‘Our Daily Bread’

This programme has been on Radio 4 all week. I only caught episode 3, but it was worth it for this introduction which I have transcribed. I thought it was beautiful. If this is it, then life is far more simple than we like to make it.

When you are holding bread… you are holding the cosmos in your hands.

Bread is a microcosm of the macrocosm.

In the bread, is the sun; if there is no sun, there is no bread. In the bread is the moon. In the bread is the rain. In the bread is the soil. In the bread is the farmer. In the bread is the baker. In the bread is the eater. In the bread are all the elements because the bread is made, only, by all the elements put together. So, when you make the bread, bread makes you.

This complete non-duality and complete wholeness of life is represented by bread. Therefore, in Buddhist tradition, also in Hindu and Jain tradition, annam (food), which is bread, is very holy, very sacred, very precious; and through bread you can find your salvation, your nirvana, and your moksha.

Satish Kumar, Editor, Resurgence Magazine and former Jain monk.

#Pastygate & Jerrycans

I really try to catch myself if I start indulging in a bit of schadenfraude because, like sarcasm, it’s a largely distasteful practice. The last day or so then has been a real effort of will for me, as we have been bombarded with images of MPs eating hot pasties, sausage rolls and pies, talking about hot pasties, sausages rolls and pies and visiting purveyors of same.

I am not sure when I cracked the most. Perhaps it was when George Gideon Osborne was asked in a Select Committee when he had last entered the hallowed portals of a Greggs, or whether it was when Newsnight devoted time to the debate, or indeed was it when our own, dear pasty-faced, spam-headed PM was pictured (with crumbs down his front) eating some pastry product in 2010, albeit not the hot pasty he mendaciously claimed he had once purchased at Leeds station.

When a spokesperson for Downing Street is forced to clarify the Prime Minister’s pie-purchasing habits, then we can only surmise that the world is indeed an absurd place, in all the classifications of the word. When our much-vaunted democracy is employed by the government of the day to place piddling taxes on hot baked products, to bring a high street bakery in line with a global industry such as McDonalds, what else can you think but hmmmmm.

The Conservative Party carry on like a bunch of repressed Billy Bunters at heart, given the way they perpetually get themselves into trouble over their high-handed attitude to the foodstuffs of the rest of us. Who can forget John Gummer force-feeding his daughter a burger at the height of the mad cow outbreak, or Edwina Currie who, despite trying to laugh off Pastygate this morning on the radio – hahaha, has a public persona that will always be synonymous with salmonella in eggs. The only food-related hoo haa I can recall in the Labour Party was when Blair and Brown dined at Granita. It’s hardly the same thing.

The Sun: caption competition?

And then there is the language of the Conservatives, mentioned in the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme this morning. Whilst the Labour contingent Eds Miliband and Balls hot-footed it down to Greggs to by a bag of sausage rolls, Francis Maude from the Conservatives was suggesting we fill up our jerrycans before we had supper in our kitchen thus painting a vivid picture of a landed gentry snacking on quails eggs and still holding a grudge against the *Germans.

To be honest, I am not in shock about that which their language purportedly reveals, most of us had worked it out anyway without an analysis of the Cabinet’s lexicon. They are what they are, the Conservatives. Yes, the big sticky clue is in the name. To conserve means to protect from loss or harm, to use carefully or sparingly, to avoid waste. It also means to make jam, chutney and pickles. Of course our Prime Minister shouldn’t bother to tell us whether he eats a hot pastry product, and he shouldn’t really need to avuncularly advise us to ‘top-up’ our cars in the face of a fuel tanker drivers’ strike. But the thing is the Conservatives just can’t help it, it’s in their DNA to protect us nitwitted ones from harm, to avoid us wasting their jam and petrol. As much as they want to shrink the state locally, when it comes to their own fiddling at a national level with the very fabric of our lives, down to what we might want to eat for lunch, or at a football game; or telling us when we should be prepared for things we could easily deduce for ourselves, well they just can’t help themselves.

And finally, aside from the nannying and the language, my more serious point is: how has it come to this? The absurdity of last week’s tinkering with the tax system resulting in VAT on hot pies on one hand, whilst with the other they hand back money to millionaires. And, we pay them to do it to us.

From www.ianbone.wordpress.com

*Wehrmachtskanister is the German word for their invention that we call the jerrycan – literally translated as a canister that makes a dam or a weir. Who of us has one, or indeed the garage to put it in? My linguistic objection m’lud is: what would we be calling it in the Conservative Party today if it had been invented in Italy or Spain or anywhere else for which we could coin a derogatory nationalistic term as a prefix?

Flo Rida does hench & The Louvre, natch

‘Life? Life enjoys me…’

So said the septuagenarian Glen Campbell on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme yesterday morning. The guy has been diagnosed with alzheimers but continues to perform and is releasing a new album.

I saw him a few years ago and I had to resist the urge to touch the hem of his trousers, I was that near the front. Two reasons really, one it would be my only chance to touch someone who had touched Elvis, and secondly because he worried me by walking awful close to the edge.

There is no favourite Glen Campbell song. I picked this because I liked the JP McManus horse of the same name who won an epic battle at the Cheltenham Festival one year; sadly no longer with us.

I never knew what a lineman actually was until I saw this video. I think I thought it was some kind of traffic cop. I’m rather glad it’s not.

Norway, Madness and the Power of Narrative

A note about this blog. It is merely a thinking aloud. I am driven to make my internal home through language and when I type it, it is like building with stones, balancing them awkwardly on top of one another with gaps that cold draughts blow through. If others want to read, then they are welcome to rest with me awhile before returning to their own, hopefully cosier, home. If in their reading they want to add their own thoughts, all good. But my thoughts here are a process, not a product, and some of my posts are wildly unpolished for that reason.

There was a discussion this morning on the Today programme about whether it would be wiser, better? (I never quite got a handle on it) to attribute the atrocities of Anders Behring Breivik to someone in the grip of madness, or as the actions of a terrorist seeking to promote a political ideology (albeit his own) in the most gruesome and abhorrent way.

There is no one answer to the question posed this morning; as with most things in life extreme (insane if you wish) behaviour can occur in the rich conjunction of potent internal and external narratives. Evidentially, one might suggest Breivik’s internal narrative consisted of being a lone warrior figure, but did this self-characterisation exist before his story met the external narrative of wider racial, religious and political intolerance? Did it develop that way because he came across an external story that fitted his internal view of himself and his place in the world.

I can believe as many things as I like in my mind but if I never express them and function in a ‘normal’ way I will never be adjudged mad. If I begin to share some of my personal narrative and it does not fit with the majority view, the more socially acceptable view, or just the dominant view, I may be on shifting sands mentally because my internal reality is invalidated.

At this point, I may or may not reach for an external narrative that will bolster, or chime with my own shaky internal one. Something that is so much easier with the Internet at our fingers. Or I might create a new narrative for myself, something more publically palatable. But where does the old one go? For you cannot kill a good story as the Murdochs could attest.

And I can quietly find people who agree with me to help me out if I am aware I have a minority view of myself, or the world. A silly example: if I tell someone at work, in passing, that I believe that I am the reincarnation of Queen Elizabeth I, then they may ask questions about my right-mindedness. But I don’t and I don’t. If I did, then I could go home and privately while away hours on the web finding people who are into reincarnation and who would probably affirm my belief. Is that mad? Or a harmless eccentricity? The latter presumably, unless I become more forthright in my beliefs and seek to impose them on a world that doesn’t share my view. Insight is a key theme in the diagnosis of a psychosis, but sometimes insight does not help, it can be akin to a newsreader you don’t like broadcasting your own narrative – your news, to you – block your ears, close your eyes, switch the channel.

Can thoughts really be mad, unless they drive the thinker mad, or are expressed in behaviour or output that does not fit with society’s ideals or ideas for palatable consumption? I can be as crazy as I like and no-one will know, or care much, if I do it quietly.

But is that the madness under discussion this morning? If there is no expression of it in thought, word or deed, how can we say it is madness, in truth. I have met people, in mental health settings, who, with perfect equanimity, would announce that they thought I should bath in curry powder with hi-fi speakers, or that a dog was their brother. On the other hand, I have met people in incoherent deep pain who only express a coherent version of such. Both types are equally recognised in the mental health system, both offered chemical cudgels to ease their brains, or their pains and the distinction in their manners given a differential diagnosis so we know. We know this one has this and this one has that and from time to time we might lock them up when they become a danger to themselves or others.

And that is where the madness we fear and that reared its many-headed Hydra in the debate this morning makes its intractable entrance. A mad woman mumbling on a street corner, or shouting at the moon is a personal tragedy perhaps, but of no especial interest. A casualty of life. It is when narratives collide, and a madness is acted out violently that we are forced to take notice.

Even then, you might point out that if that howling at the moon is a song that can be sold and sung along to, or a painting that can be bought, hung and admired, then, that’s ok, that is the creative genius.

My own view is one of damage. We are all damaged, we are all undamaged, but it is the story of the damage or undamage that we tell ourselves that matters the most, not what was done, undone or never done. Perhaps the most pernicious damage is one where the story is untold, only hinted at and never given the opportunity for the chapter’s ending. Because that kind of story cannot have a conclusion, it can only exist as news, and at anytime it might become the headline in your head if that disembodied broadcaster decides to make it so. You have lost control of your own narrative. That might be one of my views of what some might call madness.

The horror of events in Norway make me think perhaps it is when our personal narratives collide and meld with socio-political narratives that we can become the most force for good, or something else. How that country chooses to frame and express this tragic story may partly define its socio-political future.

I am not sure personal madness comes into it until the cogent narrative self is completely subsumed and in the case of Breivik, appearances would suggest that it has very much not.

More Louise Little – Less Malcolm X

It’s been annoying me that Louise Little’s (Malcolm X’s mother) life is so sparsely documented.

But what can I expect, she was a woman, a black woman, and a woman locked away for insanity for over twenty years, when the limited evidence would point to some kind of post-natal psychosis that these days may have been treated and resolved far, far more quickly.

Her political activism is recorded as a supplement to that of her husband’s – Earl Little. Her resistance to the Klu Klux Klan a matter of a few words only. Earl was killed in 1931 and Louise brought up her children for nearly eight years until in 1938 she gave birth to an eighth child and was subsequently committed to a mental institution. She was about my age: 41. It is noted in some places that, before she was committed, Malcolm had already been removed from her care by the authorities, aged 13, on account of his stealing. He was placed with a white couple known to his mother who fostered him.

So Louise Little, born in Grenada to a black mother and a white father (the result of a possibly consensual relationship, but very possibly not), the second wife of Earl Little, mother to eight children the fourth being Malcolm X is reduced to a sentence or two in the Kingdom of Google.

This is how she was summarised after her husband’s death in one online document:

“Unable to cope with the financial and emotional demands of single parenthood, she was placed in a mental institution, and the children were sent to separate foster homes.”

Seven children, for seven years, plus an eighth child and no damn money and she was ‘unable to cope’? How diminished do you want her footnote in history to be?

To be continued… Any flesh on the bones welcomed. So far, these are the discrepancies I can find. Her father was Scottish, or English. She was committed for 24 years or for 26. Her husband was murdered or not. Her will was broken by the State, or she just plain lost the plot.

This is the record of her life:-
Louise Helen Norton, b. La Digue, St. Andrew, Grenada 1897, d. 1991.

What Louise might have said or thought, when her son Malcom was shot dead in 1965, twenty-six years before her own death, does not seem to merit any mention.

Malcolm X’s mother

I caught an excerpt from a compelling new book on the radio this morning. Manning Marable’s ‘Malcolm X – A Life of Reinvention’ can be listened to again here. My ears pricked up when the announcer said that the author had died shortly after it was completed. Well, it must have taken some writing then I thought, but the truth is he died of sarcoidosis in April this year.

The book is an attempt to rewrite the legend of Malcolm X and I understand it has attracted some criticism on that account, being described as an ‘abomination’ and containing ‘serious errors’. And this is where it becomes fascinating. Marable, a Professor at Columbia University, is writing what he believes to be true about his subject. This may not tally with his subject’s truth in his autobiography, or that of all the subsequent biographers, but the veracity, or otherwise, is not what especially interests me. It is what Marable believed happened and the differences between his view and that of others that is engaging in itself.

In the first episode for example, Marable writes about Malcolm X’s mother, Louise Little. The mother of 7 children with Earl Little, Malcom’s father (Malcom was the fourth child), Louise’s story was terrible to hear as Marable writes it.

After Earl is killed, officially in a streetcar accident although rumour persisted that it was at the hands of racists, Louise survives with her 7 children in penury. She becomes pregnant and, after giving birth to her eighth child, loses her mind and is committed to a mental institution for 24 years.

Marable paints a pitiful scene: before Christmas she is found barefoot in the street, wandering, clutching her illegitimate baby to her breast…

And, with a little further research the different truths tumble out. Malcolm was ashamed of his mother’s mental illness and rarely visited her, Malcom and his siblings strived to finally gain her freedom after 24 years, Louise treated Malcolm differently because his skin was paler than his siblings (Louise’s father was a white man who raped her mother), Malcolm felt his mother had betrayed his dead father by becoming pregnant by another man. There’s plenty of room for reinvention there alright.

I wonder what Louise Little’s book would have said about it.

Mr & Mrs X

A civilised society?

There’s a lot of emotive talk on the radio at the moment as we criticise our own response to taking care of the needs of the elderly and disabled in our society. It’s probably on the telly too, but I haven’t watched that much this week.

I caught the end of a discussion on the Today programme earlier wherein AA Gill, he who we are pre-disposed to hate on account of his meanness to our favourite Clare Balding, bemoaned the fact that we just don’t seem to understand that most old people are very nice and interesting people.

Is it just me or is this just a nonsense? Some people are ok, most are ok. Some are not. Age has nothing to do with it. What we are actually dealing with is not an outbreak of disgust for elderly or disabled people, we are dealing with the consequences of a capitalist society. Old people don’t just ship up, all infirm and demanding. They come through the ranks of families. And they are, presumably, for the most part loved by their families.

The problem, as I see it, is that families no longer have the capacity to look after their own elders because most families have their noses to the grindstone trying to make ends meet. After all aren’t two incomes needed to run the most basic of consumerist households. What are you going to do when your parent becomes ill? Give up your job to be a full-time carer? What if you live miles away – what then? Don’t worry though, in steps the capitalist society offering care homes for you. These are businesses you know, not just philanthropic concerns. Old people, the disabled, people requiring residential care have their existences reduced to a business proposition. But as we live our lives that way, why are we complaining?

Well we complain because it is clearly wrong. But it is the end product of a society that only has value for people’s money and not people themselves. We seem unable to accommodate people once their economic usefulness is at an end. It is not as that ridiculous AA Gill wailed that we have somehow gone off our grandparents or parents as they age. It is just that we have trapped ourselves in an ultimate hiding to nothing, distracted by many worthless baubles along the way.

The car radio

I was being shown round a new gallery space on Friday morning, and one of the exhibits that caught my eye in the Anti-Photography exhibition was a set of black and white photographs entitled “Car Radios Playing Good Tunes”. I will have to go back so I can credit the photographer properly.

In the meantime here’s my own radio playing the blog anthem for 2011. It’s quite soon to call it, but I’ve no choice.
I was driving about this afternoon and, after a period of silence and contemplation, I flicked the radio on and the tune jumped out and grabbed me round the throat. It’s that good.

Close the curtains and sip some snakebite

I heard two things on the radio today that prompted this post. The first was a piece on the Today programme that went to Manchester to report on what is the new book club: a vinyl record club and more specifically a concept album on vinyl. Rules were: meet in a pub, buy a drink (add an s onto that in my case), proceed to upstairs room of pub, sit down in silence with drinks and listen to entire album – including when the host flipped the record over. She was most insistent on this point. Complete and utter silence apart from the music. Sounds exactly like what I used to do from about twelve years old. I can be pretty accurate about this because it was with The Police’s Ghost in the Machine (1981, best track on vinyl here) that I started the habit. And I have forgotten how great that was, just to sit or lie there and do nothing at all except listen.

The other thing that prompted the post was Simon Mayo playing Carry on My Wayward Son by Kansas on his show. I wasn’t really listening to it in the beginning but, prog rock being what it is, at some point I was forced to stop what I was doing and listen properly. The hallmark of those bands was always that more is more for the arrangement, and sometimes it’s hard to disagree with them. If you saw them live, more was more with more on top, so at least they were delivering against all the promise of the recorded overblown vocals and screeching guitars. And as I spent an awful lot of time listening to metal bands (from to AC/DC to Uriah Heep, through Led Zep and Black Sabbath to Thin Lizzy and Def Leppard) I did wonder for a moment as I stirred dinner why I never had a Kansas album.

Perhaps it was because once you’ve got Rush’s 2112 concept album to deal with you don’t need much else by way of transatlantic rock in your vinyl collection.