alternative takes, screaming ‘I am offended’ is a fantastic tool for silencing debate and dissent. It’s just that I don’t want to play that way and I don’t think it’s very helpful.

If someone has deliberately wronged us, revealing that we are upset by their behaviour puts a weapon in their hands. If you are dealing with someone whose deliberate intention is to wound and harm you, letting them see that you are offended is a gift to them. They learn where your buttons are. They may even enjoy your impotent floundering as you try to defend yourself. Making a fuss that you are offended may leave you wide open to future attacks.

However we feel is what we’ve got. Offence is something you feel, and it’s not a comfortable feeling, at that. We feel offended when we feel both attacked, and innocent. Something that matters to us has been threatened or violated in some way. Indignation is a likely response. Resentment. Anger. Sometimes these may be justified. Some things are truly offensive and need a robust response. Some offence is just because we are twitchy, insecure, feeling guilty or not liking the questions. A drawn breath, in which you consider what you’ve got before you start yelling, can make worlds of difference to the outcome.

If you’ve taken offence and followed through by taking umbrage, but the remark was made in all innocence and supposed to mean something else, anyway, you may never get to hear that. You might stomp out the space for being told you were not under attack. You may not get to hear that you are respected and valued, but may, in misplaced anger, undermine the respect you were trying to protect. I’ve seen that one done a fair few times. Taking offence where none was intended, you can create enmity where none existed. Massively defensive people who get angry at any imaginable slight do not tend to fare well with any human interactions. A calmer asking of ‘did you mean…?’ can resolve an issue without breaking anything at all. A little patience goes a long way. Dialogue can resolve those problems that never were and stop them turning into actual dialogue. Accepting other people may hold different views helps with this one, too. We should not be frightened by people thinking differently.

Based on where I’ve had problems with this, a lot of it seems to involve people who are both insecure and self-obsessed. If you default to assuming it’s all about you, then every joke, every criticism and complaint about anything will start to seem like some snide attack on your person. I had a few years of dealing with one of those; no matter what I said, it was me having a go at her. That ‘justified’ whatever kind of backlash she fancied, usually aggressive and unpleasant. It is all too easy to use ‘I am offended’ as a license to act in actually offensive ways. Some people will do that deliberately, because they are innately shitty, but if you’re just jumpy and insecure, you probably don’t want to turn into one of those, so it’s worth trying not to go there.

There is a difference between that which is offensive, and people choosing to take offence. The latter should not be a license to beat people up, and all too often, it is. The person who did not mean to offend you was probably on your side. As well not to alienate them. The person who meant to offend you will be delighted to know they hit home. Either way, a more measured response is more effective.

The History of Feng Shui

Guest blog by Uma Campbell

Any tradition that is older than written records, and is still being practiced, has a complicated history.  Feng shui is no exception.  Feng Shui is a Chinese art of situating buildings in their most optimal position based on astronomy and life forces that goes as far back as 4000 BC, late Neolithic period. While the goal of Chinese medicine is to balance yin and yang in the body, the goal of feng shui has been described as aligning a city, site, building, or object with yin-yang force fields.

To give context to how far back that is, the European structures Carnac Standing Stones and the stone circles Brodgar and Stenness and cairn Maes Howe (Orkney Islands, Scotland) were in use around that time.  It is widely believed that these ancient sites were also in use for reasons of astronomical significance.

 

To find the first use of feng shui (which means “wind, water”), it can be traced back only through records of building projects, so exact dates of first use are approximate and marked by the Dynasty that was in place at the time.  Initially, placements of tombs, shrines and important buildings would be specifically oriented to angle “auspiciously” to a cosmic event, like a winter solstice or rising and setting sun.  Based in cosmology, the principles were formed to capture good life energy or qi (pronounced “chi” in English) for a purpose, a different one for a civic building than a temple, for example.

Throughout the long history of this practice, feng shui evolved with differing branches of methods. These are referred to as “schools”, each focusing its practices on a different set of calculations or elements.

We may say the Han Dynasty shows the first organized use of feng shui (206 BCE-220 CE), referred to as the Form School.  The “form” in Form School refers to the shape of the environment, such as mountains, rivers, plateaus, buildings, and general surroundings. It considers the five celestial animals (phoenix, green dragon, white tiger, black turtle, and the yellow snake), the yin-yang concept and the traditional five elements (Wu Xing: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water).

One of the famous feng shui names recorded in the history of feng shui is Master Yang Yun Sang, who left a legacy of many classical feng shui texts and is considered the founder of the landscape school of feng shui. With the Landscape school, the Tang Dynasty (618-906 CE) used the lay of the landscape (rivers, mountainsides, soil, etc) as important ways to sculpt the energy effects desired.  Each of these schools had their own evolutions as well.

Utilized through Song Dynasty (960-1279), new techniques included a form of compass reading to orient to the 8 cardinal directions North South East West and points between), at roughly the same time as the magnetic compass as we know it was used for navigation. In the late 1800s, the Landscape School and Compass Schools merged, and utilize combinations of the tools each introduced.  [Han, Tang, Song, Qin (Ch’ing), Republic]

Today, feng shui is practiced as either by an expert in the stricter science and geometry of the ancient techniques, or by “softer” methods involving a bit less math, a bit more instinct and flexibility.   The eight cardinal compass points, landscape features and cosmic forces for house placement is possible, plus the bagua, or map, of directions and elements for interior space.

Feng shui is not easy to explain, but easier to achieve with the right advice and a little study.  Ultimately, you can choose how in-depth or lightly you want to apply these principles to your spaces.  If the effect of lighter, easier flow of energy is achieved, good living can ensue.

 

Uma Campbell is a freelance writer from Southern California. She loves writing about meditation and alternative medicine. To read more of her writing, you can visit the Soothing Walls blog. When she’s not writing, she loves to practice yoga.

Just a bit of fun

Warning: I found this one deeply uncomfortable while I was writing it. Even by my usual standards I think this is a challenging post.

One of the repeated defences of NaNoWriMo after my blog post criticising it, has been that it is just a bit of fun. This came in response to me suggesting it has a problematic impact on the book industry and on perceptions of books, far beyond the minority who participate. In turn, this led me to thinking about the logic of defending something as ‘just a bit of fun.’

Now, in cases where something is attacked purely on the basis of worth – comic books would be a case in point, the ‘fun’ defence seems passably valid to me. Comics are fun, they don’t hurt anyone normally, and they can be a tool for improving literacy, especially in boys who are not attracted to books (and we’ve moved beyond fun now). It is often the case that popular culture is criticised on issues of merit and worth, and defends itself with the ‘fun’ line. The worth attack, fun defence is perfectly reasonable not least because ‘worth’ is so subjective in the first place, and the first line of attack for people who resent ‘fun’.

However, ‘just a bit of fun’ also defends the torture porn movies and sexual pornography as well. It is a line for silencing debate about the social and emotional impact of subjecting ourselves to this kind of content. What if it isn’t just harmless fun? What if it’s addictive? What if it changes us in ways we are not even aware of? Shouldn’t we know about that, and shouldn’t we care?

All blood sports have at some point been viewed as ‘just a bit of fun’ by the people who enjoyed them. The badger baiting and cock fighting, the dog fights, fox hunting and so forth. Shooting wildlife you do not mean to eat is no doubt ‘just a bit of fun’ for the people who participate. Less so for the wildlife, at a guess. When historical armies have raped their way through conquered peoples, you can be sure someone was ‘just having fun’. It is the first line of defence for abusers – nothing bad is happening to you, this is just a bit of fun. This is the classic defence of all bullies too – especially at school. Normal rough and tumble play. Just fun. No harm real harm done…

What troubles me about the ‘just a bit of fun’ defence is that it seeks to minimise and dismiss the questions that are being raised. While there is a huge difference between a writing program and physical assault, the line of defence being taken is equally invalid and itself needs challenging. I did not question whether NaNo was fun. I’m sure it is for a lot of people. I also know fox hunting is fun for a lot of people who do it (no, I am not implying any similarity between NaNo and fox hunting).‘Fun’ is not an ethical assessment of a thing. Why should the pleasure we take in something be given priority over its wider impact? ‘Just a bit of fun’ is often a refusal to consider the alternatives.

Of course no one wants to consider that the things they were innocently, thoughtlessly enjoying might be problematic and not that cool. We don’t want to be that wrong, any of us. We don’t want to have to feel guilty about things we like, or change our behaviour because of the ethical impact. So we keep buying the fun shoes made by slave labour and the chocolate harvested by children, and we close our eyes and ears to what’s going on. Pagans with our dubiously sourced crystals, taking pilgrimage by aeroplane to international sacred sites. We are all guilty of this, to some degree. I know I could do more to avoid wilful ignorance. Do we choose to keep shutting our eyes and putting our fingers in our ears “la la la, can’t hear you, it’s just a bit of fun, it’s all fine” or are we willing to look the problems in the face when someone brings them to our attention?

And on the flip side, if you want to defend anything, ‘just a bit of fun’ is a really flimsy approach. Not least because the people for whom it isn’t fun probably couldn’t care less how you feel about it. If you love something, argue for it with more considered replies, with more reasoning and better justifications. Many people did defend NaNo on those better terms with talk of community and literacy programs – a powerful counter to my critique, and a valuable addition to the wider discussion. Thank you, those of you who dropped in to do that. That is an important counter argument, well worth sharing, and a definite consideration when thinking about the wider impact of NaNo.

If it’s truly just a bit of fun, why on earth are we willing to ignore the possibility we are hurting someone or something else?

(And feel free to place bets over how many people misread this and go on to get angry with me for comparing NaNoWriMo to rape, because if this week is anything to go by, someone will. Not something one of you lovely regulars would do, I feel confident. You all seem sane and tend to reply to what I’ve written, not what you’ve inferred after reading every third word… )

Honouring the dead

Today is the anniversary of the end of the First World War. Here in the UK we will be honouring the soldiers killed in armed conflicts. I’ll be very clear up front: I take no issue with people who are soldiers as a general premise. Individual conduct is a different thing. I am not questioning honouring the war dead in any way (emotive topic after all) but I am questioning the things we don’t do alongside that.

The desire to serve and protect has always brought people to armies. Propaganda and tales of glory, cultural pressure and politically nurtured fear: Honest reasons to defend hearth and home that no individual should be blamed for responding to. Formal drafts and recruitment by force mean that many who have fought and died were not there by choice. Poverty and lack of other opportunities has always been a great army recruiting officer, too. I do not blame anyone for doing what they had to, to survive. Thinking about soldiers dropped into disaster zones, and the way these trained and disciplined people can be mobilised in any emergency… there’s a lot of good work you can do with an army that is not about killing people.

Wars have always been about people in power wanting more power and more resources. If you are obliged to fight to defend your home and way of life, you have every right to do so, but never forget this only happens because some power hungry bastard has started a thing.

War does not just kill soldiers. We do not talk about the medical folk, men and women alike, who died trying to save lives. We do not speak of the men and boys who died in the merchant navy, trying to keep countries supplied with essentials. Their work is no less heroic – and arguably more so because it is simply directed towards preserving life, and often undertaken with no arms or armour.

In the First World War, one fifth of the casualties were civilian. By the end of the 20th century, your typical war inflicted a 90% civilian casualty rate, while wars in the 20th century accounted for some 187 million lives worldwide. (Figures taken from John Keane’s The Life and Death of Democracy). Wars kill off countless animals, both those used to facilitate it, and those who are ‘collateral damage’ alongside their civilian human neighbours. Landscapes and eco systems are destroyed by bombs, alongside culture and heritage. War destroys.

It is simply not enough to honour those who fought and died. We need to start talking about what war actually means, and what it actually costs. The best tribute we could pay to the many victims of war, and especially those who fought, would be to cease this madness. World War One was supposed to be the war to end all wars. It wasn’t. We failed them. We owe our war dead more than that. We owe each other more than that and we owe it to the future. Killing people is not the answer, the ‘collateral damage’ of murdering civilians is not acceptable, and there is no excuse.

Walking your own Pagan Path

Many Pagans self identify as eclectic, or ’own-path’. Not everyone is drawn to the defined paths. Ancestors of blood, and land may make it tricky to go after specific ancestors of tradition. Do we want to follow a pantheon with no connection to where we live? Can we follow the traditions of a land when we’re not ethnically part of that tradition? Finding your path can be fraught with difficulty. There are ethical issues and issues of appropriation. There are issues of what makes sense to you. Not everyone engages with the idea of reconstructing from the past. Not everyone drawn to reconstructing wants to work in the same way and if you go for something more obscure, you may be on your own.

The desire to be free from authority is another reason for choosing an ‘own path’ approach. If you don’t sign up to a tradition, no one can tell you what to think or do and you give no one the right to question how you do things. On the downside, people to learn from and share with can be at a bit of a premium. Shared eclectic ritual can all too easily be a muddle of nothing in particular.

Some people come to Paganism because they have been enchanted by a particular path. For the majority though, it seems to be more a yearning, a sense of something as yet undefined. What follows is a personal quest, trying to discover who and what it is that you are, where, if anywhere, you fit, what, if anything makes sense to you.

I started out as an own-path Pagan and I walked that alone for a lot of years. Eventually I realised that what I’d been doing all along was a pretty decent match with modern Druidry. That doesn’t happen for everyone.

As it stands there’s not much to draw on if you are trying to figure out your own path. Trial and error, plus finding out what it is that you don’t like about other paths is often about your lot. It’s not easy to talk about something which, by its very nature is highly individual. No one can give you the map for a landscape you are inventing, or it’s not your landscape anymore.

But what about the tools to make a map? To take the metaphor further. What about a compass, some paper and a few notes on mapmaking? That might be handy.

I’ve tried. I can’t promise it will solve everyone’s needs, because it won’t. I’ve written a very small book about what you need to figure out in order to make your own path function. There is no reason for ‘own-path’ to mean some vague, insubstantial thing, less serious than ‘proper’ defined paths. As I see it, the only path worth walking is your own, whether you do that alone or as part of a tradition. If that sounds like something you could use, do please cast an eye over Spirituality without Structures.  http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portals-Spirituality-Without-Structure-ebook/dp/B00G3MU2ES/ref=la_B00AZM663S_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384084986&sr=1-1

Show, Tell and Share

I’m involved with a podcast called Art Share – www.art-share.org. Every week, a group of us get together to talk about creativity. We’re a varied bunch, writing in various forms, fine artists, illustrators, folk who make pottery, jewellery… We also get input from people who work at the more businesslike end of creative industry. It’s an interesting mix, we get questions sent in, and all manner of topics come up.

We’re focused on fiction this month. Last week we were talking about the writing issue of show or tell – it’s about how you put your story across to the reader. We didn’t get into the mechanics of how this can work in practice, so I recorded an art-share extra, and after some pondering, it seemed most sense to put it here and let art-share link back.

So if you were wondering what I sound like (with a cold)… this is me. Unscripted, so not as perfectly fluid as might be optimal. Thank you Lurkertype for encouraging me to branch out a bit! If this works, I may do some more spoken (or sung) word pieces, tapping into that whole oral Druid culture thing. Do let me know in the comments whether this works for you, if it does, I’ll drop more of these into the plan. (I say plan… that might be over egging it…)

Show and Tell audio from Nimue

What is government for?

I’ve been reading John Keane’s ‘The Life and Death of Democracy’ – slowly, because it contains a lot of history otherwise unfamiliar to me, and is a book about the same size and weight as a house-brick! Yesterday I ran into a thought form that stopped me in my tracks. To paraphrase Mr Keane: Should government reflect society or counterbalance it?

Democracy is mostly based on the idea of majority rule, but this can lead to two obvious problems. One is that the majority are given the power to oppress the minority, or minorities. Secondly is that those who accumulate wealth, fame and power can easily use that to try and get their own way. If democracy reflects the social and economic dynamics in a country, can it be fair? We tend to assume that the democratic systems we have are pretty much the best thing available, so this questioning of core tenets really interested me.

What happens if the basic job of government is to counterbalance society? Government would then exist, to a fair degree, to right wrongs, protect minorities, ensure fairness, prevent money from controlling all advantages and generally try and keep the playing field as level as possible. It would be a system that prioritised the needs of the weakest, least able and most vulnerable on the grounds that those who are wealthy and successful can reasonably be assumed to be capable of taking care of themselves. And you wouldn’t turn them into some kind of minority to pick on here, no French revolution style execution of aristocrats (I refer you to majority rule). Would counterbalance government be viable? I like it as an idea, but I don’t know if it would work and I’m pretty certain a lot of people would hate it.

The current system encourages us to think about our needs, to vote from a place of selfishness, and perhaps with some eye to enlightened self-interest. It can be a bit short term. I have noticed repeatedly that people who are successful tend to ascribe that to their brains, efforts and other things that make that both deserved, and likely to continue. It isn’t entirely true. Anyone can fall. Illness, misfortune, accident, assault… anyone can end up a victim of crime, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then your life falls apart. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how clever you are, you can’t think your way out of debilitating illness, buy off a terminal disease or be talented enough not to get hit in a random motorway accident you didn’t see coming.

What keeps many of us (not me!) from wanting to invest in a safety net for other people, is that ‘we’ think ‘they’ don’t deserve it, and we refuse to believe we could end up in just as much trouble. That could use a rethink. There but for the grace of (insert random element here) go any of us. People who have wealth, money and power fear that other people are going to take that away from them. We are, culturally speaking, so terribly afraid of each other. It reduces our collective scope for co-operation. What would happen if we set up government to counter balance, rather than to reflect? I’m not sure, but I think it’s worth thinking about.

In case you were wondering, it’s not an entirely hypothetical idea. Uruguay was exploring it in the early twentieth century. I knew almost nothing about South American political history before this week. It is fascinating seeing how fiction authors I’ve read; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabelle Allende, Louis de Berniers, fit into that context. There is always more to learn.