WORD-PLAY FOR A NEW WORLD: LABOUR, LAND, LOVE, LANGUAGE, LUCK...

 WIN OR LOSE

For months now I have bombarded friends and like-minded groups with my observations and comments on life, and death. in the world around us. That's a rather bitty, scatter-brained approach to such a complex tangle of inter-connected events.

What seems an age ago, before the Covid 19 eruption, I was already confused, frustrated and depressed by what seemed to me a devastating combination of climate change, the pollution and exhaustion of the only earth we've got, rampant inequality within and between peoples, abuse and neglect of constitutional and legal platforms, proliferation of reactionary regimes and the failure of supposed social democracies to live up to their name.

By early this year I realised two things, that no one mind or movement could embrace the enormity of events and prescribe a solution, but, at the same time, no piecemeal business-as-usual approach could turn things round in time to save our world and life as we know it.

Of course we have never had any total, inclusive vision of the world, its trajectory or the future of our species. An unforseen eruption or meteor-strike could have put an end to life as we know it at any time.

What's different now, and what we should have recognised much sooner, is that the main threat to our existence lies not in outer-space or geophysics but in our own behaviour. Such is our collective power on earth that we are not just the beneficiaries or victims of natural events but the main authors, engineers and executors of the animate earth. Enter the Athropocene, an age that may not last another million, ten thousand, one thousand or even 100 years before it and we run out of puff. The future now lies in our hands. The plot, the story and how it ends is up to us. And the most immediate source of salvation or extinction lies less in distant space-time or technical engineering than in the inner space of human minds and consciousness, What some might, with some reason, still call the soul....

The mind boggles. I know that I cannot properly understand what's going on in the current flux of things. But I also know that nobody else can either. No God or over-arching Science can grasp whole Truth and tell us what to do. Albert Einstein said “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.” It's a pity the biblical prophets graced their own fine words as Word of God and engraved them in stone for all of us. In the absence of any single master key the best we can do is see and hear and try and touch and think our way through some semblance of life within our reach. Each of us is unique, a small part of the whole but with a vantage point that no other body or mind can match or equal. Knowing that, and knowing that each of us is one countless billions, we may each then choose whatever stream, current or pathway seems to move in the right direction, reach out and join hands to others around who may share our many of our fears, hopes and perceptions of a way ahead.

As human beings, with the singular advantage of self-awareness, we may all represent and help reshape not only our own human history but the unfolding history of human civilisation and the future of a natural world we've shaped around us in ways we never intended but may now have cause to regret. To that extent at least - in all our diversity, equal or unequal, and like it or not - we ARE all in the same boat. Where the Biosphere is heading, and how long the Anthropocene will last is very much all our business. That's a terrible responsibility for so many billions of fragile little individuals to bear, and faced with that a lot of us may prefer to hide our eyes, believe the lies, and cling to the nonsense of business as usual. Others, of whatever age, may feel as I do that schoolgirl Greta Thurnberg got it right when she said 'You dont do something because you hope, you hope because you do something.'

So what can I usefully and cheerfully do, rising 84, with whatever wit and energy I have left, apart from cultivating my own garden, walking, talking or swimming in the sea if it's warm enough. I've no special talent or professional expertise, but some varied experience and a a knack with words I've picked up in trying to make sense of what I came across. Over 70 years or so, when I was 14 or 15 I found I could often wing my way across the bits of my mind left unencumbered by homework, required reading and close attention to classroom teacher - unless it was to play them up. It was what I had NOT learned to order that opened the way and forced me to improvise, think for myself and and put it down in a way that might amuse, impress or placate my teachers, examiners and peers (girls I fancied from a distance and bigger boys who had no time for goodies and teachers' pets.

Words may break no bones, but may serve to avert or deflect hard fists or side-swipes with unkinder words. In times of peace and war it may be words that direct our personal and collective hopes and fears. In words, the images and objectives they conjure up, we define the goals and obstacles in our way, identify friends and enemies, promote and direct the industries that serve, provide and arm our tribes and nations for better or worse. 

Words are both lenses and projectors, and by Language I mean not only the words we speak or write but the whole array of signs, images, mathematical symbols and codes that clarify, represent and communicate what we sense and perceive as the real world. And that world as we see and sense it can never be the whole picture or the whole truth. Our senses, with the best science in the world, can only pick up those limited aspects and frequencies of a nature that remains profoundly mysterious. Our senses have shown us what we need to evolve as we have and survive as we are, not to comprehend the best or worst of all possible worlds, or what else the future may hold or with-hold. What we know as the natural world, including our own nature, is not the truth of life or death in itself, but merely life as we know it in the shared by limited experience of common humanity,

I could have headed this blog with the word Life in pole position, but that now seems too big-headed, over-used and even boring (I'd used it before myself, in a rather more practical look at Lifework). Now that everything seems so tangled, open-ended, dire and confused, I've settled instead on a handful of stubby old words  Five familiar words that still ring more or less true in everyday talk.  These are my fateful five: Labour, Love, Land, Language and Luck. In the absence of any more reliable compass in a world that spins in unimaginable space-time, I'll stick in my five words to form a pentagon, not as a higher mystical truth but as poles in a more humble tent, for myself and any fellow travellers who care to step in. As for the fabric of that tent, that's what I'll be weaving as I string my observations, guesses, approximations and partial truths between them.

One advantage of a five-pole plan over the traditional compass crucifix is that it doesnt lend itself so easily to binary divisons and confrontations. Leonardo lampooned learned scholars and churchmen who looked down on him with a mixture of pride and humility. For all their fine robes and learned presumption, all he could show were the rags and tatters of life as lived and the world as observed in passing... As for me, I have nothing to compare except my own little weave of the bits and pieces, loose threads I can pick up and join.  No better or worse than yours or anyone elses, so welcome to any passer by or fellow travellor who can put in whatever patch. offcut or strand of that seems to fit. In Palestine people build tents by the roadside for weddings and funerals...but that's another story. For now, if you've time, we can put our heads together, share what comes up and make a bit more sense of things in friendly way. 

Edit 11.09.2020

Marx and Darwin neck and neck?

Darwin showed how live on earth evolved of itself and not by virtue of some other god. Marx had already come to that conclusion, but also that man, as a species among others, was not only a product and part of other life on earth but its effective author. Two minds, one truth in the making.

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (also referred to as The Paris Manuscripts) are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx.Not published during his lifetime, they were prepared for publication in original German by researchers in the Soviet Union, in Moscow's Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute and first released in Berlin in 1932.

'Plants, animals, minerals, air, light etc constitute....part of human consciousness as objects of natural science and art.... To say that man lives from nature means that nature is his body with which he must be in continuous interchange not to die. The statement that the physical and metnal life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature.'

'.. The (non-human) animal is one with its life and activity. It does not distinguish the activity fron itself....Conscious life activity distinguishes distinguishes man from the life activity of other animals...man, because he is a self-conscious being...The practical construction of an objective world, the manipulation of inorganic nature...Animals produce only themselves while man reproduces the whole of nature.... Animals construct only in accordance with the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while man knows how to produce in accordance with the standards of of every species and knows how to apply the appropriate standard to the object. Thus man constructs also in accordance with the laws of beauty.'

Meanwhile 'We shall begin with the contemporary economic fact. The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces...The devalutation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things...the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates, the poorer he becomes in his inner life and the less he belongs to himself. It is just the same as in religion. The more of himself man attrributes to God, the less he has left in himself....just as the gods are fundamentallly not the cause but the produce of confusions of human reason...

'Private property is likewise) the product... of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself....

'From the relation of alienated labour to private property it also follows that the emancipation of private property from servitude takes the political form of the emancipation of workers, not in the sense that only their emancipation is involved but because this emancipation includes the emancipation of humanity as a whole.'

And now, more than 150 years later, we can realise how completely human activity has transformed – or deformed – the nature of not just human life but a lot of the rest as well. Unless and until we can wise up, 'emancipate' or heal ourselves, life as we know it is also lost. We're all in that global boat. No good just blaming one race or master class, we'd have all done much the same in their position. To get us out of this fix and find a safer shore is all our job. No god, superwoman or higher law to put things right.

Marx wrote his economical and philsophical notes around 1844, about fifteen years before Darwin pubblished his 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life'on 24 November 1859. 

Darwin is now considered the founder evolutionary biology. Perhaps Charles Darwin might have got in first with his more scientific vision if he had not been so distressed at the prospect of dethroning God, shocking the world and upsetting his wife in his revelation of a self-generating natural world, with us part of it. What Marx did, though that was also kept under wraps for years, was reveal the role of man, not God, in the making – or breaking? - of the natural world and begin to outline not just what was going wrong but what we could do about it. The founder of revolutionary recovery?

Original Labour (cf keywords Love, Labour, Language, Land and Games)

Like every other mammal, I am the product of a mother's labour. So if I want to write about myself, with an eye to others more like myself than not, that's where I start. It may seem selfish, egocentric or self-important to write about myself but that's my only window on a world that runs in and out through me. I'm only one of trillions, but still a case in point – part of the evidence myself and a vantage point on others. Maybe some of them will recognise me, or themselves in me.

Making babies, like digging, fighting wars and social care when we get old can be hard labour. With some blood, sweat , tears and other messy stuff along the way.. Many creation myths have Man born of water, dust and mud. Woman too perhaps, though the biblical creation myth goes way off course when it fashion's the woman from Adam's rib. The Muslim Koran gets nearer the truth with Allah (the merciful and compassionate) making Man from a blood clot. Hard labour either way, with the difference that some privileged men have been able to leave the roughest bits to others while, labour for women mostly cut across class boundaries. Here's song for the labouring man:

A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones....

I was born one mornin', it was drizzlin' rain
Fightin' and trouble are my middle name
I was raised in the canebrake by an ol' mama lion
Cain't no-a high-toned woman make me walk the line

16 TONS (Johnny Cash / Merle Travis)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfp2O9ADwGk

Although we all know that a woman's work is never done, I've yet to come across a song that tells the woman-in-labour story as it is. Any offers to fill that gap? Anyway, I was not born in a Kentucky cane break but in a nursing home near Blackheath in South London. That was in the run up to Christmas 1936. My parents and their families may sometimes have felt poor, but they were not. Of course I dont remember that but from what my mother told me later she had a lot of trouble giving birth to me. With midwife and doctor to hand, but not my father, as was normal those days. He seemed happy to see me, and glad to find his wife still alive. But earlier in her pregnancy he had been quite shocked by the transformation of his slim young wife when her belly swelled big and round. He walked out. I dont know how long he stayed away but it was certainly a shock for Mary, my mother. And me too perhaps, if if somehow got through to me. When it came to labour pains and delivery, the narrowness of her hips combined with childhood damage to her coccyx to make things more difficult. Her bent in tail-bone snagged the pelvic exit route.

This story was never just about my mum or me. Human females in general are not very well-designed for the delivery of big-headed babies. Unlike Neanderthals, Sapiens women stand and walk erect on closer-set legs.. The human brainbox may not be bigger than our stone-age cousins' but our hip and pelvis structure came out narrower..

As a man I cant understand how any woman feels in giving birth, but from what I learn it appears that women's hard labour birth probably preceded the hard labour of men out making a living. Eden could not have been a garden at all, with its goodness all to hand and protected by some sort of wall. With better science we can guess that the Eden story looked back to times already going, going, gone. When our ancestors were hunter gatherers, with lots of space to hunt and gather in and fruits, and roots and game in relatively easy reach, life may not have been too arduous for little tribes who moved from place to place. Less strenuous and more fun perhaps than scratching a living out of the ground or felling trees with stone axes or bulding walls.. Why else did hunting become the sport of kings and their warlord peers? It was they who now claimed the open forests as their own, kept killing the wild animals and calling their trophy-meat 'game'?

What the biblical creation myth also misses out is the hard labour of feuding and fighting within and between small tribes, and the accidental deaths that occur in the hunting of big animals or defence against non-human predators. But all that time, we can assume, women were still struggling, bleeding and dying in their inescapable procreative role. How else could we have gone forth, multiplied and colonised the world?

Over that longer hstory and prehistory, my guess is that women in childbirth have been at least as much at risk as were men at war or down mines etc. Men's wounds, unless they are crushed or fall from great height. Traditional warriors wounds were mostly blows or cuts from the outside in. They were more likely to be to the head, upper body and limbs which can be protected with armour and shields. Their wounds are more accessible for treatment than the internal wounds that occur when the labour of childbirth goes wrong. Internal wounds 'down there' have always been harder to treat and disinfect, more open to cross-infection as essential organs, conduits and containers entwine. Another evolutionary design fault, as bladder, bowels and womb are piled in together like soft fruit in a bowl.

Until recently I hadnt given the internal process of pregnancy and delivery much throught. Now I'm older, my mind is more free to wander and look to the important bits it missed. My interest and attention is also skewed inwards and downwards as my own entrails become less resilient and more demanding. But even before that I had observed in myself that the focus of emotion had less to do with heart or head than with gut feelings lower in my abdomen. Above and beind the belly-button, in that rib-cage opening to which God turned for Adam's rib, and with its focus in the solar plexus. I dont know why we're all told about the external cutting and tying or clipping of umbelical cords, but why haven't we heard more about what goes on inside the infant thus suddenly released and deprived. The solar plexus remains a bundle of nerves, and the sudden closure and diversion of such a grand central supply line from mother to embryo must surely have left its mark. While the maternal womb jetisons the placenta, what becomes of the internal apparatus left behind

on the other end?

Were there no lasting scars, adaptations or records of such extraordinary formative events? I wonder if that solar plexus may also be a data base or part of one, a livinig archive of primal loss and transformation? Isnt that where I, or we, now feel it, in a very physical way, when we experience a new shock, loss, fear or more positive excitement? And some vaguer or more lasting sense of longing or forboding? My guess is that this new material is grafted onto an older deeply rooted stock.

This everyday visceral business plays up and around the way we feel and thnk about ourselves, each other and the world. Nothing is too low to play a part in what we most fear, long for and aspire to. Old age can be a pain in the arse, but it also creates new openings and opportunities. As my frailer digestion and bladder interact and vie for attention, I wake up more often at night to relieve myself on one or both channels.

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With old age, a lot of our visceral business becomes more demanding, digestion more laborious, bladder less accommodating and the two playing off on each other. I wake up at night and need to relieve myself on one or both channels. With more interrupted sleep I dream more, or remember more dreams. The membranes between sleeping and waking become more permeable, and dreams criss cross with memories, new inferences and interpretations. Not a supernatural world but real for what it's worth, at once scrary and revealing if I can keep track of it. Maybe it's always been like that, and I just didnt notice it so much, and now I remember that Common Sense was once the name given to some imaginary point or process in ourselves where the messages from our other senses – sight and sound, taste, smell and touch – combine and integrate. That still seems quite sensible to me though I wouldnt confine it to this or that end of our physical and neural mainlines, or to this or that part of a cerebral mainframe. What more recent science reveals is how much of our sensory information is processed and responses prepared before we become conscious of it at all.

In more everyday terms I am conscious that the traditional five-sense package we pick up at school does not quite fit the bill. Where does it leave the undeniably real sensations we feel inside ourselves, beginning with the pains and discomforts of essential organs under stress and going on through sexual arousal to those other 'solar' impulses that we may or may not as they trigger us to fight, flight or freexe, to reach out or approach, recoil or embrace, hide or shield, touch or stroke?.

Back to that digestive tract, which I sometimes think of as my inner worm. Like the unsung earthworm that Charles Darwin wondered at, it does much of our essential business. Like the humble worm – though 'worm' was also the name given to dragons and the snake behind our fall from race - our digestive tract it equipped with the neural lines it needs to direct and manage its essential work. And oddly the peristalsis mechanism that squeezes our food intake down through our body and enables our digestion chemistry down the way is very similar to that used by worms to squeeze themselves through surrounding soil while squeezing as much as they need to feed on through themselves.

Clever worm, a self-propelled, self-fuelling conveyor belt that predated creatures like us by umpteen millions of years. Now I wonder if our more elaborated systems can be understood as evolutionary add-ons. A long series of chance mutations and new opportunities as found in the hard and soft-ware of skeletons and limbs, more speciallised organs, senses, glands and brain segments. A wonderful range of add-ons, apps and accessories adopted by the primal worm that lives on in us and other ground it helps to feed and fertilise.

I'm not saying having babies is like having worms, or demeaning the 'higher' forms of intellect and sentiment, just getting back to basics on which all such refinement depends. It's taken me a long time and it didnt begin with the visceral reminders of old age, my good fortune in being present at the birth of two sons. It didnt begin with the visceral fragilities of old age, with my good fortune in attending my own sons' birth and infant after. My first proper job at the age of 18 I was as an orderly in a geriatric ward. I worked along-side a small group of older, more experienced 'state-enrolled-assistant nurses'. They were working class women who made sure that I, as a middle-class male incomer took the rough with the smooth. From feeding and bedmaking to changing clothes, washing old bodies and slopping out;soiled linen sheets. I rubbed ointment into bedsores and helped lay out and shave a man I'd known alive the day before. That crash course was a blessing to me. Close contact with patients and workmates was a great lesson and leveller. It washed away old reflexes of revulstion and disgust and enabled me to engage more easily with people I could now recognise as more like myself than not. Across conventional divisions of age, class and sex, conversation and interaction became less stileted, freeer, franker and funnier.

This hospital job was the first stint in two years of 'alternative service' when I refused to join up for what was then compulsory national service in the armed forces. But my father told me he'd had rather the same liberating experience in his own basic training for war time service in the navy. For my mother who, then and later, was often condemned to domestic isolation, there was some collateral benefit when she, as hospital patient in later life, found some relief in the intimacies of day to day care. She too became able to love and laugh across social the social boundaries that had constrained her earlier life. When she found she could chat lightly with a black male nurse as he bed-washed her, she may also have recalled the presence and hands of a black maid who washed her as an infant in Trinidad. Also in that bath, Mary could just about remember the big white hands of her father, which must have been unusual for a middle-aged, Anglo-Irish judge in 1913.

All that must have helped my mother and me to get back to each other at last when she came to stay with us in Wales. She needed somewhere to stay and someone to look after her when she was too old for comfort and no room was yet available at a care-home nearer where she lived. It was |Ada my wife who did most of the washing and changing. Ada's background was Irish Catholic/Communist working class and they had not been too sure of each other until then. But now the became good friends. Once or twice, then and before, it fell to me to take a hand. Now living together, day to day with no holds barred, old barriers between us seemed to melt. For the first time in our lives, after more than 60 years, my mum and I we were able to embrace each other and mean it, enjoy the new warmth between us.

Such a shame we had a hard time in my long-drawn-out delivery. By the time I appeared she was exhausted and drained, literally, by loss of blood. I must have been a bit battered and bruised, with a little forceps scar to show for it. That all left neither of us in any condition to enjoy each other when we first met face to face. Later she told me she felt she'd been a bad mother, and I know I was stroppy with her as a child and distant later on. I'm sorty it took so long to make up, and grateful for all the help we got. I was born on December 1936. My father had returned home well before that. Contrite or not he was obviously glad to see me and find his wife still alive, well-washed and warmly-wrapped by the time they let him in. I hope that by Christmas that year we could all begin to enjoy each other's company.

What's left, what's new? No up or down,just in and out and round about.:

This picture topped a blog I began after the collapse of an Occupation movement in 2011. I called that blog WOTS LEFT, straplined LOVE, EQUALITY, FREEDOM. At that time, I felt that predatory or parasitical banks were at the root of much global injustice, exploitation, inequality, war and, yes, climate change.With guidance from Ada, my wife, and help from her grandson I slapped gluey newspaper round a preformed pig, let it dry and painted it gold, Ada fashioned the rag doll and I touched up our planet on a ping-pong ball. We  enjoyed that. But the pig and doll disappeared from the steps of St Pauls, and I'm still worryng about high finance ruling and wrecking the only world and life we've got. But now I'm less certain that bankers are altogether greedier or stupider than the rest of us. Except that today we face a more deadly combination of climate chaos, deeper inequality, a resurgent right and rampant capital  that drives and feeds on the damage.

What's changed? Just more of the same but worse. And for me and some others perhaps, it now all seems more pervasive and personal. Fault lines of of division, suspicion and meanness come home to roost. Opening up between families, within ourselves as much as anywhere, and the rot sets in - not always for the worst. That requires a new look at both human nature and the wider nature we spring from, reflect and depend upon. What's it all about? And that must also go for what we mean by love, when love can be love of the wrong things, right things in the wrong ways, or fed by hate for others..

Convection usually means the vertical circulation between hotter and cooler liquids or gases. That's a key dynamic in current climate change, and may also help us understand some vertical revolutions and displacements in human human society and within ourselves as pent up energy and impulse bubble up. 'They say the world is spinning around,
                                                                     I say the world is upside down' 

                                                                     Jimmy Cliff    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG6Eop0x5UU

Read on if you have the time. I will be looking out for chinks of light and green shoots as well as darker stuff. I'm still for more Freedom and Equality, but sometimes big words become over-used, misdirected and abused..I'll hang onto the LOVE, because we all want more of that in some way. But I will also try to dig deeper into what the word might mean, Doesn't loving our neighbours as ourselves, also require that we recognise and embrace the worst in both as well as the best?

My updated word-list will now comprise Love, Labour, Language, Land and...Games.  Why games? Try this one: pick up those five marker words, stand them on end like dominoes, then arrange them in a circle like the signpost pillars in Stone Henge. Then knock down and remould as horses on a round about. If you look them you can spot an inner ring and give them names, not horses of apocalypse but more friendly Common ones. Gee up Common people, Common land, Common sense, Common-as-muck (turn over, dig in), and Commonwealth, Why not, and easy as you go...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECr1aLZH7lo

  

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Ivor Goodjob meant no harm*

Our representative democracy is debased (George Monbiot) precisely because it has no base. The 'architecture' that must be changed is a pyramid of ladders, the bottom rungs of which hang above most people's reach.

Hierarchical gradients of income and wealth, knowledge and power span our economic, cultural and political life. A large, professionalised minority we pay, more or less willingly,to provide for us, mostly do better out of their jobs than we do. The working or non-working majority who get less than the national average wage also fail to qualify for any progressive career.

The decimated old white working class who voted Leave never voted, even with their feet, to automate their own jobs, relocate their industries or overpay the bosses and bankers who unemployed them. Few will be reading Monbiot, or me or any wordy broadsheet.

Yes what's needed is more direct democracy, but not confined to sensitive listening devices or top-down tick-box consultations. The direct democracy so sadly lacking is not mainly about choosing between preselected policies and representatives, but people deciding and acting for themselves, hands-on and face-to face, in their daily work and neighbourhoods.

How else can we begin to determine what's best, what's possible and how to go about it. Without this direct practical experience and social reconnection, how on earth can we decide what more to expect from the people we send up and away to speak for us?

How else can we create an effective base to inform the overarching economic and political bureaucracies that dispose of our time and money, do better for themselves than most of us, on the coat-tails of a megabuck, national and global, master-class?

Hannah Arendt on bureaucracy:

The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Charles Dickens on bureaucracy:

Chapter 10 of the Charles Dickens novel Little Dorrit. The chapter title is: "Containing the Whole Science of Government," and it includes the following:

"The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart....

"This glorious establishment had been early in the field when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving -- HOW NOT TO DO IT.

"Through this delicate perception, ... and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments, and the public condition had risen to be -- what it was. …

The Castle by Franz Kafka

“Regarding night interrogations: the night is less suitable for negotiations with applicants for the reason that by night it is difficult or positively impossible completely to preserve the official character of the negotiations. This is not a matter of externals, the forms can of course, if desired, be just as strictly observed by night as by day…the official power of judgment suffers at night. One tends involuntarily to judge things from a more private point of view at night, the allegations of the applicants take on more weight than is due to them, the judgment of the case becomes adulterated with quite irrelevant considerations of the rest of the applicants’ situation, their sufferings and anxieties. The necessary barrier between the applicants and the officials, even though externally it may be impeccably maintained, weakens, and where otherwise, as is proper, only questions and answers are exchanged, what sometimes seems to take place is an odd, wholly unsuitable changing of places between the persons.”

And The Trial by Franz Kafka

“You can’t go out, you are under arrest.”
“So it seems,” said K. “But for what?”
“We are not authorized to tell you that. Go to your room and wait there. Proceedings have been instituted against you, and you will be informed of everything in due course. I am exceeding my instructions in speaking freely to you like this…. If you continue to have as good luck as you have had in the choice of your warders, then you can be confident of the final result.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_7weUR0oMY

Chris Hedges updates (in the last 15 minutes of his Wages of Rebellion) what Harry Belafonte once called the incarceration of black America. Now says Hedges, it's modern slavery and the return of the company store in privately run prisons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNhsNHg7PI

'Another day older and deeper in debt..' If it were only black America suffering, poor whites wouldn't have turned their backs on shabby normality to vote for snake-oil Trump. And if it were wealth as such that riled them, they wouldn't have voted for Trump, any more then our own systematically deprived voted for Farage. The elites our poor whites rebel against are not confined to Washington – or Brussels or Westminster – but much nearer home, in everyday schools and offices etc

Hannah Arendt, who covered the trial of Eichman, called his conduct 'banal' – however evil the results - and homed in on a more general'thoughlessness' of bureaucracy. Chris Hedges talks of the indelible blindness of privilege, and Dickens and Kafka wrote long ago on what happens to people caught up in such systematic thoughtlessness.

Here's a trailer for Le Proces, aka The Trial which scared the daylights out of me in the 1960s, and left me in love with Jeanne Moreau (not to mention Orson Wellies):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNhsNHg7PI

Hedges, who teaches black prisoners (partly to heal his privilege-blndness) says a lot are of prisoners are still in debt to their private prisons when they leave. He says the black man shot in the back as he ran away from traffic cops was afraid of being sent down again for non-payment of those debts. His name was was Walter Scott and this Guardian report has a video of his banal execution in what could be any old park round here.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/07/south-carolina-police-officer-murder-charge

 *Ivor Goodjob was a name coined in an unemployed writers' group for a fictitious official from what was then the Department of Health and Social Security. I think the department has changed its name and hardened its criteria for disability, deservedness etc

Haves or have-nots, we need each other.

Here's a letter of mine, in response to the Observer's Will Hutton, as it appeared in the paper today (08.01.2017)
  
The care we’d want ourselves
For better health we need a better society, writes Will Hutton (“Good health is born of a good society. Little wonder that we’re suffering”; Comment, ). Less inequality, fairer taxation and more support for those of us, old and young, who most need it. But that may also require abroader shift from dependence on top-down, centralised provision, the array of goods and services we pay for but can’t control or understand. Somehow, we must get a better grip on what we can understand, agree and do together for ourselves.
That’s where society begins to make sense and social care is a natural starting point. It’s a face-to-face and hands-on business, with the expertise of experience and fellow-feeling. Hospital and social service departments would collapse without a threadbare but resilient safety net of family and friends, neighbours and workmates. And among the self-appointed carers are hundreds of thousands of children with parents or siblings who depend on them.
Two recent proposals suggest ways forward: Liberal Democrat former minister Norman Lamb has proposed a dedicated tax for health and social care, while the chief nursing officer for England, Jane Cummings, calls for more systematic support for care at home. A clearly costed and targeted national insurance would help. Priority for home-care, paid or otherwise, would save a lot of institutional and hi-tech provision. It’s also what most of us would want for ourselves.
Greg Wilkinson
Swansea

Of course Hutton is right that the secret of good health may lie in a good society. But he can never quite admit that what's bad about society as we know it is an economic system based on private wealth and bureaucratic hierarchy, a built-in trickle up of wealth and power from the many who have less to the few who have most.

I'm fed up with saying this in more or less palatable ways, and almost as fed up with an oppositional left that seems happier attacking its enemies than coming forward with better ways of doing things. Yes, everything could and should be different, but what are we actually doing about it? No revolution will work unless we can find ways of doing things differently among ourselves and seeing where to go from there. Sniping at more or less democratically elected leaders gets us nowhere if we have nothing better to offer, not just in theory but in practice. Replacing THEIR leaders with OUR leaders will leave us with more of the same unless we have a wider body of people already engaged in doing things better and more democratically for themselves and others. To find those better ways, we've got to get to choose good starting points, addressing more or less immediate needs with means that come to hand.

Representative democracy and elected governments will always let us down unless they are grounded in and responsive to a commonwealth of more direct democracy. Commonwealth involves common people (as in the House of Commons, the millions of acres of Common land enclosed by propertied parliaments and the old word Commons, for a common provision of essential rations etc). When I referred to 'our depleted social infrastructure' I wasnt just thinking of in- or out-of-work benefits but of children playing in the street, women meeting in corner shops and over garden fences as they hung the washing out, men meeting and organising in nearby factories and mines, works outings, holidays and union branches, local pubs and clubs, congregations in their Sunday best etc etc. Facebook, online shopping and petitions cant fill that gap unless they help to bring us back together face to face with something to be getting on with when we meed.
Meanwhile, oppositional socialism, ritual protest against present evils, may help bring down top-heavy systems or it may provide a safety valve to keep them in place. To replace them with something better we need a more constructive socialism, doing the best we can for ourselves and each other with the means to hand. Only from that basis of shared commitment, organisation and experience can we build a bridgehead and get through to secure the help we will still need from more centralised powers, whether political or corporate, that now monopolise resources, expertise and power.. 

Easier said than done, and my letter to the Observer below is only a tiny step. Published or not, it helps to clarify my own thinking, and lead me towards what could be further steps - with more than a bit of help from my friends.

Here's the last bit of my Observer letter that was NOT published, for more or less obvious reasons:

'A recognised, respected and properly funded Neighbourhood Care system could pilot a revival of other depleted social infrastructure, giving more content to so-called 'community'. From health and social care, more of us could \reach out and work together on other matters of common interest, in whatever space and time we can find between homework and paid employment otherwise.
Greg Wilkinson

PS The recent upturn in deathrates has a lot to do with funding cuts and growing inequality, and research also shows a link between inequality and obesity, an obvious cause of early death.On the other hand, a longer life is not always a better one, and a society that allows and encourages three quarters of its middle-aged citizens to fatten themselves for the slaughter might also offer them a painless way out. If we're free to self-harm, at whatever the cost to ourselves and fellow citizens, we might also be free to die at a time of our own choosing, with dignity and the agreement of loved-ones and qualified medics.

(Ed: If you prefer, the PS could stand as a self-contained alternative letter. I'm 80, with vested interests. My first job was as a ward-orderly in a workhouse refitted as hospital (c 1955, when the NHS too was young), caring for old people with nowhere else to go. About 50 years later I helped look after my own parents, in and out of hospital when they became incapable of looking after each other. The were not poor, which made things easier. At about that time, my wife did respite days for young carers, who seemed very happy to be making things out of willow sticks with her, playing and exploring our then neck of wood and stream in Wales.)'

Other questions arising::when does age become a disability, and who cares for the carers, young or old? Do only those with special needs and disabilities need caring for? I once heard Dennis (Beast of Bolsover) Skinner ridiculing privileged people who call for others to stand on their own two feet. 'That's easy to say, when you're strolling down the fairway on a sunny day. But no one comes into the world or leaves it on their own two feet.'

But... Old Labour's great post-war nationalisations, and even the wonderful NHS, were also top-down, centralising measures that made more and more of us subject to remote provision and control, and opened the way to top-down privatisation. And now we must also wonder how long can more and more of us depend on more and more expensive care while resenting every extra penny it costs in tax? And how come that all professional carers are trained to get their patients or clients doing all they can for themselves, while the rest of us expect everything to be provided and done for us.The trouble with capitalism is that it turns us all into needy dependents and willing slaves to the big providers who employ and sell to us.  Private and public state and corporate sectors interlock and fuse, and what difference does it make whether an enterprise is for profit or not-for-profit if their effective hiearchies and differentials of power and reward remain unchanged?

To reverse or balance this upward flow of wealth and power requires an effective counter force in the other direction, from base to summit if we accept the present pyramid model, with all ladders meeting at the top, and most of us nearer the bottom. For that we need to take back control of, and responsibility for, our own lives and circumstances wherever we can and as  far as we can reach. As individuals, families, neighbourhoods, towns etc, we must decide and do what we can for ourselves and each other. That's what direct democracy means, and only when that falls short should we delegate our authority to more remove representative bodies. That does NOT mean we could ever be self-sufficient, and we will always need more centralised powers to do what's best done on a larger scale, and to secure communication and a level playing field between regional and local centres. The soon-to-be-late-lamented European Union had a clumsy label for the principle that could also apply within nation states. 'Subsidiarity' meant that each part could do what it reasonably could for itself and only become subject to more central authority when that became impractical, local self-sufficiency, in what might be seen as a community-of-communities.

In my Observer letter I suggested that Social Care could become a pilot for broader renewal of social infrastructure. Why should that human foundation for any succesful enterprise in life be cut back further and left to rot while new post-austerity goes to roads and railways, runways and broadband?  A revival of local, collective and communal activity could extend from interpersonal social care to a range of other more or less neglected activities, from children's play and after-school clubs to youth and sports, libraries and museums, parks and allotments, and green no-mans-land in older council estates.

It's not a choice between voluntary effort and professional services, paid and unpaid labour but how to bring them together in better ways, so that formal training and institutional resources can reinforce grass-roots initiative.. An integration of popular and professional, top-down and bottom up.  Some of this is already happening, but for the wrong reasons and often the wrong ways, because local authorities and public service departments have been forced to cut costs and replace paid with unpaid laboour rather than combine the best of both. It's not a matter of either/or, them-or-us, not win or lose, but both joined up. My father once wept when, at the end of an early televised marathon, the front runners joined hands and crossed the line together.

Beware abstraction, and over-the-rainbow fantasies. The link below gives a better idea of what I meant about fattening ourselves for the slaughter. How can any Health Service or Social Care take the weight of such an overhang?

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/middle-aged-health-alcohol-weight-lifestyle-a7497561.html

Obesity, like mental illness, suicide and other sorts of self harm, increases with inequality, at least in better-off societies. It is not only or even mainly self-induced...  It wasn't always that way and here are some verses I wrote about a scrawny old man - who am I to talk? - who was admitted to the hospital ward I worked in more than 60 years ago:

He'd lived in a house they'd condemned

With his wife and a yard full of hens

They got them both out in the end

But couldnt make him see sense.

They broke the old couple apart

Two bodies and one broken heart

In a workhouse refitted as hospital

For the aged and chronically ill

The old man stood up for his rights

Got out of his bed in the night

And told us who came to push him back in

He'd been feeding his chickens.

So we tied a net over his bed

Put sedatives in with his tea.

In a week and a day he was dead..

Could the same ever happen to me?

Why not? 
But at least my mother lived a lot longer and died quite happily. When she left us in Wales she went to a residential home nearer where she'd lived and knew people. After a year or two there she tired of getting weaker, ill and incapable despite good care. For a while she talked piteously about it being time to die, as if we might help. Then she stopped eating. The kind women who laid her out left her wedding ring on her finger and pinned a rosebud to her nighty. They'd noticed she could smell what flowers were in a bunch even before it was unwrapped.

Earlier this week,  Ada (my wife) took down the little Christmas tree in the hall and pulled the cloth off the heavy garden flowerpot I'd stuck it in. Popping out of the soil were a dozen white shoots, and on one side, where the light must have got in, stood two wide-open dark blue irises.

A flash of hope in the Pandora's box of 2017. But for all of us, may tides of war and desolation turn before too long and let more humankindness in. Wherever we live, haves and have-nots cant get far without each other

Seasons greetings, lighter days to come

                     



TASHTEGO BELIEVED RED

A hand comforts held out to one who's sinking;
And what founders deeper than a world which sinks?
Like a lost ship it never once says thanks,
Since no single hand can save its timber drinking
The poisoned salt its sides awash are flanking,
Thirsty for web of weeds or sift of sandbanks,
Its last music gunshot, its gesture poise of tanks
Over the wood where swathes of death are ranking...
But witness, the hand is no hand but an arm
Curving itself with the strong swimmer's flex
- A thousand arms which thresh against the blast
Of a regressive ocean, even whose calm
Is derelict with that impartiality which wrecks
- Yet regard, regard, the red banner nailed to the msst!

                              Malcolm Lowry 1909-1957
                              best known for novel 'Under the Volcano.
                              and seaborn short stories 'Hear us, oh lord...'


PS
The image is a collage of junkmail etc begun by Ada and finished - with sweating palms - by me. I'm 80 tomorrow and find myself more blessed with wife and family than Lowry was. Take comfort too from other facts of life at sea: tides turn and even sailing boats can make headway upwind, not straight on, but tacking this way and that. (Same with truth: 'He that will reach her, about must and about must go' - John Donne, though now he might say She)