Monday, November 08, 2010
Not long ago I dreamt of Susie.
There she was, my late wife, back in the house.
In Merlindene, in Fife, where we had our commune.
It was a scruffy cold house then; but now it had been smartened up and there were new carpets everywhere.
And Susie was back, and in her chair in the living room, and she made it seem like a throne.
She was better, and strong again, and was going to return to work as a journalist.
She said she though I should start working as a journalist again too.
And I protested, I said I was perfectly happy doing what I am doing now.
I didn't see the ned to start going back to work on newspapers again.
And then it was time to go to the bedroom, and the carpet was filthy, so I went off to look for a hoover.
And then I woke up.
Reflecting on it afterwards, I can't help noticing how intensely my preoccupations are personal these days.
To do with living as a transsexual, with the intense and wonderful relationship I am engaged in...
But also I can't help thinking this has to do with a growing sense of despair at the wider world.
A deepening sense of futility at engagement with it.
A sense that no matter how angry I get it will not change the cruelty and vindictive folly of the present UK government...
And yet I need to engage... and also understand and appreciate that everything I say or do is also in its way and expression of engagement.
And that's why i dreamt of Susie again, and in that amazing house where we tried to live as a commune because we wanted to change the world.
Because we thought: The Personal Is Political.
And we believed it too.
And it's appropriate I should be feeling and thinking this now, right after going to the turbine house at Tate modern in london and seeing Ai Weiwei's installation there.
Which looks like nothing when you first see it. Visually, I was far more interested in all the people looking at it and crawling under the little barrier with their cameras to take close-up pictures of it. There was a wee girl there with her dad and every time he went on all fours to do it she clambered on his back and crawled all over him, laughing.
I actually wanted to film that.
i squatted at the edge of the barrier and thought about it.
It took some time.
One hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds.
A dear friend of mine has just come back from China, and she spent some time in a city in China of 38 million inhabitants.
It took 8 hours to cross it.
And this wasn't even one of the biggest cities there.
And I feel insignificant even here... and helpless. And struggling against conformity.
I must be sunflower seed number 67,459,321, buried quite deep, and I barely catch even the smallest scrap of daylight.
And yet I do matter.
We all matter, even if all we do is make up the mass.
And I am diminished when one of us goes.
And the sunflower seeds are all uniform... and yet hand pained, and different.
And the sunflower seed is an image of conformity... but of nourishment and kindness too.
it was all so intensely moving an invitation to reflect on our humanity.
Wonderful to be seeing it with my daughter Katie.
We giggled and talked and discussed things and shared our looking at the world together with such love and pleasure.
Something so important me and Susie did was have our children.
Not just the decision to bring them into the world, but how we chose to care for them.
Deciding to share their care as best we could. Knowing this was an intensely political, as well as an intensely personal, decision to take.
susie dedicated much of her intellectual life to developing an understanding of citizenship.
Citizenship in its fullest sense; citizenship which involved personal life choices alongside political ones.
And very wonderful to see that the artist, Ai Weiwei, believes this too.
That the way an artist lives matters.
I know that. i have known that for a long time.
It moves me so deeply to see a fellow artist, in a different continent, in a different art form, putting all this into practice.
Because it is true: we all do belong together.
There she was, my late wife, back in the house.
In Merlindene, in Fife, where we had our commune.
It was a scruffy cold house then; but now it had been smartened up and there were new carpets everywhere.
And Susie was back, and in her chair in the living room, and she made it seem like a throne.
She was better, and strong again, and was going to return to work as a journalist.
She said she though I should start working as a journalist again too.
And I protested, I said I was perfectly happy doing what I am doing now.
I didn't see the ned to start going back to work on newspapers again.
And then it was time to go to the bedroom, and the carpet was filthy, so I went off to look for a hoover.
And then I woke up.
Reflecting on it afterwards, I can't help noticing how intensely my preoccupations are personal these days.
To do with living as a transsexual, with the intense and wonderful relationship I am engaged in...
But also I can't help thinking this has to do with a growing sense of despair at the wider world.
A deepening sense of futility at engagement with it.
A sense that no matter how angry I get it will not change the cruelty and vindictive folly of the present UK government...
And yet I need to engage... and also understand and appreciate that everything I say or do is also in its way and expression of engagement.
And that's why i dreamt of Susie again, and in that amazing house where we tried to live as a commune because we wanted to change the world.
Because we thought: The Personal Is Political.
And we believed it too.
And it's appropriate I should be feeling and thinking this now, right after going to the turbine house at Tate modern in london and seeing Ai Weiwei's installation there.
Which looks like nothing when you first see it. Visually, I was far more interested in all the people looking at it and crawling under the little barrier with their cameras to take close-up pictures of it. There was a wee girl there with her dad and every time he went on all fours to do it she clambered on his back and crawled all over him, laughing.
I actually wanted to film that.
i squatted at the edge of the barrier and thought about it.
It took some time.
One hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds.
A dear friend of mine has just come back from China, and she spent some time in a city in China of 38 million inhabitants.
It took 8 hours to cross it.
And this wasn't even one of the biggest cities there.
And I feel insignificant even here... and helpless. And struggling against conformity.
I must be sunflower seed number 67,459,321, buried quite deep, and I barely catch even the smallest scrap of daylight.
And yet I do matter.
We all matter, even if all we do is make up the mass.
And I am diminished when one of us goes.
And the sunflower seeds are all uniform... and yet hand pained, and different.
And the sunflower seed is an image of conformity... but of nourishment and kindness too.
it was all so intensely moving an invitation to reflect on our humanity.
Wonderful to be seeing it with my daughter Katie.
We giggled and talked and discussed things and shared our looking at the world together with such love and pleasure.
Something so important me and Susie did was have our children.
Not just the decision to bring them into the world, but how we chose to care for them.
Deciding to share their care as best we could. Knowing this was an intensely political, as well as an intensely personal, decision to take.
susie dedicated much of her intellectual life to developing an understanding of citizenship.
Citizenship in its fullest sense; citizenship which involved personal life choices alongside political ones.
And very wonderful to see that the artist, Ai Weiwei, believes this too.
That the way an artist lives matters.
I know that. i have known that for a long time.
It moves me so deeply to see a fellow artist, in a different continent, in a different art form, putting all this into practice.
Because it is true: we all do belong together.
Labels: Ai Weiwei, The personal IS political
Thursday, December 03, 2009
There's a meditation group that meets in a church on Tuesday lunchtimes.
We meditate sitting, walking, and eating in silence together.
And there's a space for sharing what happens.
The whole thing is inspired by the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh and made possible by the devoted work of a lovely man, Jon Bagust, who organises it.
I love being there, but the intensity of the last weeks and months has hardly made it possible.
I was there the day before yesterday. I was at a meeting and arrived a little late, just after it had begun.
The silence and the peacefulness in the church was so palpable and so strongly in contrast with my curent state of mind it was as if it hit me like a blow.
If its appropriate to use such a violent image to describe so quiet and yet so powerful a thing.
The reading spoke of the need to bring joy into the world. I thought that seemed a bit ambitious for what I try to do in my work; but at least i always try to give pleasure and inspire a smile.
But then I became aware of how much anger and hatred my play about Jesus has inspired. How hard not to get caught up in it. How the words we speak and the actions we do can have results that are totally opposed to our conscious wishes and intentions.
And painfully aware of how much this fills me with turmoil.
Turmoil that somehow needs to be assimililated and resolved.
My companions said some very sweet and supportive things; and I seem to have plunged right back into the fray.
I've been so dismayed that the evangelical groups who have noticed my work and been most vocal in the world-wide opposition to it are also almost certainly funding the Christian movements in Ugnada promoting the vile bill to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death.
Knowing this makes me all the more determined to try to use my art as best I can to resist.
A first step has to get help from people who know the business. So yesterday I travelled to Glasgow to see an independent producer to see what can be done.
On the train on the way there i was working on the final draft of my radio adaptation of "La Princesse de Cleves". it was such a pleasure, this fine tuning. Over the years I have built up so many skills, I know precisely what I am doing, and I feel comfortable and at home there.
I enjoyed the meeting in many ways, and learnt so mjuch from it. Not least how far such encounters take me from my comfort zone, into a new world where i feel painfully ignorant.
Then i remembered: soon after my mother died i was sent to a new boarding school. It was a terrifying place. Bullying was institutionalised and systematiclly used as a method of social control.
It was crucially important to "fit in".
I didn't, of course.
Early on in my second term there I said or did something wrong and was sentenced to "being sent to Coventry". So for the next ten weeks no-one spoke to me, and everyone acted as if i didn't exist.
I suffered so intensely at that time. In the midst of my fear and my shame, a particular torment was that I couldn't even be certain of what i had said or done that had caused this to happen to me. That made it all worse, somehow: it made my whole being in the world seem doubly shameful and embarrassing and unacceptable.
It was soon after that that some bigger boys got me involved in acting: and it was in the rehearsal room that for the very first time I felt myself totally at home.
Playing girls' parts. And how sad that the pleasure that gave me should have then plunged me again into the deepest fear and shame. A hideous and so easily avoidable cycle of suffering that I am still struggling to escape from.
All that happened 45 years ago: but I can still so intensely feel it.
How strange that the huge issues the Jesus play involves, the global struggle between repression and liberation, should somehow also, and so intimately, be bound up with so individual a trauma.
How tempting to retreat back into the safety of words.
But it's not enough.
i suddenly think of lines from "Losing Venice":
The clouds gather. The storm is rising.
And it will come. Nothing can stop it.
We know. We laugh when we can;
We live, as we must.
Fear eats away our hearts. Will it spare us,
We wonder, will it spare or children?
Yet what can we do? Tear down our city?
Label the stones and move them, stone by stone,
Rebuild them on the higher ground?
All our energy is taken up with living.
Besides, is there any mountain high enough
to hide us,
Is there depth enough in any cave?
I doubt it. Crying is easy.
Laughter requires a little more strength.
I wrote that in 1985.
Somehow I saw what was coming.
I was right.
We meditate sitting, walking, and eating in silence together.
And there's a space for sharing what happens.
The whole thing is inspired by the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh and made possible by the devoted work of a lovely man, Jon Bagust, who organises it.
I love being there, but the intensity of the last weeks and months has hardly made it possible.
I was there the day before yesterday. I was at a meeting and arrived a little late, just after it had begun.
The silence and the peacefulness in the church was so palpable and so strongly in contrast with my curent state of mind it was as if it hit me like a blow.
If its appropriate to use such a violent image to describe so quiet and yet so powerful a thing.
The reading spoke of the need to bring joy into the world. I thought that seemed a bit ambitious for what I try to do in my work; but at least i always try to give pleasure and inspire a smile.
But then I became aware of how much anger and hatred my play about Jesus has inspired. How hard not to get caught up in it. How the words we speak and the actions we do can have results that are totally opposed to our conscious wishes and intentions.
And painfully aware of how much this fills me with turmoil.
Turmoil that somehow needs to be assimililated and resolved.
My companions said some very sweet and supportive things; and I seem to have plunged right back into the fray.
I've been so dismayed that the evangelical groups who have noticed my work and been most vocal in the world-wide opposition to it are also almost certainly funding the Christian movements in Ugnada promoting the vile bill to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death.
Knowing this makes me all the more determined to try to use my art as best I can to resist.
A first step has to get help from people who know the business. So yesterday I travelled to Glasgow to see an independent producer to see what can be done.
On the train on the way there i was working on the final draft of my radio adaptation of "La Princesse de Cleves". it was such a pleasure, this fine tuning. Over the years I have built up so many skills, I know precisely what I am doing, and I feel comfortable and at home there.
I enjoyed the meeting in many ways, and learnt so mjuch from it. Not least how far such encounters take me from my comfort zone, into a new world where i feel painfully ignorant.
Then i remembered: soon after my mother died i was sent to a new boarding school. It was a terrifying place. Bullying was institutionalised and systematiclly used as a method of social control.
It was crucially important to "fit in".
I didn't, of course.
Early on in my second term there I said or did something wrong and was sentenced to "being sent to Coventry". So for the next ten weeks no-one spoke to me, and everyone acted as if i didn't exist.
I suffered so intensely at that time. In the midst of my fear and my shame, a particular torment was that I couldn't even be certain of what i had said or done that had caused this to happen to me. That made it all worse, somehow: it made my whole being in the world seem doubly shameful and embarrassing and unacceptable.
It was soon after that that some bigger boys got me involved in acting: and it was in the rehearsal room that for the very first time I felt myself totally at home.
Playing girls' parts. And how sad that the pleasure that gave me should have then plunged me again into the deepest fear and shame. A hideous and so easily avoidable cycle of suffering that I am still struggling to escape from.
All that happened 45 years ago: but I can still so intensely feel it.
How strange that the huge issues the Jesus play involves, the global struggle between repression and liberation, should somehow also, and so intimately, be bound up with so individual a trauma.
How tempting to retreat back into the safety of words.
But it's not enough.
i suddenly think of lines from "Losing Venice":
The clouds gather. The storm is rising.
And it will come. Nothing can stop it.
We know. We laugh when we can;
We live, as we must.
Fear eats away our hearts. Will it spare us,
We wonder, will it spare or children?
Yet what can we do? Tear down our city?
Label the stones and move them, stone by stone,
Rebuild them on the higher ground?
All our energy is taken up with living.
Besides, is there any mountain high enough
to hide us,
Is there depth enough in any cave?
I doubt it. Crying is easy.
Laughter requires a little more strength.
I wrote that in 1985.
Somehow I saw what was coming.
I was right.
Labels: The personal IS political
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