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.

.

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

  

 .