What Really Matters
As the world darkens we can see our connections glow. All the smart people talk about context, context, context: about how meaning is lost and found as the particular and specific background comes into focus and is honoured. I want to speak about my particular connections in the dark world: how they work and how they can fail, how they make me ever more who I am even as those colleagues seem so different to me.
There are some people, friends and colleagues, with whom I can discuss the darkness of the world. Susannah who writes plays and translates plays from Portuguese and Brazilian. John who writes angry letters to the Guardian. Michael who insists on finding the human potential in every difficult situation. Caroline who tweets about her shame. Matt who is so young but knows that “education” may drag his students down. And Nora who feels her ancestry leaves the world on her shoulders. Quite naturally as the absence of trust and dependability sharpens and deepens, friends who are sensitive to that decline into the abyss come to glow, to shine, and frankly I need them in order to be myself and continue writing like this.
There are some other people, friends and colleagues, who react differently to the darkness of the world. Perhaps they do not see it and feel it. Perhaps they feel they should not see it, or if they do should not acknowledge or discuss it. There are many professional colleagues who know that to admit that things are getting worse will disbar them from employment and consultancy contracts. I have indeed been on contracts where the reason for the contract, the very source of the difficulties was unmentioned and unmentionable. I should have been reading Private Eye but had never thought till then that the sleaze would cross my professional path. These other friends are hugely important too: I need to feel what the darkness is like when an attempt is made to ignore it or banish it. I need to know what it feels like to develop a strong faith without feeling the need to experience it. I need to know what it is like to look for technical solutions to problems buried deep in our culture. And I need to know what it feels like to become complicit in the lies and the deception and the betrayal.
Being me
I can no more remain the same person as I can be Caesar, constant as the northern star. The more I try to stay the same the quicker I change. We none of us perceive enough of our contexts to even be able to comprehend what it would mean to be the same. When I pay attention to how the little things change from day to day, then I know I am more or less me still. A kiss is still a kiss but is never the same twice: we cannot manage our expectations.
So those glowing connections in the darkness could equally be described as threads across the abyss. As a thinking experiment pay attention for a while to just how little is propping up the stock markets, property valuations, corporate revenues. There used to be fundamentals below which a market would not fall for very long. Ten years of almost free money mean that price signals have been lost for a long time now. Now do the comparison with our cultural life. What is propping up the selves that confidently strut through public life?
When I feel for what holds me up, what makes me who I am, what allows me to express myself at all, I find only those connections and threads. I had a searing experience only the other day trying to have an evening conversation with people who had no inkling of existential angst. (Psst! Economists) I loved Yaris Varoufakis’ lecture at the theatre in Kingston where he said that to an economist, if Macbeth could not decide whether to kill the king or not then things must be finely balanced and he might as well toss of coin. I felt I was in the domain of coin tossing when so much is at stake.
There are also those who educate without hiding the absurdity that is in the world, open to every development but trying to be free to the other as itself, dreaming of others as they are not now: each grows only if dreamed.
Being me is both the subject of intense and intensely personal experience AND the evolution of a network of connections each taking existential risks and finding their way and OUR way. The illusion of separateness can be very strong and lonely, but it is swept away every time by effortless tuning in and empathic communication. And as in the quote above, I become more myself by other people dreaming of who I can be, seeing paths that I cannot yet see.
How to focus on my becoming without being ego-bound and obsessed with my role as thought it could exist independently is the challenge in our culture. We don’t easily catch the profoundly African concept of ubuntu, where our becoming is necessarily and inextricably joint and several.
Yes, but what is the point?
There is a little dance. First, we are naively subsumed by what Jung called the collective unconscious. We know what it is we have to do because it is in that collective “we”. Many people do not have the strength to get beyond that. Then there is the painful process by which we come to realise that we must be in some senses differentiated, individuated, from that collective in order to grow and in order to be of service. Then we can rejoin with others on a different basis. Although I have described these as steps in time they are always all in play in the dance. By definition we cannot know what we are not yet conscious of.
Our culture wants us to be action-oriented, to find solutions, to make things better. Our culture wants us to be purposeful. So our first breaking-out, as it were, is to understand that as a collective unconscious impulse that we need to refuse before we can deal with it. When someone asks “what is the point?”, we know we have to grow before an answer can be found that is not already captured. And that process of understanding that refusal is necessary is the beginning of a dimension of our growth. We can also see that anyone who thinks they are already free of the little dance is deeply mired in it. Anyone who claims their thoughts are their own.
It is also always the case that the people who appear strong and leaderly are deeply lost. They are forcefully creating their own reality and will doubtless have followers who need them to do that. That is their response to the gathering darkness, but the light that they shine tends to blind us all to what we need to pay attention to. Certainly, in my case those glowing connections are the reality that I most need to see.
“How are we to save the rhinoceroses, the whales and the planet” may feel like a straightforward and objective sort of question, but in terms of my relating to you it is not, it is a distraction. What we do together may provide an answer, but not directly. The question points indirectly to a broken and dysfunctional web, to broken thinking embedded in the collective unconscious, to wildly false assumptions, to a profound lack of groundedness. None of those things get healed by focusing directly on them: that would be like looking for happiness.
We have in our culture a sense of inside and outside, of depths within us and a whole universe outside. Where do we look for truth, for authenticity, for our sense of ourselves? What we need to understand, to glow with, is the inseparability, the necessary connectedness, the ways in which inside and outside are illusory. Instead of defending fragile and arbitrary boundaries we need to live our deep integration and feel its joy. Who would have thought successful network connection and growth would depend on something called individuation?
Language and new thought
Nora Bateson has a riff about Straight Outta Compton. Such was the oppression and the inability to hear the black youth of Compton that a new language, a new music, a new take on the world burst onto the scene. The film is worth watching: especially in how power is mediated and how that changes.
I have also referred to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. Among many other topics she speaks of trying to learn her ancestral tongue from the remaining elders who escaped being captured and forced to give it up. She finds it almost impossible to master a language that is 70% verbs when English is 70% nouns. And there is revelation in the radically changed view of the world when she does.
Of course, we used to teach Latin and Greek to allow insight into how the world looked to Romans and Greeks but the evisceration of education means that this is no longer even possible. My Latin was taught me by an émigré German Jew, and I did not recognise the treasure.
I want to speak however of the emerging language between myself and my colleagues. Not so much different words as a whole different grammar to suit an emerging different take on the world. There are people who have tried reading this blog and found it repulsive and self-aggrandising. There are people who persist in reading without understanding what it going on. But the notion that English the way it is used in the press and in public discourse is adequate to describe what is happening to us, I find plain wrong. This is not about facts or alternative facts, it is not about news or fake news, it is not about scientific prediction of calamity or recovery. I am not claiming originality or even novelty, I am saying that the mistakes our culture makes are thoroughly embedded in its notion of abstract nouns and dictionary definitions.
What I write here is conventional and inadequate, but the ongoing conversation that makes me what I can be is special and unique, the way anyone’s being is when they can grasp it. I can have a private conversation about things that economists would regard as entirely subjective and it can have more significance than anything else. The conversations the NWA crew had internally did change the whole public world, not that such change is a measure. It is not grandiose to pay attention to a significance that is not visible to others.
