The call of the wild...or shall I stay indoors?

I went for a run yesterday. Running can be quite meditative. It shakes my mind and my body and draws up any lethargy that's been collecting. It leaks out in my sweat and I feel like I'm running away from my own laziness. Or running to combat my laziness. I also get restless. So running is a great antidote to restless jigging and building frustration.

I'm in the south of Finland on holiday. I kept to the road on my run, but there were tall silver birch and pine trees either side of me, where the forest stretches out.

As I ran, I stole glances into the trees. I always associate the forest with peace and stillness. But as I peered into it, a deep sort of anxiety started to well up. The forest here was wild, unkempt, close to people, but not looked after by them. I could spy rotting, fallen trees and thick darkness. Masses of moss and tangled branches. There was something chaotic and futile about it.

 

I am the first to romanticise nature and idealise notions of 'returning to the wilderness' but I started to realise just how divorced I really am from the wild. I am a smart-phone wielding, distracted, safety-groping modern person with little knowledge of nature beyond the greenness we cultivate in our back gardens. I am a massive, laughable hypocrite. I love the ideal postcard picture of a forest, not the real thing.

As I ran and looked into the forest, I thought about creativity, artists and anyone who dares to travel to the edges and beyond what men and women have already cultivated. I thought about madness. Henri Matisse famously said 'creativity takes courage.' Looking into the dark forested chaos from the paved road I started to feel like I understood what he meant.

The act of creativity involves submitting to chaos. It means going beyond the social constructs of all the labels and boxes we have created to order things and put ourselves in a position of mastery. To create something new, one first has to screw up and destroy all sense-making maps and step off the trodden path. Creativity is walking into the wild and trying to keep your wits about you, letting yourself be an instrument, absorbing what you see, using your eyes as if for the first time, and then hopefully coming back with new forms of meaning. Prolific American artist Georgia O'Keefe's words in a 1923 letter to Sherwood Anderson ring out; 'whether you succeed or not is irrelevant - there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing - and keeping the unknown always beyond you.'

We worry about creating meaning as a species. Don't all our forms of progress come from creativity? Daring to imagine something new? Realising there are endless ways of making sense of chaos. Submitting to nothing, and coming back with something.

In 'The Courage to Create', American existential psychologist Rollo May distinguishes creativity as the product of a raw, undefended encounter between self and world. Courage is needed to withstand the intense anxiety provoked by a natural world with no meaning ascribed to it. When one puts aside empirical fact, order, the history of everything we 'know' and meets the world just as it is,

'Our sense of identity is threatened; the world is not as we experienced it before, and since self and world are always correlated, we no longer are what we were before[...] The anxiety we feel is temporary rootlessness, disorientation; it is the anxiety of nothingness.'

May goes on to define artists as those who 'do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being.'

I wrote the below after my run and wanted to share it here. There's a sense  of futility to it, but I'm not going to apologise for that. Futility is uncomfortable, but it exists. Artists probably know it well. It's a scribbled homage to all the artists out there, sacrificing themselves as instruments, travelling beyond their edges, and bringing back visceral meaning for all of us.

What if we veer off course?
End up lost, among the fallen trees, compounded by moss,
Confused by thick, impenetrable bracken.
Weighed down by the damp, with just an echo for company,
An echo that fritters away, gets swallowed by the deepest forest,
And disappears.
Into nothing.

What if we submit to the chaos and it devours us?
Turning to see the path we marked on the way here, to keep us safe,
We are shocked to find that it's gone.
Was it ever there, we start to wonder...
Did order exist at all,
Or did we dream it up to put ourselves at ease?

What now?
We summoned the courage to create,
And we teeter on the edge, grabbing at the hand of destruction,
Desperate for company when we find ourselves alone.
Futility creeps in on us with the beetles.
Is this the only way back to ourselves?

What if we lose the web of language that keeps us rooted,
If we see new forms we cannot live without.
How do we express them?
How do we share them?
Will people call us crazy?
Will we be crazy?

Trapped in limbo with the longing call of the wild,
With messages for men and women who no longer possess ears to hear.
Will you take us back, when we have been away so long?
Or maybe we've walked too far,
Stepped over the edge.
We're knee-deep in chaos and there's nothing left.

Either way, wouldn't you rather say you took the risk?

 

 

Dear David Cameron, and maybe all of us, me included.

I received a letter from David Cameron yesterday. I live in what is considered a marginal constituency in the coming election and therefore he wanted to beg for my vote by bad-mouthing Ed Milliband and the SNP and talking about the economy. A lot. And nothing else.

I felt angry. I thought I should respond, it would be rude not to right? Even if it was just so I could untangle my own angry knot. As I wrote, my anger grew and became uncomfortable and itchy. I realised my anger was not exclusive to David Cameron, but probably many of the other parties, the choice I face in this election, the pressure to have to vote tactically to keep someone out, rather than vote for who I want to see in government, and also anger at the world, our age old global cultural paradigm built on White colonial power that still covertly rules, however politically correct we pretend to be. And at myself, for my impotence in being any different or standing up to things I disagree with. It's easier to eat a doughnut or watch a YouTube video of a cat meeting a lizard and freaking out.

Anyway, this letter won't really help. But more than anything, it's a message to myself not to forget where my passion lies and to keep doing the work I think is important, on myself. It starts from right here, where each of us stand. If we can't be the change, what's the fucking point?

Here is David's letter:

 

 

 
My response:

David!

How did you know how much I love receiving post? Aww, you really shouldn’t have. Especially at such a busy time.

No seriously...you needn’t have bothered.

It felt like getting a letter from an old friend, except for the fact that you left off my younger sister who has been knocking around for 21 years and is also registered to vote in this constituency. I would expect an old friend to know that. But she will soon be footing her £44,000 bill of tuition fees, so perhaps you thought she might not want to hear from you right now?

If I’m honest, by the 5^th use of my first name I started to feel quite uneasy David. As if you didn’t want to tell me anything at all, or fill me in on your news, but just show off how good you are at mail merge.

Language is interesting, your letter reminded me of that.

-          You mentioned us by name 7 times. Cheers for that. Really hammered home my own name to me.
-     You mentioned the economy or used money-based language 15 times. In one short letter. You used it even when you weren’t talking about the economy. Shows where your priorities lie eh David?

I get it - you want to put an end to austerity and ‘continue building the British economy’. The problem is, you don’t seem to care about the fair distribution of that wealth or anything else besides economic wealth?

Let’s talk about what matters; our country. Oh, and how about the rest of the world, other species and the environment? Hang on. If we think about the rest of the world, we risk actually giving a shit about people other than ourselves don’t we? As we’ve seen, that’s not really on, because division is absolutely key to your economic plan. And the economy is key to, well, everything.

Britain needs to get back on top in your eyes, clamber back up on its hierarchical ladder where it can poke away any rage from the marginalised with a sheepish smile, a furrowed brow and the insistence that using the newest politically correct language means you are actually politically correct or aware of or open to discussing issues of diversity or inequality.

If we look inwards, to Britain, we see stories of how you have helped to grow the British economy and started getting us back on track. All this success while more people than ever are using food banks. So where is their share? The welfare and social care sectors are facing increased cuts in order to ‘balance the books’ while the corporations get away with lucrative deals and tax-dodging.

How you treat your own people is reflected in your view on to the wider world. But it’s not just you David, I’ll admit that. It’s the whole of our archaic global cultural paradigm that desperately needs to shift. First World nations have set the bar by cashing in their wealth and attempting to drown out protesting voices that don’t fit their narrative. We have forgotten the sacred importance of community in favour of focussing on the individual. We need voices that represent everyone. We need to recognise that we are everyone. If we fail at diversity, we fail to connect in the deepest sense as a community. We become unsustainable as a group and do little good for anyone around us. Shit needs to change. Badly.

How do we do it? Awareness. Start by being aware of your own functioning. Seek to come into contact with your own prejudices every day. Don’t pretend you don’t have any. Talk to someone that repels you, or that you realise you already have a stereotyped perception of, before you’ve met them. Name what comes up for you – discuss the stuff we try to avoid all the time because it makes us uncomfortable and causes friction with our rooted perception of the world. Seek to expand beyond mainstream ideas that can make you feel like a claustrophobic pea. What do YOU think? The work is everywhere, in every moment, for all of us to do. Try to be open, be curious. Try listening. Until we own our own shit, we’ll just keep projecting it onto ‘the other.’ It’s safer that way apparently. But the danger is what we’re seeing playing out in the world – repression of a problem doesn’t make it go away. If we fail to own our own shadow, we cast a collective darkness much bigger than the one we’re running away from.

It’s a tall order, but one we can all do something about. Starting right now.

It may seem like I’ve gone off on a tangent, but really these issues underlie the surface of a politics and a modern culture that frustrates a great many of us today. I’m looking for a leader who is actually a decent human being with enough self-awareness to understand how his or her decisions will impact the group of people he or she is leading. A leader who looks out for everyone, not just his own. David - your inability to acknowledge the marginal voices in Britain (as well as elsewhere) is why I won’t be helping you out in this marginal constituency on 7^th May.

As far as I’m concerned, you can jog on.

Penny for the Guy/ Your Thoughts?

It's strange that we celebrate Bonfire Night to remember some bloke who tried to blow up Parliament many moons ago and got caught in the act. It's a national festival held up to remind us of the danger of dissent. I can imagine why an old skool monarch would want to stick that day in the calendar. Especially after the imminent danger of having almost been blown to pieces. But it's funny that it still holds.

Is it just a gripping moral tale from the past? Or is it still a useful metaphor to help the government warn the common public what might happen if we try to put a rocket under David Cameron's arse? Turn it on its head, and maybe it's actually a celebration of dissent? The very fact that it's a festive occasion where we utilise Guy's weapon of choice to send pretty lines and coloured spirals through the sky is something I reckon he might've quite liked. Unfortunately for him though, by the time the fireworks kick off, he's usually endured his millionth death by bonfire via the form of another childish effigy wearing Dad's old tennis shoes and Hawaiian shirt. Maybe there is no particular reason for holding up the festivities except it's tradition, innit. And everyone loves an excuse for a celebration. And Mum loves an excuse to burn Dad's vile shirts.

I was just reading about Guy Fawkes (Wikipedia of course). Apparently (according to trusted source mentioned in previous sentence) when he was first caught for the Gunpowder Plot he gave the authorities a false name. Instead of Guy Fawkes, he told them he was 'John Johnson'. HA! That is a man in the moment of panic....'shit...my name...think of a name...definitely not Guy...another name...any name...a man's name...John...a surname...bollocks...nothing...John...John...son?'

Remember, remember the 5th of November. When a bloke fucked up and got caught trying to blow up the government.

I have decided to take my own message from this. Remember, remember:

1) we're all a bit fucked up
2) that's what makes us beautiful and real
3) striving for perfection is death to the masterpiece
4) embrace all of you, including the messy fucked up bits! It's liberating for you, and the guy next door will breathe easier too when he knows you've just fucked up and even more so, he'll admire you when he sees that you can handle it.
5) That's what I'll be celebrating this Bonfire night. Three cheers to you big Guy - for fucking up, and getting a whole country to light up the sky in honour of that on a yearly basis for over 400 years.

A Poem

An Invitation From The Sea

Being by the sea calms our souls.
The crashing of water,
Constant ocean song,
Soothes us all.

We don't have to be anything here.
Water washes our tickling minds,
Intellect seems comical and ridiculous.

The waves creep in to the shore,
And invite us to join them.
To scrub out our boundaries,
Be listless, open and free.

Let's become slippery silver fish that swim forever,
And cannot be caught.
Learn to skim the shoreline in a sidestep, like the crab,
Forgetting our preoccupation with forwards and back.

The ocean sweeps over us and offers to dilute us,
To banish our complexities and itches,
To become uncontained and happy for it.

Kurt Vonnegut on creativity

Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007) was an American author and humanist. I imagine his passion for humanitarian issues may have grown after witnessing the allied firebombing of Dresden towards the end of World War II. At the time, he was an American POW trapped in an underground meat locker. That's not the sort of thing that leaves you with a good impression of humanity. Please see my earlier blog on Slaughterhouse-Five for a link to more info on the Dresden Firebombing.

In addition to war,Vonnegut experienced other significant tragedies during his earlier years - his Mother committed suicide on Mother's Day while he was home on leave from the war in 1944. His sister Alice died of cancer only hours after her husband had died in a train crash.

Some of these experiences may lend themselves to Vonnegut's writing style - which typically centres around tragi-comic science fiction storylines. Vonnegut explained in an interview that his forays into outer space surrealism in 'Slaughterhouse-Five' were intended to provide relief to his reader, from the heavy subject of war. I can only imagine these tangents were first employed to provide relief to Vonnegut himself, who had lived first-hand the horrors of war he was tackling in his fiction. The art of fiction itself was perhaps a way to cope with what he had encountered. Art gave Vonnegut the possibility to create something meaningful to share from such utter destruction. Perhaps, in a sense, he was able to escape the heavy burden of what he had witnessed by releasing it to the world.

Read more about Vonnegut's life and career here.

All I really wanted to share here was Vonnegut's below words on creativity, which I love.

Theatre Review: CHIMERICA

Harold Pinter Theatre
Written by Lucy Kirkwood
Dir. Lyndsey Turner

Lucy Kirkwood is one talented young lady. Born in 1984, Kirkwood is only a few months my senior. This makes me feel deeply impressed and provides a welcome reminder that hard work and passion pay off. Kirkwood has produced an inventive, thought-provoking play that is currently receiving rave reviews from critics and public alike. And yes, I am about to write another such review.

Chimerica is not Kirkwood’s first play, but for those that hadn’t heard her name following previous successes, this will be the one to blow her out the water. It was first staged in May at the Almeida theatre, and has now moved to The Harold Pinter Theatre, where it is showing until October. Born in Leytonstone in 1984, Lucy graduated from Edinburgh University with a degree in English Literature. She is currently a writer in residence at Clean Break Theatre Company. She wrote and starred in her first play Grady Hot Potato in 2005. Kirkwood has since written other plays, many with dark undercurrents. Her 2009 production It Felt Empty When The Heart Went At First But It Is Alright Now, staged at The Arcola Theatre, provided a moving commentary on sex trafficking. Kirkwood is not shy to pick up bleak and difficult themes, and she tackles them with a sensitivity and humour that make them enjoyable for audiences.

So, what is so good about Kirkwood's latest production, Chimerica?

Well, the script for starters. The story centres on an iconic image taken during the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1989. A well-dressed civilian, presumably on his way home from work with plastic shopping bags in tow confronts three tanks, standing directly in their path. The play opens with Joe Schofield (Stephen Campbell Moore), an aspiring photojournalist snapping the shot from his hotel window. The story shifts to some years later when Joe returns to China on a visit. China has changed. The play details a corporate and rapidly developing nation, seemingly intent on fitting the American consumerist mould. One of the play’s characters describes it as a nation that has gone “from famine to slimfast in one generation”. 

The play recounts Joe’s obsessive search for ‘the tank man’ in his photograph. Joe’s boss Frank (Trevor Cooper) is not convinced when Joe pitches his idea as a ‘good-news, human courage’ scoop. That may be well and good, Frank responds, but it’s not what America is interested in paying for or reading unfortunately. Joe’s blinkered obsession reveals a preoccupation to find a meaning beyond the superficial growth and artifice that now embodies China, as well as America. It turns out that his idealistic interpretation of the image may be far from the truth of the situation. Kirkwood calls to question our interpretation of history, events and the world around us. She starts with a real photograph and exposes the many possible stories that exist behind it.

Kirkwood’s writing is relevant, accessible and jam-packed with witty one-liners to boot. Being funny is something tricky in writing, especially if you are writing about serious matters. You can easily over-bake it, making funny too deliberate and starchy. But here, the characters deliver punchy, off-the-cuff responses when interacting that jolted the audience into riffs of genuine laughter.

This production is innovatively staged and applause must be directed to stage designer Es Devlin. A rotating cube containing different rooms and spaces between America and China provides numerous set changes. Relevant city scenery is projected on the outer cube walls to enhance the wider geographic location and help to shift the movement between America and China.

The acting is superb. Stephen Campbell Moore plays the obsessively idealistic activist, Joe. Claudie Blakley gives a stand out performance as Tess. Benedict Wong, Trevor Cooper and Sean Gilder also shine brightly in fully fleshed out characters. Nothing left to say except to mention Lyndsey Turner who has stitched this play together in her accomplished and confident direction.

Go and see it.

The beauty of being inappropriate

There is something truly delightful about inappropriate behaviour. Or at least the relatively harmless strand of it.

Life is full of social codes and rules put in place to determine our behaviour in certain situations. We learn them as we become adults as a means of coping and functioning well in society. But, have you ever noticed inappropriate urges dive-bombing into your consciousness at the least appropriate time? These urges always spring up suddenly, unexpectedly. They pounce, and it always feels as if the imagined action is on the tip of your tongue or niggling the end of your fingertips or toes, threatening to burst into public domain.

I'll give you an example:
I ordered a Chinese takeaway not long ago. The delivery man rang the doorbell. I opened the door. He stood on the doorstep, holding the white plastic takeaway bag out towards me and exclaimed:
"Dewivewwyyy" in a Chinese accent.
I caught myself just on the edge, as I realised that my instant urge was to mimic his exclamation, mirroring back what he had said in an impersonation of his accent. I wasn't being racist, it was just an urge that came from somewhere within. But it would have been massively rude and weird if I had. So I refrained, paid him and ate the food. Which was the normal thing to do.

The other day I was walking along the underground tunnel at the interchange between the Victoria and Piccadilly line. I had an instantaneous urge to strike out and punch the guy in front of me in the back of the head. For no apparent reason. I didn't do it, obviously. At work, when the office is quiet, I sometimes feel like standing up and singing a random tune like 'Coco Jambo' in an over-exaggerated and stupid singing voice. I never have. It would be fun when waiting at the back of a long queue in a shop to suggest everyone starts a game of 'Chinese Whispers'. I love it when a newsreader struggles to fight a fit of giggles or accidentally slips up on a word and says something inappropriate by accident.

This Dutch interviewer's laughter is on the dangerously offensive side of inappropriate, but he just can't help himself!

My boyfriend told me about going to see some sections of Holst's 'The Planets' played live at The Royal Albert Hall with some friends. The support act had been an outfit playing on empty jars with drumsticks and suchlike. I can imagine some people probably enjoying it, the polite silence of others not enjoying it. There were probably stray claps, perhaps a few disapproving or confused glances exchanged quietly in the audience. Then someone stood up in the audience and shouted:
"THIS IS CRAAAAAAAAAP".

 

Inappropriate audience laughter during a TEDex talk

Even more fun than the inappropriate behaviour itself, is watching people's reactions. We have certain scripts and rules to our behaviour that feel safe and rehearsed, and we can act out appropriately. When these are broken we end up in the realm of the spontaneous. It's proof that anything can happen. It's sort of exciting. Most of us hold back from these urges, it is the obvious thing to do - unless you want everyone to think you're a 'nutter'. We try our best to snuff out the internal monologues that occur in our heads so that we can act out what it is we think we 'should' do to fit in and appear 'normal'. Mark and Jez from Peep Show always illustrate our internal battle so well.

Mark desperately tries to hide his real feelings when Sophie breaks up with him in an episode of 'Peep Show'.

Where do these inappropriate urges come from? When reading in bed last night a line stood out in my book that explained the notion well:

"one's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper." - Mohsin Hamid, 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'

Hamid employs this sentiment in an entirely different context. In his book, it relates to the conservative dress demanded of women in Pakistan and its possible effect on men and their desires. But...the line still made me smile as it makes sense here too and rings true. Confinement of our behaviour obviously creates an inner urge to break it.

Breaking the social code is usually awkward, shameful or embarrassing. But it can also be hilarious and exciting and break the monotony of what we expect from each other.