How easy it is

How easy it is 

To hold your hand,

and talk of love.

Not the love

thrown as accusation

Or sharp as a cat's claw

that catches on my clothes

And is hard to shift

(as loose threads are never

entirely smoothed away)

But instead love as

the touch on a shoulder

A shy hello at a bus stop 

A father hearing 

'Your son is doing well'

The fleeting permanence 

of a footprint in plaster

A reassuring glance,

and the way I count your freckles 

or the pebbles on a beach

(the result is just the same)

The tilt of the heart 

like waves rolling over the horizon

to let the next, and the next, and the next

roll in behind

I hold your hand,

and talk of love,

and how easy it is.

On hope, ethics and uncertainty - or what my holiday reading taught me

On holiday recently I read a few books that made me reflect on my own way of being in the world. Unless we're religious (and often even then) I get a sense that we don't often consider our own personal philosophies of life; we might look for quick fixes through self-help books, or seek out new ways to make us happy (yoga, meditation, travel, therapy*) but a deep examination of values and ethics isn't really the 'in' thing. Alongside our personal struggles, and intrinsically connected with these, there are of course the massive global issues; immigration, technological change, future of work, climate change, and so on. Proper consideration of these challenges requires us to engage in ethical, moral and philosophical debates, yet the political, like the personal, is usually distilled into soundbites or simple solutions, or worse, denied in a fog of 'post-truth'.

In my teaching I encourage new educators to consider the place of personal values, morals and ethics in everything they do, and this is usually through processes of reflective practice. Reflection (done well) encourages us to consider our own reactions to events, and prevents us tumbling repeatedly into situations and relying on old convictions or beliefs that may not actually serve us any longer.  We can be led by the heart or the head when we act, but rarely examine which or why.  Sadly, when we leave teacher training behind, reflective practice is often forgotten too.  I chose a number of holiday books which I hoped would help me to get back into this space.**

My thinking has been shaped most recently by posthuman and nomadic thinking (Braidotti, 2013).   Braidotti draws heavily on the writings of Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher who was a lens grinder and social outcast for much of his life. His book, Ethics, makes readers question their most basic assumptions about life, truth, religion, politics and science. It is his emphasis on affirmative action and our need to act ethically that has been forefront in my mind recently as I attempt to navigate this post-truth, neo-liberalist, individualised world.  So my first reading choice was Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio.   This book is a fascinating blend of philosophy and neuro-science which supports Spinoza's rejection of the mind/body split through recent scientific research. It examines the notion of 'emotions' and recent discoveries which prove that they are literally embodied in our brain chemistry, physical responses and muscle memory.  'Feelings' are our response to emotion, and it is how we interpret and act on these that can be pivotal to our survival and interaction with others.

My second read was The Path by Michael Puett, and I was surprised to find echoes of the same themes. This book offers a guide to 'living well' and encourages us to 'rethink the concepts of our lives...behaving in ways that bring about real change.'  It is more philosophy than self-help fortunately, and based largely on the principles of Daoism. Like Braidotti's call to 'think global, act local' it asks us to focus on daily moments rather than worrying about the big stuff.  The overarching question here is, 'How are you living your life, on a daily basis?'

Puett's thinkers (including Confucius and Zhuangzi) see the world as a series of fragmented and messy encounters - their view is that a need to bring order to this complexity is one of our greatest sources of pain and frustration.  Yet, rather than simply 'going with the flow' or accepting uncertainty (often the mantra of mindfulness practices) we are taught here to hone and refine our responses to every day situations. This is still mindfulness but in an active sense; taking notice of our instinctive responses and then refining them, with propriety.

The book suggests that the idea of living with complexity and uncertainty is challenging and counter-cultural. We take comfort in binary thinking; in the security of being on one side or another, perhaps still programmed for earlier, tribal times. We feel safe in our separateness from nature and anything 'non-human' and seek out spaces where there is one truth and lines are clearly drawn.  Old, familiar behaviours and the affirmation of echo chambers can feel as comfortable and reassuring as an old cardigan, but like old clothes at some point they stop suiting us.

Puett suggests that making change and sloughing off old ways of being is best done through the use of ritual. In this context it means acting 'as if'; taking on roles that are different from our usual ones and constructing new ways of being in the world.  We are usually saddled with beliefs about our personalities and traits, seeing them as fixed and static ('I'm an introvert'; 'I've got a quick temper','I don't like change.') We fix the traits of others too, based on our past experience of them and their own assertions about themselves. This polarised thinking can harden assumptions and make us repeat the same arguments time and time again.  What if we take on a new role though, and act differently next time around?  For example, how might I act the next time I argue with my sister, if my actions were no longer based on the belief that I was always stubborn and that she only thought about herself?  The idea of acting 'as if' is echoed in the Spinozan idea of 'potensia' - soft power, which I talk more about here.  It is affirmative, hopeful and asks the question 'and why not?'  (Of course, the ultimate 'as if' is the phrase 'I love you' which we repeat with hope, despite the fact that it is impossible to love every part of every person, all of the time). Puett invites us to act with others in 'what could happen if..?' interventions; actions which require humility and the ability to admit that the behaviours that always served you all in the past are no longer useful.

My last book, Rebecca Solnitt's Hope in the Dark is an inspiring read for anyone already jaded by the General Election.  It reminds us that change isn't linear; a forward progressive march, but more a 'crab scuttling sideways'. Again, the emphasis is on embracing uncertainty and having an understanding that change, when it comes, can happen in unexpected ways.

I would commend all of these books as a way to question and explore accepted truths about the human condition.  They invite us to act in a way that opens up a constellation of different possibilities; but also require hard questioning of ourselves and continual examination of our feelings and reactions.  There is in each an acceptance that we are fallible, but an overwhelming sense of a journey filled with potential, if we choose to seek it out. As Solnit states:

'Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes - you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.'

*I'm guilty of all of these

**I did have some fun too, honest :)


Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Damasio, A. (2004). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. London: Vintage Press.
Puett, M. (2016). The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Tell Us About The Good Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Solnit, R. (2016). Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Chicago: Haymarket.

Woman, universal

For Lesley

I knew you
long before I met you.

In the stories of the women
that came before
and will long come after us.

In the blue of Boadica
fierce in the truth of battle
and in the warrior queen
alone on the African plain.

In the might of Cleopatra
holding love in her own hands
and in the power of the doula
giving faith in our bodies, to overcome.

In Artemis and Athena
echoes through the firmament
as unseen threads join star to star
woven through my life, a skein of hope.

I knew you long before I met you.
Woman, universal.

Beached

She wrote it out.

Sat on the beach and sifted for words
Through the stones.
Testing the weight of each,
Feeling the smoothness of pebbles like letters

A thousand metaphors in a grain of sand
And looking for similes, bright and rare as sea glass.

Seeking cadence in the rhythm of the sea and thinking
How the crash of the waves feels as triumphant as love
Till the drag of undertow leaves you cold and standing
Exposed but knowing 

that the crash will come again 

In an avian life that grabbed her by the neck
And dashed her on the rocks
Over and over again, until it was better to crack
And let the words pour out
In rivulets down the cliff face
To sink in the rock pools

Or hide amongst the stones 
Where the feathers are empty quills.

She'll choose the ones she wants to use.

Thoughts on a day off from service, Barton-On-Sea

And so we came
Down from the city of Southampton.
Twenty of us, or more
Pouring along the crevices of the rock
With the languor of treacle
and sticky in the heat.

We glimpsed the huts first
like building blocks from the playroom
washing-line bleached
and pegged to the cliffs.

We felt shock of sand through nylon
As we watched the ships of our fathers and brothers
move reluctant through the narrow water
Clinging to the shore like babes
And pushing slowly out along the narrow passage
between the legs of the isle and the mainland
born at last into the open sea.

We saw stones starched and white as sugar
Dissolving into tea-warm waves
As seagulls shrieked their dinner call
like the children shouting for tea.

And through it all the sea stretched out
Flat to the horizon
Beneath the smoothing iron
of the copper-plate sun.

Critical remembrance

When I was at school, I had a German pen friend.  Monica lived on the edge of the Black Forest and I visited her twice; I had a bit of an agenda for the second visit as I was accompanying the school football team and one player in particular, but whatever my motivations, my German was pretty impressive after a month in her company.  She lived in a three storey house with three generations of her family and what struck me on both visits was her grandmother, who always dressed in entirely in black.  When I asked why, it was explained to me that it was because she would never forget the war and the losses suffered by her family.  By the time of my first visit she had dressed in black for 45 years.

Fast-forward twenty years or so and I am thinking again about how we remember the past.  It's taken me a while to go back to Germany, but I finally managed to get to Berlin for a long weekend.  It happened to co-incide with Remembrance Sunday and the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. In the same week of the US elections, the opportunity for an exploration of the rise of fascism couldn't have been more timely.

Site of Nazi HQ, Berlin

I visited two museums - firstly the 'Topography of Terror' which despite its slightly sensational name is possibly the most forensic and detailed exhibition I have ever seen.  Built on the Hotel Prinz Albrecht site of the Nazi SS headquarters, it is a catalogue of the rise of fascism, but also a call to action; one of the aims of the foundation is to 'actively confront history and its aftermath.'  The word 'topography' is interesting in itself; the geography of the site is laid out, although little physical evidence remains apart from a few cellar walls.  It suggests a detailed mapping and examination of a landscape at a point in time, a similar notion to the 'cartography' concepts of Rosi Braidotti*, who suggests that we have to map out our history (personal, political, social and cultural) in order to fully understand and learn from it.  The detail of the documentation, records, photographs and artefacts allows visitors to see every perspective and peer into every dark nook and cranny of Nazi history.  The story is laid bare as if presented to a court; there is no sentimentality, blame,sugar-coating or biased interpretation. What you make of it is up to you, but the facts are undeniable and all the more powerful for that.

The second museum was the DDR; an interactive examination of life in Germany's first socialist state.  The DDR for me was the white shirts of the East German football team I saw on TV as a child, the numerous defections and disappearances of sports-people, and of course the fall of the Berlin Wall which is etched on my memory in one of those 'I can remember where I was then' moments. The museum includes a to-scale mock-up of an East German high rise flat, complete with 60s wallpaper, original clothing and a drinks cabinet (they consumed a horrendous amount of alcohol per head, unsurprising really).  The similarities between the two museums and extremist ideologies were striking. Fascism and communism are at either ends of the political scale but come around to mirror each other in many ways; love of the military; corruption at the top; propaganda; enforced patriotism. In both states control was very quickly taken of the education curriculum (always an early warning sign).   If these things sound familiar in present times, we would do well to keep Lawrence Britt's 'Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism' close at hand.

It is said that 'art is on the side of the oppressed', and in a wonderful counterpoint to the stark reality of history in Berlin's museums, creative, affirmative expressions of art are found everywhere. Through the glorious graffiti in the East of the city, the wall-turned open air art gallery by the banks of the spree; the stelae of the Jewish memorial and the empty bookshelves of the book-burning memorial at Bebelplatz.   Art allows us to seek out an alternative world, where 'imagination is a power of cognition and a medium for alternative meaning-making and expression'.**

Detail from the Berlin Wall, East Side Gallery

The last few weeks have been personally tough in many different ways and on many different levels. This trip left me feeling humbled and more privileged than ever to work with teachers who are doing their best to work for a world of social justice, where people still believe in art and creativity, where they see their role being more about developing critical thinkers than consumers of information.  It's a difficult path to tread and becoming harder; but a good place to start this work is always with ourselves. As Foucoult wrote, "The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us."**  We need to work on our own 'cartographies', examining critically our own informed beliefs, values and subjectivities, in whichever way works best for us; only after doing this can we help others to do the same.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Peter Eisenman

*Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press.
**Clover, D. and Stalker, J. (2007). The Arts and Social Justice. Leicester: NIACE.
*** Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Technological Intimacy

I've always liked Bjork, in the way that I love all women who push boundaries and refuse to conform. Somehow she has managed to stay absolutely herself, while simultaneously taking on different personas and reinventing herself over the years. From the early Sugarcubes days, to the egg-laying swan, through psychedelic, experimental music and to the imagining of new musical possibilities through technology.  As a post humanist I am interested in the links between art and tech, experimental practice, and new relationships between artists and the environment.  As a result #BjorkDigital, now showing at Somerset House, was a must-see for me.

This exhibition was an opportunity to engage with Bjork's latest work through the medium of virtual reality (VR). It takes tracks from her latest album, Vulnicura and immerses you in them; passing through the rooms in small groups, you are able to experience four different songs engaging with them on increasingly interactive levels.

The first piece is Black Lake, written about the singer's recent split from her partner, artist Matthew Barney.  It is shown on two large screens, which wrap the images of the Icelandic landscape around you, sound emerging from fifty speakers in the floor and walls.

As heartbreak songs go, this is perhaps the most personal and painful exploration I've ever witnessed. Moving through caves, volcanoes and moss-fields to a process of rebirth, Bjork emits an agony that is visceral, and reflected in the punishing landscape around her.  The physicality of heartbreak, although felt, is rarely explored or demonstrated in this way; this was a raw primal scream of anguish.  The glimpses of joy at the end, against the backdrop of green mountains and endless skies left a sense of hope and possibility.  It isn't always possible to go to a cave in Iceland when your heart breaks, but this made me kind of wish it was.

Next was Stonemilker, and this was our first opportunity to try the VR headsets, while perched
together on swivel stools.  The comedy potential of 25 people spinning silently alongside each other in a room gave me a slight sense of the ridiculous, but this was soon blown away by the intimacy of the experience.  Bjork appears next to you on a stunning Icelandic beach; you can follow her and explore the scene through a range of angles, spinning 360-degrees.  You get the sense that she is singing both for you and to you; it's a track that implores you to share emotion and be present.  I was glad to be able to blame the goggles for my watery eyes at the end, although I'm sure I wasn't the only one moved by it.

The final two tracks were even more immersive and intimate. Mouth Mantra, filmed inside Bjork's mouth, gives a whole new perspective on the human body; uncomfortable and graphic at times, but oddly compelling.  The psychedelic nature of this one (combined with a slight entanglement with the curtains) meant that this was the one occasion where I did feel a bit queasy.   In Notget, Bjork appears as a giant moth priestess; you are able to move around for this, attached by your headset and headphones to the ceiling.  As the music unfolds, the image moves around you, so that by the end you find yourself enclosed within her body. It was interesting to find that the friends I was with fully embraced this idea and dived in, while I could feel myself backing away, completely overwhelmed by the proximity and physicality of it.

This exhibition surprised me in many ways.  I'd anticipated being impressed by the technology but not moved by it. Yet the intimacy of the methods and potential for self definition and exploration, along with Bjork's capacity for vulnerability, stood out in a world that makes us hide ourselves and our emotions.   It is often said that we are mediated by technology, to the extent that we are not human any more.  Post human thinking, however, encourages us to '...unfold the self onto the world, while enfolding the world within...starting from environmental or eco-others and including technological apparatus.' (Braidotti, 2013).  #BjorkDigital has convinced me that embracing tech as an extension of the self, as a way to redefine our world and relationships, may actually enable us to be more human than ever before.

#BjorkDigital finishes today

Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press.