Existential angst...

I wish I was a Bacchante. I am tired of having my face pressed up against the glass of the attempt. It is a sickness of self, of treading the same roads of thought, of dreaming the same dreams--the imagination growing in grooves, with no bud to manifest. I want a loosening, I want to BE instead of watching myself watching myself and occasionally watching others. The time has come to be alone, yet the talk of being so is like a shard my mind cannot fully touch. Things like Facebook tick away with other people 'being' and you sitting on the Circle line and never getting off, but watching silhoettes and relationships appear and vanish (and I was on the real Circle line today and thought precisely this--which is ridiculous. Self-help books talk about 'changing your perceptions', but that's like saying that young people 'need to get more involved in politics').

And then there's that sense of  wondering if you have been eroded somehow. Apparently back in February I was 'spontaneous' and didn't seem to 'take life too seriously'. *Reads the above paragraph* Damn. 

Memory lane...

... I've just found this old place again. So much has changed. If I think too much about it, it aches. I had the confidence, idealism (and blindness) to 'pontificate' (my dad's word) on things I knew nothing about. In some ways I'm tempted to delete my old posts and start again. But I don't think I will. I'm trying to contact that old me; she could write and I can't. I've been lost since summer 07.

I'm trying to write again at the moment. It's something shortish--perhaps a short story, perhaps more, perhaps simply short-lived, which popped into my head a few days ago.

The January winds had not changed since he was a child, despite whatever the newspapers said. Their touch remained a bracing spur from the grave, whether or not it was wrong to be taken out of it. But that day they filled rather than cleaning the lungs, offering iron which had nothing to do with pollution. Clouds had sprouted in the sky like tumours Grey light clarified people on the street, making their movement surprising. All his senses were acute and compressed; the air felt like glass to be flat against, and the leaflet in his hand the only thing that anchored him.

On the other side of the glass stood his wife.

She was somewhere there, hidden on the other side of that city-street, lurking. He kept spreading his hands, and wanted to convey the fact. Sometimes passers-by seemed to understand already; an old man stood on a corner, speaking into the breeze to no one. God is dead, Quirk thought, but didn’t think. Thinking belonged to others.

Sensation. Cold feet. Chafing wind.

A wave of laughter coursed up to his throat. How standard it all was! These were the set reactions, the strategies of denial; you laughed, you cried, you pretended, you even observed it…

Working back into it is so painful. I didn't know Quirk was grieving until he was walking down the street.

And I promise I'll stop being self-regarding and start writing about life next post :)

Disorganised Religion

Yes. It's true. I've entered the world of adulthood. Do I feel suddenly mature, responsible and ready to take on the world? Uh... not really.

I feel like I've emerged from a very extended party. The night of my birthday featured a civilised meal with the parents, the day afterwards a very enjoyable and mainly civilised trip to the theatre, and the day after that a thoroughly uncivilised night with friends. There was cake consumption on unprecedented levels. The only thing which marred the experience was the school trip to the Tate Modern. I happen to detest most modern art, and I sat through a twenty minute video of coloured buildings and a voice trying to relate it all to identity and democracy in naked disbelief. You couldn't help wondering whether the lampcost on the corner was supposed to be a phallic symbol. That's what the Tate Modern does to you.

After that cursory personal announcement, I wanted to share some thoughts about—brace yourself—religion. Before I start, I would like to say that the following is all intensely subjective, and so nothing I say is meant as an arrogant declaration of a new gospel; I have decided to 'go for it' instead of crowding it all with little apologies.

Over the past three years I have had people trying to convert me, either seriously or otherwise, to either atheism or Christian fundamentalism. The first is all much of a muchness; you either believe in a god or you don't, and it's a leap of faith which can't easily be rationalised. I believe in one, and that is that. Fundamentalism also seems to ignore this principle. Our delightful headmaster, preaching on his own ego-fuelled pulpit, seems to believe that Christianity is indisputable. It's not, but that's the whole POINT of religion. You don't know, you believe.

I could rant about fundamentalism for a while, or I could explain (and attempt to justify, as far as is possible) my own beliefs. I choose to do the latter, because I'm rather tired of explaining to people that the word 'pagan' does not necessarily mean Wiccan or druid, or any other kind of nature worshipper. Part of the problem is simply communication; when I say 'pagan,' I actually mean 'part of a larger movement of neo-paganism, with a dash of meso-paganism informed by hermeticism and Jung-influenced monism.' Imprecision is a sin, but so are too many 'isms.' All I want to say right now is why...

# I reject organised religion.

Basic rebelliousness? No. Jung puts it better than me.

"[...] People had long forgotten what [the sacred archetypes] meant. Or had they really forgotten? Could it be that men had never really known what they meant, and that only in recent times did it occur to the Protestant part of mankind that actually we haven't the remotest conception of what is meant by the Virgin Birth, the divinity of Christ, and the complexities of the Trinity? It almost seems as if these images had just lived, and as if their living existence had simply been accepted without question and without reflection, much as everyone decorates Christmas trees or hides Easter eggs without ever knowing what these customs mean. The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean."

C.G. JUNG, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Second Edition

Archetypes are the primordial images, the rawness of the power I see as the godhead. In systemising them, in teaching them rather than experiencing them, they have lost their power. You are communicating through layers of Man, shells of learned abstractions, rather than directly with God. Jung was speaking in terms of collective psychology, the meaning remains relevant to me; in proceeding alone, one is arguably more likely to confront a symbol directly, and perhaps get past its symbolism.

Note the word 'arguably.' There are two major criticisms that can be made, neither of them entirely answerable: prayer and the alternate way. Christians pray to God. Muslims pray to Allah. Wiccans 'draw down the moon,' which is a pretty way of saying ritualised prayer. It's still 100% possible for someone to speak with the divine in an organised religion; the more intense it is, the more likely it is that you can feel God. By the alternate way, I mean that by rejecting organised religion, I am still following ways which have been paved by human hands, and littered with human terms and symbols. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a system, and anyone who has sat down and read anything of Aleister Crowley soon realises that his way of speaking with God is to learn a new language. That perhaps explains another of my beliefs—

# All faiths are doors to the same room.

No religion is more 'valid' than another, as all are centred round the same thing. So why make it harder for myself by rejecting the major and organised?

The point I have to make for both of those previously mentioned truths seems a shallow one: familiarity. To say it breeds contempt is a few miles too far, but to me, a person who has known the Christian story for as long as I can remember, it starts to become meaningless. If I sat alone and read the Bible, it would make an impact, one which would go beyond the symbols. Unfortunately, instead of having been free to do so, I have been subjected to such things as school assemblies and lectures by people who read the Bible as though it's a textbook recommended by Ofsted. Kabbalah, however, I discovered on my own. Mythology, stories untaught and so untainted, spoke to me: I discovered Odinism. Yes, to understand Kabbalah you have to read books written by those with their own little human views, but you are free to reject an individual's words; it is systemised and unrelenting orthodoxy that breeds alienation.

I am a pagan, but I am not an 'ism.'

Voting is 'fun'

The world is incredibly helpful sometimes. I was wondering what on earth to write on here, only to have a reason to complain quite literally dropped into my lap.

The concept of myself voting has always been a rather fuzzy one. In the realistic sense, to me it seems to be a case of choosing between the equally useless to rule over the eternally unhappy. I could go on forever about how hopeless modern politicians appear to be (the fight for the centre ground, the appeal to fluffy abstract concepts, hysteria over whether or not it's offensive to call an old lady old, concern about making criminals think that the government is 'mean,' etc.) but voting has always seemed rather important. Voting, I thought, was a rite of adulthood, symbolic of maturity and part of an essential democratic tradition going back to Ancient Greek times. When you become eighteen you are granted this right; you are an adult, with a voice that can be heard. All well and good. Unfortunately, Basildon Council has different ideas about it all. Its letter to me has to be seen to be believed.

"The elections on 3 May this year will be your first opportunity to vote. To help first time voters, and to make the process a little more 'fun' the Council has signed up to a new service called the Election Alarm Clock. [...] You also get the chance to play the 'ele-jumper' game - see how far you can get the roller-skating elephant to jump."

What's next? Voting by your favourite colour - red, blue or green? Voting by which politician has the nicest smile? Would that be 'fun' enough?

Half of me is inclined to take the idea of a game involving a roller-skating elephant being of equal importance to voting as being offensive to specifically eighteen-year-olds. You don't grow up only to be treated like a child, needing encouragement in the form of fun-in-inverted-commas. The other half of me has had a blinding revelation. People are always complaining about how everyone is 'dumb' nowadays. All political correctness aside, they're 100% right. As a nation, we are dumber. One only needs to consult a previous generation's typical exam paper and the reality of the UK's slide down the European educational scale to see that. What was my blinding revelation, this 'black lightning' as author John Fowles put it? Letters like this are the reason.

Reality TV. Comedy in which the height of amusement is a well-timed fart. The 'everyone's a winner' policy which means that incompetence is counted as creativity. Assemblies in which students are urged to 'achieve their goals.' Letters to eighteen-year-olds (who are supposed to be well-nurtured, educated adults) putting elephants on roller-skates on par with voting. Any psychologist could testify the existence of self-fulfilling prophecies; a child which is treated as though it is stupid will feel it to be true, and is therefore unlikely to be academically gifted, to say the least. In an experiment, psychologists Rosenthal and Jacobson randomly chose 20% of elementary school children from 18 classrooms and told teachers that they were 'intellectual bloomers,' predicting that they would improve greatly over the next school year. The teachers believed that the children had been tested using a special IQ test. When Rosenthal and Jacobson returned, the 20% really had become 'intellectual bloomers.' Bringing it back to the main issue, if people are treated as though they are stupid, they will likely become so.

Roller-skating elephants? Excuse me? It makes one wonder what goes through the heads of those at the top of it all. Is there a guidebook for party members?

1. Always wear yellow and other happy colours!
2. Corect spellnig is scarry.
3. Barney the Dinosaur is cool.
4. Don't forget to smile!

The mind boggles.

Holy Words

Warning: I was in a very strange mood when I wrote this. No insult to any geographers or economists intended.

Over the half-term, I was set to read Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks. I am supposed to be reading it with an eye as to spotting wider themes in first World War literature. Why is this at all interesting?

I have had two reactions to the book which I don't think were included in any part of the English syllabus. The first reaction is a problem which I've been having with more than one book, and which has resulted in more than one being laid aside, never to be finished. I did, in fact, have to pause for quite a while with this one, following Isabelle's abandonment of Stephen. It is the same reason why I can rarely complete any Margaret Atwood novel, and why another novel I'm reading, Sons and Lovers, is proving quite a mountain. What is this reason? Pain.

Pain in relationships. I can read books with gruesome death scenes in them. I can read books with murder and rape in them, vast battles that result in truly monumental death-tolls, and, in Birdsong, all of the horrors of the first World War. But, to me, get a couple of flawed human beings and place them in a relationship together, and that's more painful than anything else. Hang them in a white space as just a pair of talking heads and have one of them a flying rabbit and the other a talking pig, and it's still a work of art, because the pain of it is going on all the time, and it needs to be written about, even if it's too much for cowards like me.

And there's the second reaction, merged with the first: This is why I chose to study English Literature. These things need to be expressed, this universal pain needs to be written about, and therefore, if not conquered, then at least understood. If mathematicians work with numbers and values, then writers work with souls. Literature is synonymous, to me, with both the heights and depths of human passion. You cannot get passionate about Geography. Nobody is ever moved to tears in Economics. Few other things can reach into you at all, let alone create a flame which burns in ecstasy. To read is to commune with not just the author but something greater than yourself; a subjectivity which is universal yet speaks to the individual. This is also why I chose, from around the age of four, to set my sights on becoming a writer.

"His nerves stilled in the sensuous repletion of the moment that precluded thought." A line from Birdsong. Here's another: "She dreamed of pale faces beneath rose-coloured lights; Lisette at the corner of the stairs, the bloodless features in the red glow, a lost girl, and other like her caught in some repeated loop of time, its pattern enforced by the rhythmic motion of the train; many white-skinned faces with dark eyes, staring in disbelief." Exquisite prose! The kind I long to write. The best I've ever written?

Abercrombie flung off his robes, bared his shining white body to the pale face above. A delightful contrast played over his lithe form, light accompanied by shadows which darkened between his legs. One steps, two steps - the dance that wasn’t a dance, but more a way of speaking without using the tongue, a language which unrobed them all, so that an observant teacher would have spotted naked youths leaping in ecstasy in the shadow of the trees…

Had they believed it?

No, belief was too specific a word. One did not believe in a heart-beat, one could not have so fragile a thing as faith in the forces which had urged them outdoors and demanded their surrender. He could perhaps rationalise it only hesitantly, as an outpouring of youthful fervour that could find no other outlet; the breaking of a dam behind which waters swirled and boiled…

I am not exaggerating when I say that, to me, writing is a spiritual experience. Understanding comes with words. Words are inadequate alone, but there is always a mind reading them. I believe it is that communion which can get as close to anything resembling God as it is possible to get.

Happy Families

I'm going to have to break one of the promises I made to myself when setting up this blog. I promised that I would not include anything too emotional in it - but really, all our views and experiences are informed by emotion anyway, so it was a silly resolution to make.

I can't wait until I go to university. More specifically, I can't wait until I get out of here.

I have never had a normal family. I don't mean that in the nice, eccentric sense. I DO have a junkie aunt, but that's not why I want to go to Cambridge and forget about blasted 3 The Warren. I have never had a normal family in that I have never had parents who have loved one another, and in that nothing I believed in when I was little was true. When I was younger, I believed I had Happy Family TM. There was Mummy, Daddy, a cat and a naughty little sister. I thought all families were like mine.

Last summer, when it had all gone all wrong and I'd discovered that Happy Family TM had never existed for me, I went round my aunt and uncle's and discovered what it was to see a married couple who loved one another. I have never seen such a painful contrast in real life before; if I didn't know better I would call it literary. December last year saw a visit round a friend's, in a house that was civilised, where said friend had been taken to concerts, and the sofas were neatly organised, and the lounge was well-decorated. Irrelevant, but I find myself detesting everything about my 'family.' Every room is disgusting. Every person in it has a problem. The pictures hanging on the walls are of lies. I hate everything from that awful ornamental dining Edwardian couple to the hallway green carpet. Everything is coloured with what went wrong.

Everyone around me seems to think that it is all stopped, all finished. That the problems of last year are indeed 'the problems of last year.' And who can blame them, for how can a break-up take over a year?

I know very few people who have not been damaged by their parents. I can list a whole host of people who have - people who are insecure, people who are frightened, people who can do nothing but hurt having been hurt themselves. And how can their parents help it, having been damaged themselves? This sounds really overly emotional and exaggerated, but nothing has made me more cynical than my own family. Of course I love my parents - but right now it's a distorted love, because, to put it bluntly, I have a father who has yet to display any real depth of feeling and a mother who tells me everything, as though I'm the adult and she's the child. I should certainly not be going round other peoples' houses and wishing I could exchange lives.

Blood is a lot thinner than one thinks. If I 'believe' in any 'proper adult' it is in someone who probably doesn't think about me for longer than a few minutes a day, if that. Platonically, I love them nonetheless.

"Institutionally racist"

I'm afraid that my first proper post is a rant. I daresay it was always inevitable; it's something I feel strongly about, and I've had many rants about it over time, and so there's always bound to be another left in me.

A couple of weeks ago, our school held something called 'Multicultural Week.' In reality it was a rather sad affair that was considerably less impressive in its impact than it was made out to be, but I was hopping mad when it was first announced. Why? I was shoved into a House assembly, talked to by the most patronising person in the school, who paced her words as though speaking to a group of five-year-olds, and told that we would be celebrating 'diversity' and 'tolerance' by bringing in 'examples of cultural heritage.' Frankly the whole thing struck me as being more akin to the sixteenth century novelty of having a black page-boy than a true symptom of a tolerant society. There were Muslims in the audience, and I don't think they appreciated being patronised in this way. It's alarming how I did not even notice they were there until darling Foakes began talking about 'diversity.' For another thing, why was the school doing it? Was it out of a clumsy desire to be welcoming that only accidentally came off as demeaning to those very cultures it was supposed to be celebrating? Or was it to show Ofsted how all-embracing we are?

The last Multicultural anything our school had was Multicultural Day, which happened to coincide with a visit from the inspectors. Funny, that.

To the point: a truly tolerant society does not need to trumpet it out that it is tolerant.

Official photos now have to show what can only be termed the ‘token ethnic.’ Posters show white hands shaking black ones, or differently coloured children hugging. Ethnicity forms are dispatched in schools, demanding to know whether someone is Black Caribbean or White British or Mixed Race. What’s the fundamental message? Race matters. Race matters so much that people must be effectively pigeon-holed under these titles. Did, I wonder, the children who played side by side in the playground have any notion of racism before they were given a lecture against it?

In 1999, following the failed investigating into Stephen Lawrence’s murder, Sir William MacPherson published a report which described the Metropolitan police as “institutionally racist.” If anybody doubted this report before, then surely the decision to actively seek out recruits from ethnic minorities over those from white backgrounds does nothing but convince them? A black Met police officer will be left wondering if he was employed because of ability and potential, or because of his skin colour. This can only be described as racism - racism twisted into a form of condescension.

Quite apart from how distinctly irritated and uncomfortable ethnic minorities may be feeling as a result, this ‘new’ racism only seems to be encouraging of the ‘old.’ The growing strength of the BNP is alone a testament to how isolated and snubbed the white working and middle classes feel, and a simple perusal of the Daily Mail can be quite alarming. Articles such as the recent one declaring the Falklands War as ‘very British’ or one describing a family as ‘very English’ would not have looked out of place in the 1940s. The government’s continual ‘preference’ (I think the inverted commas and the paragraphs above already show what I think of it) of ethnic minorities has rightly been called by some as ‘reverse racism.’ People who feel they are being victimised are angry people, and angry people tend to gravitate towards extremes. Not healthy.

Methinks that "institutionally racist" is a phrase which can, unfortunately, be applied to most facets of the government and state, not just the police.
…

On a more personal note, it’s odd how hard it is to have a sensible talk about this with anyone, without being dubbed a racist or a communist - a conclusion I have reached thanks to the 'discussion' I had with my parents last night. My parents see no distinction between me complaining about jingoism in the Daily Mail and me wanting the utter destruction of British culture. They rarely listen to what I say, but instead argue with what they think I say, and my dad decided to quash any sensible debate by telling me that my views were 'coloured by the era in which I was born.' Honestly, now there's an assertion that would kill all debating clubs stone-dead: there's no point in having an opinion on anything, because it's just been coloured by your age. I may as well throw up my hands and resign all right to have an opinion at all.