small green sprouts

manchurian candidates

2008-05-20T11:27:00.000-07:00

At the ITP conference this weekend, Michael Murphy talked about the evidence for reincarnation. Esalen has been collecting data on 'survival' for some time, and, according to Murphy, the evidence has now convinced him, pretty much against his will, that reincarnation is a fact.

The data that convinced Murphy were amassed by Ian Stevenson, of the University of Virginia, who has been researching the question of reincarnation for some time. His case studies concern children who were born with birthmarks or deformities, which they claim relate to the way they previously died. Such as a child born with a line of eight round birthmarks, who claimed he had been executed by machine-gun fire. Stevenson identified the man he had been, who had been shot across the chest eight times.

Sri Aurobindo's explanation for this type of phenomenon is that some of us experience a 'deep death' (like a deep sleep), in which we recharge and reconnect with our soul's mission, before being reborn in a new body to continue our evolution. Others, however, experience a 'shallow death', and as a result, carry the stresses of this life into the next, psychosomatising them into the new body as birthmarks or deformities. Woo woo enough for you?

My own reading of studies on near death experience revealed that everyone goes through a 'life review' after death, and that the one criterion on which a life seems to be judged is how well one has loved. This, it seems to me, is not only a useful guide on assessing one's ongoing life, but also constitutes a sort of pith instruction on how we can best, as a species, evolve further, and save ourselves from otherwise certain doom.

Murphy says that if we are willing to accept the possibility of reincarnation, and the implication of a continuing soul, with a mission of evolution, then we must reassess the synchronicities in our lives as glimpses of that mission. Surely they provide guidance from the deep soul. And we must listen to them, or lose that guidance.
We are all, said Murphy, Manchurian candidates, sent here on a mission about which we have no information. We have to work it out as we go, trying to sniff out the track and stay on it.

He quoted the Gita, which says, "It is better to fail in your own dharma than succeed in someone else's". These words ring in my mind like a bell. Like a transmission from the deep soul, saying don't follow any more red herrings, no matter how brightly they shine.

sati

2007-12-15T18:53:00.000-08:00

I was told a myth this week that zinged about my mind like a hummingbird. It's the myth of Sati, who was one of the wives of Shiva.

Sati was a princess, and her father did not include Shiva on his list of potential bridegrooms. Shiva was far too marginal a type for him. But Sati had set her heart on Shiva, and so she married him just the same. The two of them went to live together at Shiva's place, in the charnel grounds, where they spent their time singing and dancing and meditating.

Sometime later, Sati's father decides to hold a fire ceremony. He invites everyone, except his daughter and her husband. Sati is furious at such public rejection, and declares her intention to go anyway.

Shiva says no, she shouldn't go. It's a mortal insult, not being invited. She should stay away. But Sati defies him too, goes, and in her rage, throws herself into the fire and is consumed. Shiva is devastated. He gathers her remains and roams about the world, grieving, until Lord Vishnu comes and cuts up the body, so that bits of it fall over India.

In this myth, Sati rejects all the suitors her patriarchial father selects for her. Instead she chooses her own man, and leaves the house of her father to be with a different type of masculine energy. But she is still enmeshed, and when her father snubs her back, her rage at the patriarchy destroys her. It burns her up.
The man who loves her cannot save her. She has destroyed herself in order to avenge herself on her father.

The myth seems to ring true to me. So many of the women in my generation have such conflicted relationships with the masculine. We reject the patriarchial system in which we grew up, and yet somewhere inside, our rage smoulders, unabated. If we're not careful, the fire of our own fury can destroy us.

The myth is unbalanced. There are two men, but only one woman. Sati lacks a supporting feminine element. If there were another woman in the story, would she run from the arms of Shiva to cast herself into the father's fire? She is too alone, she has become unstrung. The love of a good man is not enough; she needs the community of other women to save her.

As it is, alone, she cannot survive her own hurt.

tristes tropiques

2007-09-28T02:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, in Grenoble, I visited all the bookshops. First I bought Tristes Tropiques by the great anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss. Then I found a book by psychotherapist Guy Corneau which starts,

“Inevitably there comes a moment in one’s life where nothing’s going right, nothing at all. Sometimes it happens as a result of external circumstances: a divorce, a failure, an illness, a reversal of fortune. Sometimes it happens within, while everything seems to be going fine on the outside…At any rate, whichever way it comes to pass, suddenly the thread seems to break. An irrepressible feeling rises from the depths. It can be a great sadness, an extreme lassitude, a gathering irritation, or the loss of one’s appetite for life. One is confronted, in the words of Leonard Cohen, with an “invincible defeat…”

Corneau is a Jungian, so he believes that such passages of despair and urgency are created by the psyche as an opportunity for discovery, and a chance to break out of the cocoon one has bound oneself into, and become one’s real self.

In the University bookshop I bought an autobiography of Isabelle Jarry, one of my favourite authors. It starts with an account of spending two years working on a new book, only to have her editor reject it.

I’m comforted by the failures of people whose lives and works I admire. It’s so easy to see their temporary blind-alleys as the dust in the oyster. Clearly set within a context of overall success, they look meaningful, or at least harmless. Not a wasteland, but a field left fallow as part of a pattern of crop rotation. Not a drop from a great height into the wilderness, just a wrong turn taken when exploring a new city without a map—no problem, just turn around and find your way again. And keep your eyes peeled as you go, just in case you bump into something amazing and un-thought-of, while you’re walking where you didn’t expect to be.

This is good to remember. Because from ground level, when you're in it, it's too easy to feel like a rat in a labyrinth, with no lever to press. When we're in the shadowy slums of the soul, it’s pure faith to imagine finding one's way out--walking steadily forward into a the light of a wide, tree-lined square, with a fountain sparkling newly in the sun.

musee du quai branly

2007-09-13T11:43:00.000-07:00

The Musee du Quai Branly in Paris houses 300,000 artifacts from Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas. It’s a serious centre for ethnographic and anthropological research, as well as a repository for stunning ethnic art. The collection is dramatically, theatrically lit, setting the pieces, stunning in themselves, in a manner that leaves you panting the way good opera does.
I am immediately riveted by a case with four decorated skulls, called simply ‘ancestors’. One has been given a new face of smooth clay and eyes made of round, whorled shells, so that they look wide open with shock. “I’m dead?” Another still has its teeth, and has been worked with a collage of seeds. But the one I find most touching is the plainest, a small skull which has been painted in simple ochre and red, and polished to a sheen. Its empty eye sockets are dark and deep.

Looking at this old person, I think I'd like to have my ancestors somewhere, in a place where they'd be safe and I could visit them. I’d like to take the dead faces of my grandmothers into my hands and stroke their temples and croon to them. I’d like to light a little fire for them in the winter and sit with them by it. Looking at these skulls, so lovingly preserved and honoured by decoration, I wonder at the way we simply consign our loved ones to fire or earth and have done.

Wandering on, I come to a group of huge wooden posts with heads carved in them. They're open in the middle, and can be played as drums. Their purpose was to guard the sites reserved for ritual dancing, as well as to provide the music for ceremonies. Lit from above, the looming faces, with their protruding triangular jaws and bulging brows, look bewildered and angry. I get a sense of some energy that's not quite heat, not quite vibration. It seems to me they're anxious and unhappy to be so far from the place they were made for, so divorced from their purpose in this world. Instinctively I stoop to touch the floor in front of them to pay hommage, I wish I had a little honey and sesame to leave for them, even though that's West African and these come from Polynesia and who knows what sacrifices they require. I'm sure they'd be grateful though, for something.

The final part of the exhibition is a section on repair in Africa, entitled ‘Wounded Objects'. The notices explain that in Africa, things are repaired rather than thrown away. Partly because resources are scarce, and partly because when something breaks, it is taken to reflect a rupture not only in the object itself, but in the community. So mending it also represents repairing the community. Furthermore, the wound is considered part of the life of the object, so there’s no intention of hiding it, or of re-making the object as new. Many of the repairs are beautiful, for example the small patches of intricately engraved metal that patch calabashes and pots. Or the copper staples applied diagonally, in lines. Or the precise stitches placed across neat lines of holes drilled by hand along the two sides of a break in a calabash.

Looking at leather thongs and nails repairing a large carved wooden object that seems to be two linked bowls with lids, I reflect that in a culture where things are made by hand, with hand tools, over days and weeks of careful, inspired, intricate movements, you would indeed hesitate to ditch something just because it was cracked. You couldn't just throw it away and buy a new one. Every piece here is unique. Every piece is a labour, if not of love, then at least of intimate respect. And it would cost a corresponding amount, increasing your respect for it. Of course you would repair it; there would be no question.

And this respect for the absolute, instrinsic value of a thing, as well as the relative poverty (at least when riches are measured in cash) of the area, means that ordinary things are also repaired. A large colour photo shows a woman in Mali repairing both calabashes and plastic buckets, with neat stitches of blue plastic thread. Another shows a man repairing someone's broken rubber flip flop, using a roll of nylon string.

This idea of the repair being an honorable part of the object, and of the repairer deliberately not trying to hide the fact that the thing has been broken and subsequently pieced carefully back together, is fascinating to me. At times I have felt so broken myself, so worried that I’ll never be quite the same again. And now here’s a whole roomful of objects which are just fine with being openly broken. The repairs are like scars, writing the story of the life of the object on its skin, as it were. Many are even decorative, making the object more beautiful than it was before—though that’s not necessary either. Many of these are sacred objects, objects of power, and they don't need to be beautiful. They don't need to seduce in order to be respected. The energy radiates out of them. 'The repair restores their power', states the notice.

Interestingly, when I ask for the catalogue in the bookshop later, I’m told it has sold out. Evidently I’m not the only one who’s struck by the notion of rupture and repair.

countryside thoughts

2007-09-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

My last day in England is blustery and autumnal. I hike up the lane behind my sister’s house and follow a Public Footpath sign across stubbly fields. The wind roars in a big ash tree and a flock of about a hundred rooks rises flapping and cawing into the air. I find a fragment of terracotta sticking out of the earth, and then a delicate chip of bone china with an elegant blue and white willow pattern. Who knows how old they are. Antique stuff is always getting ploughed up in Britain. It’s everywhere.

Some of my American friends have disparaged the European countryside for this reason. “We have wildernesss,” they say, “But in Europe there’s not an inch where humans haven’t been.”
I felt rather hangdog the first time this happened, unable to defend myself or my continent. It’s true. Everything has been touched by humans. But I realise now that actually this is one of the things I like about Europe.

There’s a relationship with the land here. It knows us. It has myths and legends enshrined in it, as well as ancient Britons, Gauls, Saxons and Romans buried in it. The place names tell the story, and lumps or troughs in the grass reveal historic sites. (Plus you can go camping without having to hide your food from bears.)

Closer to York, there's an area with field after field of pasture, the surface of which runs in wide, flat ridges like corduroy. These are the remnants of the old strip farming system, established over a thousand years ago in Saxon times. Every family had its strip. Villagers convened to decide how the crops would be rotated and which areas would be left fallow to regenerate. It’s amazing to see the system still there, now covered with sheep, casually grazing by the side of the track.

Up by where my parents live is an islet of trees and bushes, on a hummock in the middle of a field. The farmer ploughs neatly around it every year. If you look on the ordonnance survey map, you can see it’s marked as a barrow—an Iron Age burial mound. No big deal, they’re common up here in the north, where there aren’t so many people and urban sprawl hasn’t reached so far into the fields as it has in the south. I doubt it has ever been excavated.

The footpath in the field I’m in now ends in a ditch of nettles and brambles, so I stump along the hedgerow until I can get through to the lane on the other side. Most of these hedgerows are ancient too, and they provide a rich and undisturbed micro-habitat for everything from foxes and badgers, to knuckle-sized voles and shrews. In the old days a hedge was professionally maintained, by a Hedger, who pruned the new growth in the autumn, chopping neatly half way through the vertical branches so that he could bend them back down and weave them back into the hedge, strengthening and thickening it. Now hedges mostly just get lopped by a mechanical trimmer attached to a slowly moving tractor, and the result is gap-toothed hedges composed of trees and holes, and reinforced by barbed wire.

Further north, fields are separated not by hedges, but by dry stone walls. Miles and miles of neatly stacked pieces of stone. No mortar is used; the stones are secured only by the way they have been fitted together. The wind blows through the chinks so it doesn’t knock the wall down, even in winter gales. Sometimes it’s a cavity wall, with two neat outside edges and a filling of smaller rocks and rubble. Every few hundred yards a larger stone is left sticking out, making a step for a stile, so you can nip across the wall if you need to.

Dry stone walling is another craft teetering on the brink of oblivion, although artists like Andy Goldsworthy have helped encourage people to value the age-old skill.

Up by Robin Hood’s Bay I saw where the old walls had been filled in by people less than expert. The flat stones had been carefully stacked back on top of each other, but they didn’t all line up quite so smoothly as in the older pieces of wall, and they weren’t topped by a neat edge of vertically stacked toppers, like a row of stiff lace.

This lane is edged by rosebay willowherb, stretching its tall spikes of mauve flowers. Delicate purple vetch and pink clover bob among nettles underneath. I spot lady’s bedstraw, so named because it really was used to make beds for ladies, in the days when peasants bedded down on the floor, and ladies on beds stuffed with straw. Shiny blackberries bulge on the thorny brambles, and I taste a few. Tangy and sweet. Juicy.

work as god

2007-06-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

James Hillman likes to write about polytheistic approaches to the psyche, as an alternative to our worship of the One God of Ego. He says that with a polytheistic approach, the other voices within us can be heard, not demons vis a vis the Ego and its rationality, but as equally important spirits. He urges us to let these voices speak, and be heard, rather than rushing to label them as pathology and supress them in favour of the Ego and its gospels of reason and success.

The monotheism/polytheism dichotomy is enlightening. We fall into the montheism trap SO MUCH, in so many areas of our lives. It's pervasive. Perhaps not surprisingly, as the struggle between the two modalities lasted many centuries and resulted in the Spanish Inquisition, the massacre of Jews and Cathars, and the burning of thousands of so-called witches and satanists. We learned the hard way that there is only room for one truth, one guiding principle, one way.

One area which this has affected is that of what we do for a living--in the US, work is a jealous god. We are supposed to live to work, we define ourselves by what we do ("I'm a manager".). And we squeeze a meagre existence around the edges of that. It's a weird ethos. A classic case of an ideology obscuring the economic base of exploitation of the worker, Marxists would say. Classically Protestant work ethic, a philosopher might opine.

The French, who are historically Catholic and Revolutionary, have a different set of ideologies. They work 400 hours less than Americans per year, but are much more productive--because they have a life too and time off to live it!

Here in the US, however, where work is God, if you ask for time off without pay, or try to negotiate extra holiday, they look at you askance--you've just revealed yourself to be a Blasphemer, a Heretic. It makes them uncomfortable. They disapprove so profoundly that they don't even wonder about the cause of that disapproval, or wonder how reasonable your request is. They just know it's a sin to do what you just did. They feel it in their bones.

Where are the Cathars of the world of work?

the matter of darkness

2006-11-17T09:55:00.000-08:00

They said on the radio this morning that 70% of the universe is made up of dark matter. Pretty much all that we know about it is that it's the stuff that pulls the universe into explansion.

I know I'm extrapolating directly from physics into metaphor here, but this just seems somehow significant:
1. Most of the world we think we know is made up of stuff we don't know anything about, and aren't even aware is there. We are, so to speak, completely in the dark about what's really going on.
2. It's the dark stuff that forces us to expand. Not the light, but the dark.
Both seem as true on the personal level as they are on the physical.

I like them because they help to reclaim the importance of darkness, and sever the link we have made between darkness and evil, negativity and death.

In the Far East white, not black, is the colour of death. Funeral corteges consist of mourners clad in bright white, colour of bones and loneliness. Someone once said white was the colour that he associated with "lost". Like the white fog in which you lose your way, or the over-brilliant, blinding glare of snow.

Dark is the place where the seeds lie buried in winter, until by the grace of that period of apparently endless dormancy, they invisibly begin to germinate, sensing the light and warmth they can now move toward. If they get to the light too early it can be dangerous--they can grow spindly, or be too shallow rooted to withstand strong sun. In the desert of New Mexico the native farmers plant the corn DEEP.

The dark is difficult. Or at least, the cold dark is. As winter fills the evening with frozen ink, I light candles and think of the soft, welcoming dark of tropical and Mediterranean nights, with the little lights strung out between the looming shadows of acacia trees, and the soft songs of crickets rasping in the background.

progress

2006-08-01T12:29:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me this week that in the old days, when things did not change so fast and there weren't so many people, and so there was not the same need for endless development, you could stand on a piece of land in mid-life, on which you had stood as a kid, and on which you have stood every day since then, and look out, and it would be the same.

And that permanence in the LAND would have given you a different view of life. A view of life in which cycles of seasonal change went on, but basically the world endured. And I think this permanence would have been a comfort.

Now I go to the places that I loved and took solace and strength from when I was younger, and they have been touristified and pathed over, with explanatory plaques and souvenir vendors, or they have been razed and built on.

The LAND is disappearing. The world population has DOUBLED since I was born, and I feel this nostalgia for the passing of calm and silence and small-scale life, and for a time when things did not require continual adjustment at such a pace.

Some things are good as they are, they function well and do not need to be replaced or improved. It's a relief to find things as they were, unchanged, old friends softened by time and use.

I long for respite from the continual murder of the simple and quiet. I scour around in my mind for where peace and permanence might be found, but there are people and buildings and roads everywhere that I know now, and I feel a panic at the thought of the 3B more who will arrive by the time I am 80, tripling the population since the 3B it was when I was born.

Already all the bustle overwhelms me. Moving somewhere unspoiled simply invites a repitition of that experience of seeing the houses begin to sprawl over it. There is no solution, no grace to be found.

vertigo

2006-07-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

Many have tried to write about the Mediterranean, but few have succeeded.

There's a melancholy about this old coast and these islands, like a base note of musk in a perfume that would otherwise be too sweet to bear. Is it the bitter ghosts of all those dead empires? Or was there always a sting in the honey? A thorn in the lion's paw? (For there were lions here, once). Perhaps it's the daemon of this land itself that inspired the Greeks to tragedy and sent first the Alexandrians, and then the Romans, out to conquer the known world.

The impossibly clear water is alive with tiny fishes. Intoxicated, you dive down deeper and deeper, until the current of your passing billows the sand, half-revealing ancient mosaic. The fish flash silver, and your blue-and-white mood shifts to slanting vertigo at the depths of time concealed here.

The veil slips. The beautiful olive-skinned dancing boy becomes an old man wasted by years. But within the grotto of his eyes glows the same fire that blooms in the blood-red geraniums and the crow-black cypresses down by the port, where men have been fishing for millenia.
The jasmine-scented afternoon smells like heaven, the evening air is delicious, and in the soft night everyone's eyes are olive-black and filled with the slow smile of love. The magic is irresistible, like a flower to a fly, and in you slip, reveling in bright yellow.

war crimes in Iraq

2006-07-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

TIKRIT, Iraq - U.S. investigators have asked Iraqi authorities to help them navigate cultural sensitivities to exhume the body of a teenager allegedly raped and murdered with her family by American soldiers, a military official said Saturday.
Full story at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060708/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_rape_investigation

Incredible. The level of disrespect in this is extraordinary. I am not Muslim but my reaction was, for god's sake, they have to violate her all over again now she's dead? And always with the ideology of justice.

The soldier charged with the rape received an honourable discharge on the basis of personality disorder. Which of course suggests a failed attempt at a cover-up. But question of responsibility has to go much, much further than an investigation of this man's individual acts. And do read on, because the point of this post is not to vilify this man for what he did.

There's something wierd about the army righteously going after soldiers for committing atrocities. By allowing ourselves to get pulled into despising these men personally, on the basis of their individual 'disgustingness', we permit the continuation of the ridiculous ideology that the "normal" war in Iraq has proceeded, and continues to proceed, in a civilised manner. That, with the exception of this unpleasant character, who has now been removed from the game, the war is just, fair and clean.

Whereas the unpalatable truth is that these young war criminals are behaving in ways that are coherent with the situation they are living in. If they put me through what they put these young men through, prostituting their courage and their loyalty for the profit of the ruling oligarchy, I would also be a perverse remnant of myself. And that's a fact, actually, according to a study cited by James Hillman in his astounding book A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR:

"A world war 2 study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 % of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties.....[A] common trait among the 2 % able to endure....was a predisposition toward 'aggressive psychopathic personalities'."

NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT. In other words, if you aren't psycho already, two months of combat will drive you nuts. Or put the other way around: two months of combat drives every single person nuts, unless they already are a psychopath.

Then, having driven you nuts, the army personalises it, saying you have a disorder, or are a war criminal. I'm not letting this particular rapist-and-murderer off the hook here (he sounds like one of the 2%), but I am asking us to consider where the blame really lies for his disorder and his war crime, as well as his opportunity. He and thousands like him, along with hundreds of thousands of civilians, are being physically and psychologically violated and maimed in and by the war.

According to a friend of mine who worked recently at the VA, after all the research based on the Vietnam Vets, the army is still just dumping the soldiers back into society exactly the same way. We will be reaping the harvest until well after I die. Hopefully peacefully, in a bed.

We must not be taken in by the ideologies of freedom, democracy and a just war. If anything needs to be exhumed, it is the truth of violent colonisation that lies beneath these shiny white words.

the world outside

2006-05-25T16:43:00.000-07:00

I left Palo Alto yesterday afternoon, and as I drove out to 280 I was struck by The World Outside. The brightness of the sun, the brilliance of the blue sky, the flashing effect of the wind in Eucalyptus trees. It seemed, well...outsized. And a little overwhelming, like something you've been looking at for a long time, suddenly seen through 3D glasses.

It's easy to lose touch with the The World Outside when you're working in an office. You get inured to your little paths between your desk, the lab, the printer, and the secret coffee machine squirreled away in that code-protected area. And it occurs to me that this is the NUMBER ONE PROBLEM: the fact that we lose touch with The World Outside, that we forget the warm embrace of the air, the scent of the summer breeze, the softness of the rain, the whisper of trees in the wind.

It's not surprising that CEOs and top execs have no relationship with nature or respect for biodiversity. They never really meet either, except perhaps obliquely on a hunting trip laid on by a client, and that hardly counts. They are the nearest thing you can find outside of a fifties sci-fi movie to brains in jars, fed by an automatic feed of pre-digested nutrients.

How can we expect them to have any idea what a forest is like when it's just dusk and you can feel it breathing? How can we blame them for not understanding that manipulating transactions of profit and loss is the least of all human activities? How can we hate them for not seeing the world as more than a sink for effluent they never smell, see or touch? It's literally all numbers and concepts to them. They speed past it on their way to other things; things that exist in their minds and on their balance sheets. Things that exist ONLY in their minds and on their balance sheets. Who ever saw a share price build a nest and lay eggs? Who can lay total customer satisfaction on a plate and watch hungry people eat it?

While I was pondering all this I drove to my meeting. It seems to be consolidation time again inside the company I'm working for. It's not too far along yet, but I can scent change coming, like rain in the fall. And it gets me going. The blood starts zinging in my veins, my heart beats a little faster. I start thinking strategically, I churn out ideas. It's not excitement that generates this; it's a mixture of fear and competitive spirit. If you even have a little competitive spirit, the scent of danger can drive your adrenalin sky-high as you start to accelerate to make sure you get ahead of the team before the wolves are let loose.

After the meeting I left to drive back through the same glorious country, with the blond grass glowing in the late afternoon sun, and the smooth hills curving green to the horizon. And once again I had to struggle to see it. I was too speeded up, too hyped on paranoia and determination to survive. I was full of plans for how to feather my nest in this abstract world of contingency plans that have nothing to do with anything I could actually weigh in my hands, or plant in the earth, or gaze at with eyes that well up at its beauty.

Is it any wonder The World Outside is in such grave danger when our minds are so full of the immaterial? When even I, with my deep ecology agenda and concern for the world, struggle to see it through the film of figures that runs up and down over the inside of my eyes like the titles for The Matrix?

gulab jamun

2006-05-22T21:19:00.000-07:00

I've lived most of my life in other people's countries. I was born in a Confucian culture to ex-pat British parents (one Welsh, one English), and apparently learned Chinese before English. I started primary school in a Protestant country and moved a couple of years later to a Mediterranean culture where I was fascinated with little street-side shrines to the Virgin Mary. At nineteen I went to University in Scotland and moved pretty soon after graduation to France. Now I'm a resident alien living in the US.

Given all of this, in some ways diversity is my specialised subject. I have never really felt particularly British. Having friends all over the world makes you pretty unfit for patriotic pride, basically because you realise that everyone is just as important as you. Learning to speak French changed the self inside of me, and permanently altered the way I interact with the world.
Living in South East Asia as a teenager gave me a different locus of importance in the world. You may know this feeling if you've spent a lot of time somewhere else; the centre is no longer London or New York, but Hong Kong, Japan, Jakarta. It FEELS different when you look at a world map.

But recently I've noticed something more: a deepening of that feeling of cultural relativity, of that geographical off-centering. I don't know whether it's the result or the cause of this deepening, but I'm increasingly glimpsing a different centre...as though the focus of the world, and the important areas in it, were shifting eastwards.

In Large IT Company, Inc., where I work, most of our young engineers are Chinese and Indian. And for good reason. Recently the US National Academies of Science and Engineering, and the US Institute of Medecine, published a report called 'The Gathering Storm', in which they warned that the US lags far behind other countries in science education. Personally I have noticed, based on meeting kids in developing countries as varied as Senegal and Vietnam, that we also lag in terms of our motivation for educational achievement. We can't get our disillusioned kids to finish school; their kids seem sharp as tacks, learn everything they can and are clamouring for more. At seven the Vietnamese street kids read and write, and insist on conversing with you via a phrase book. Little kids in Senegal have to be VIVID to survive, and their twenty-somethings are dying for opportunties to use their talents in the world.

The African CIO of a large defense company recently told me that he had noticed a significant change in West Africa. The Chinese, he said, have moved in. And, he said, their attitude was completely different from that of Western partners. For a start, they built stuff that was actually useful; that is, for more than simply money laundering via pseudo-aid. Such as hospitals. And secondly, they moved their people there, to live in the area and integrate. He said it looked like real investment.

I thought it sounded as though he also meant investment by people who, though different, act as though you're both equal. And I thought, woooo, this changes everything. Because the Chinese can contribute to Africa without the legacy of colonialism. (By which I mean both a culture of superiority, and trade restrictions built to continue the fleecing of the Third World that we began four centuries or so ago.) And I felt a little excited, because perhaps we don't have to work through all that colonial shit anymore if some other people can just come along and side step it. Then us Whities will be out of the game. Someone else will bring a ball, and everyone will go and play with them instead. And the joke will, for once, finally, after all these hundreds of years, be on us.

While I had this on my mind, I noticed an interaction in the coffee-corner at work, while I was sharing some gulab jamun with some Indian colleagues. An Iranian engineer wandered by and was offered some of the delicious syrupy treats, and there followed a conversation during which it was pointed out to me that gulab jamun came to India by way of Persia. And I had a little moment of realising, in a visceral way, that the Rest Of The World has a life of its very own.
The shock was not that I realised this. It was that I realised it in a new way. I realised it, not in a way related to the past, but in a way related to the future. I realised it in my body, as though I lived a dozen time zones to the east. And as we laughed, I got that the West is done. We don't realise it yet, but the sun has set here. The future is in the Rest Of The World. It's in China and India (and probably South America, given the recent revolts there against US hegemony).

I'm nervous about this economically, since my savings are partly in dollars and partly in Euros, and I worry about my old age in a dead empire. But I'm also excited about it. Will the end of colonialism happen in my time? Whatever happens to me and my small life, I look forward to whatever small role I can play in a world in which the tired old horse of the British empire, and its nasty starred and striped nephew, are finally put out to grass.

final rant about dating

2006-05-18T18:50:00.000-07:00

It seems terribly francaise of me to hate something linguistic with such venom, but I loathe the verb to date, as in "I'd like to date you".

I despise its blunt and mechanistic transitivity. Subject, verb, object: I, Date, You. It shocks me. Worse than that; it repells me.

Prior to coming to America, I had always used the phrase to go out with. "She's going out with him" seems to me to be about as far from "She's dating him" as "She's making love with him" is from "She's doing him".

She's making love with him allows so much more openness, gentleness, nuance and mutuality. In She's doing him the action is stripped to the most basic common denominator, in which one person operates upon another, almost irrespective of that person's own subjectivity. In this phrase, and in the mindset represented by this phrase, the other exists merely as a target for the activity of the subject. There's no I/Thou there; it's strictly I/it. And what's worse, it's I/it in denial.

It's more subtly the same with He's dating her. HE's dating HER. What's she doing? Well, in this sentence construction, not much. She's reduced to being the object of his activity of dating. She's not going out with him. They're not seeing each other. He's dating her. (Ditto by the way, with She's dating him. I'm not talking about gender roles here, I'm talking about ways of viewing the opposite sex as an instrument for one's own agenda of self-gratification.)

As I said, it seems very French intello of me to be so concerned with the deep structural psychology underlying a banal piece of surface syntax, but I truly think that the transitivity of this verb phrase reveals what is so unhealthy about the whole relationship scene here in Silicon Valley, in which it is quite normal to date multiple people, compare them on a kind of mental spreadsheet (for all I know people use real ones), and then pick the "best" contender.

You can buy tickets to expensive 'speed dating' soirees, during which you rotate through people in slots of six minutes each, and ask those with the best personal PR for their numbers. You can subscribe to online dating services, some of which (such as eHarmony) have already decided for you that if you're a woman, you need an older man (on the basis, they claim, of research). Women apparently sort men by height and income. So, if you're a short nice guy with a low paid job, kiss your subscription goodbye. I don't know what the men sort for, but I do know the woman post glamour shots.

All of this exhausts me on the deepest of levels. I'd rather stay single than enter this world, with its loaded agenda and its instrumentalist goals.

How have we have allowed ourselves to become so commercialised that every exchange has become one of profit and loss? In a society in which everyone continually looks for the biggest return on the least possible investment, every interaction becomes an advertisment, every meeting an interview.

indigenous? not for millenia

2006-03-27T19:07:00.000-08:00

I keep coming across training courses that promise, "During this week, we will rediscover our indigenous heart". Or some such other variant of this promise. "We'll rediscover our indigenous heart." What?

These statements about our "inner indigenous nature" are generally accompanied by glowing testimonials from people who describe themselves as "I've traced my roots. I'm Celtic, German, Spanish, Greek and Irish", or, "I've discovered I'm Swedish, Italian, French, Czech and English". What on earth are these laundry lists of the nationality of their ancestors supposed to signify?

It seems to me to be an insult and a belittlement of indigenous people to assume that a one week course, or even a two year course, or even a ten year one for that matter, can enable people who have not been indigenous for MILLENIA to "rediscover" anything about themselves which is indigenous. Indigenous culture is not some bundle of practices one can learn from reading a book or two about spirit medecine, or by invoking some set of diverse ancestors in dubious ceremonies involving the burning of sage, or even by completing an MA in anthropology.

You can go back through your family tree and discover that you have people in it from Spain, England, Germany, Greece etc. But what does that mean? It certainly doesn't take you back to anything indigenous. Indigenous means local to the land, linked to the land, of the land (a good clue is whether a people practise an hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with shamanistic medecine and religion). None of these cultures is indigenous. These are cultures of empire!

Practically no-one in Europe, unless they are from the far flung Northern regions of Finland, or perhaps some of the very rural areas of ex-USSR, has been indigenous within several thousand years. The Celts, the Greeks, the Romans, the Huns, the Goths, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Gauls, the Normans, and countless others dealt with the indigenous in Europe from before the time of Christ. Some small pockets remain, for example in Lappland. But basically most of Europe has not been populated by its indigenous people for a v-e-r-y long time.

I for example will never be able to become indigenous--even I spent the next 20 years learning to live on the land, to listen to its spirits and creatures, and imitating the practises of some real natives, I would never be able to unlearn the habits of the non-indigenous cultures I have been part of. I can never BE the way I would be had I been brought up within an indigenous culture. It's not about what you DO.

I read somewhere that ferrets will not go feral--they have been domesticated too long. You can release them into the wild (they tried it in Australia to keep the rabbits down) but they will not go back to the land and turn feral. Well it's the same for humans. My Welsh family has been traced back to 1066 and there's not an indigenous soul in there. I am not going to belittle the milennia of culture, knowledge, study, wisdom and invention of the truly indigenous by claiming that I can "reclaim" all that for myself.

The indigenous are on the verge of extinction in this world, and appropriating them culturally is part of the process of devaluing their real existence so that it can be recuperated by the mainstream, and so that they can be rendered extinct without hitch--after all, we're all indigenous, aren't we? So they weren't that special after all. Nor was their ancestral habitat. Bye. Resist this crap, people. Rediscover your dignity, and your right to live on and with the earth. Support the fight of the indigenous for the right to life for themselves and their land. But don't steal their identity as well as their birthright. Don't claim to be indigenous if you are not.

the wild wood

2006-03-27T19:06:00.000-08:00

For a while during my childhood my family lived in England. In the north of Yorkshire, on the edge of the national park. So after school and on weekends, I began to wander out of the housing estate and up the lane into the woods.

The woods were mostly beech and chestnut, but with some pine, hawthorn and oak mixed in. The path through the trees led to a river, and further across the river was more forest. When I went into the further areas of forest I found unexpected delights: a whole clearing of wild bluebells one spring; a huge ancient quarry covered in brambles, with caves in the chalky walls. Once I paused on the path and looked up through the trees and met the eyes of a small owl, sitting up there looking down.

In winter I followed the traces of rabbits and foxes through snow. When I was in the areas that weren't my habitual territory, I felt prickly and wary. I stalked along like a rodent, looking over my shoulder and just a wee bit twitchy. (I'm small and I'm female, so I tend to think like prey.)
Many years later, visiting my parents as an adult, I went up down to the woods, crossed the river and walked much, much further than I had ever done, until I came into a much denser part of the forest. It was an early spring afternoon, a little chilly but very clear. As I proceeded along the path through the conifers, I began to have A Feeling.

It was unlike any other feeling I had ever had in the woods, and it went much deeper than the sensible wariness of a small animal off its normal beaten track. It wasn't just that I was out of my territory--it was more that I felt out of my DEPTH. I felt I was in the presence of a power that was completely undomesticated. Like a truly wild, very large animal. This wood could eat me if it chose. It knew I was there and it was breathing all around me and tolerating me. I was awed, and not a little scared.

As I walked along, pondering what this feeling meant, and what it wanted me to do, a voice in my mind said, "I'm in the Wildwood". The Wildwood was the ancient, primary forest that covered Old Britain. The place of bears and wild boar, outlaws and Robin Hood. The domain of the Horned One and the source of legends and myths that persist to this day.

I continued along with my shoulders prickling for about ten steps, whereupon the path turned into a small clearing. There on a panel it said, "This forest was once part of the old wild wood, which covered most of Britain". (Or words to that effect.) All the hair stood up on the back of my head. Because I had KNOWN it, and it was the wood itself that told me.