POST 16: Austerity and Abundance--and the forward march of time

In the wake of the Tory Government announcement of ‘austerity measures’, the London arts community quakes.  Now there is a precedent in Australia, with George Brandis’ particular version of rendering artists’ lives even more austere by siphoning arts moneys into a self-managed fund (see: “Coalition Arts Slush Fund”—the $104.8 million heisted from the Australia Council to fund the new “National Programme for Excellence in the Arts” http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue127/11963).  Some wag asks Brandis to agree to a quarter of his personal income being taken away and ’managed’ by someone else. 

A precedent in law or policy is unfortunately like the flutter of a butterfly: it spreads out from the shudder where it begins. Once such a policy is out in the world, it's hard to dis-appear. What can halt the forward and cross-continental march of this narrative?  Kindness, generosity, respect, compassion, sustainability, and useful employment –for artists and whoever else, and what they contribute to culture--are too thin in that storyline.

ELDERS, AGING, AND CONTIGUITY.

Kindness, care, and relatedness is key to a future which has to face what to ‘do’ with an ageing population. Entelechy, in their work with Elders, asks key questions central to most people’s lives: What makes life meaningful? How can I contribute?—questions which are strange to think of having a cut-off point at age 65.

Accompanying the ‘forward march of time’ (our brains just keep growing, did you know?),  some parts become more frail. So do we focus on the frailty, or the resilience? The brightness, or the decay? Colin talks of  ‘curved space time', which seems to indicate that linear time does not exist. It is a partial consolation and mental reprieve for those experiencing the 91 years in their bones. 

Later, at the airport for a trip to the Continent, I wonder at the grace of people who  have to wait. As I, too, wait in a wheelchair, due to a temporary ailment, I see all the others who are used to waiting, for hours, without information about when they will be moved or tended to.  As if they do not need to be spoken to.  

I am aware that for every one sitting here, there are hundreds and thousands who also wait. So, too, with marches, where those present represent the multitude of others who could not come. I look here at the pram and think there was probably a woman who wants her voice counted, but is busy giving birth at home...

"Anti-Austerity" March, Bank, London, June 2015.

If appearances can ever be trusted, there is wealth still here in Britain, and we are marching through the marble heart of it. ‘Everyman’ ‘everywoman’ and ‘everybaby’, perhaps marching for themselves,  but also representing all the other everypersons who worry about the rent, education, and enough food on the table.  

The march makes it on to Channel 4, which is notorious for avoiding such events. Notorious, indeed, for every so often plying tricks of the trade such as reversing film footage, turning the assault of a civilian by police into an attack by civilians (see http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/12/ipcc-will-not-investigate-orgreave-police-action-during-miners-strike). But here, the Beebs  broadcasts the aerial shot of some 200,000 who came  from as far away as Wales. Railway workers, nurses, teachers, the Greens, and vegans who distribute pamphlets proclaiming their diet will solve all the problems of the world. Bless them. Abundance in their austerity.

A few pipers and drummers by the side, cheering.

A group of Hare Krishna followers in their saffron robes, adding colour, chants and bells.



                                                                            With thanks to Rebecca Swift and Julia Honess.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

  

Post 15: Beds

The room is frozen. A bed, a chair, both empty.What does it mean?

Bed. Home. Remembering isolation.

It is one of those hushes in the room.

But then young E. calls out, it must be different if you are married. It’s no longer your bed, but shared; but this brings to my mind the intolerable  times when you cannot share it, when you are the one who has had to move.

And as I ponder this, privately, quietly, there must be so many other ‘bed’ stories people will not share--because it is too painful, or tender, or caring. Maybe watching someone pass away, or the fear of their pained selves left alone--but one elder lets that one speak through her tears.  Or even the good memories when the earth opened and the baby came. On that bed:   two for tea, but home  for 3.  Or of beds shared with sisters, top to tail. R again pipes up: under the bed; that’s where many slept when they were young.

I never once hear anyone here talk of their poverty whilst younger, not in those terms, but yes to the lack of space, of sharing space with others, of not being able to spread.

Beds.

Rest. 

Isolation.

A trampoline.

The complexity of those sheets, what is wrapped in those sheets, what thoughts rest on those pillows, I am quite sure dreams revisit me, fully, when I put my head back to the pillow, from the night before. That rich veil-- the unconscious, painting and pooling a landscape so colourful that your cheek on the pillowslip draws you back down.

No body mentions sex.

Maybe that’s because it actually is a hospital bed in front of us and who links sex with hospitals?  and for a group of ageing people, it threatens a finishing, rather than a beginning.

Then K. really sparks things up, talking about being naughty and ‘sent to bed’. Naughty beds, naughty beds, what a wonderful sound. Naughty beds, with the elves dancing, bruising the sheets, kicking up their heels.

R. then leans across and chats about money stashed in the bed, about disordered sheets, dirty beds, bedbugs and germs, about hiding under beds, or a large family with children having to fit in and sleep under it.  Of the comfort and need for your own, even after a nice holiday. What is that. Of imprints left in the bed, I thought of dreams left in pillows, other peoples smells. R’s children crawling into her bed, when they were sick; young E. says she stills crawls in to her mother's whenever she visits home. 

David throws gladioli across  the bed; it becomes a coffin. R. says 'not like those tiny flowers and chocolates on pillows in hotels'.

Ba boom. The punch line, and the heartbeat. The heart comes home, to a taste, a delicacy. Beating home.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

Post 12: Elders group--Week 3

We begin with a memory of touch. This is Vicki’s story, of when she was touched in a moment of profound grief, by a stranger, and in a public place. She tells the story with exceptional grace, from a very humble place.

Becky invites us to hold hands and pass a pulse around the circle--one hand squeezing another, right to left, and passing it on, hand to hand. It is like the path of a dragonfly, alighting and tripping off again.

It is hard to wait, waiting to receive, to be pulsed, to be touched. It is hard to keep our eyes closed, suspecting indeed the pulse may not come. Why is this so hard? It is so hard, waiting.

We are invited to share our names, in different ways. Different propositions from David and Becky, and then a counter from M., insisting we do not have to fuss. She is right, for us not to fuss. And yet, a partnering happens, of those who can move, or be helped to move, moving to others for whom that is harder, Arm to arm, arms to arms, disarmoured by touch. And it is playful, fun. At David’s suggestion, we recite “Sometimes I…”/feel younger, older, remember more, remember different things. Via touch.

A great exercise. And it is only in the doing (not in the ‘not needing to’ do it) that we discover just how good it is.

Mr P seems overjoyed, propelling his partners across the room, to connect.

images: Roswither Chester

J. receives the touch of four others, a pile of hands, playing and touching. It is inevitable we play the hand-pyramid game, hands piling one on top of each others’, a scramble up a ladder that never finishes. And then J. remembers what her hands did, sometime (I think) after the war: she washed up. And washed up some more. Serving others.

Being moved by our names, across the room, to touch, to remember, to recall and renew.  Rosalind talks about revealing one’s story to strangers, on a bus, or whilst waiting for a bus to come. Someone you don’t’ know: one word back perhaps is all you need. Gets it off your chest.

And when did we begin to talk about trees? About the image of a tree. Ah… when David passed the bowl of dark, washed grapes around. Here, have one: eat. Colin found pips. Others found sweet. Others found home in their mouths. Olive found a story: don’t swallow the pips, love: a tree will grow inside you from the seeds. Many find that pleasing, the idea;  but Micky finds it quite sinister, threatening. The dark and the light; the fairy tale and the foreboding.  Significant and  interesting.

I tell the story of trees, the way they talk to themselves, from “tip to tail”, how the roots know the height of the tree because the tip tells them. This inner knowing: I am this tall, please draw up this much juice, the soil complicit in the dialogue.  It is an intimate knowing; how much we can know inwardly; how much others, humans, mostly, are unaware of.

All this knowing.  All of this knowing, all of the time [or for the most of it].  David asks, ‘who has talked to trees, when they’ve needed someone to listen’. Some admit to it; Colin observes, ‘like talking to one’s dog’. I don’t’ reveal that I believe trees have occasionally talked to me. Fairly thumped me on the back of the head, asking me to listen. Why do I not reveal this to the group? I remember the date, time and place. The colour of the sky. If I were asked. And yet they were not chatterboxes, these trees; once done, they zipped their lips. Job done. Driven by necessity, not vanity.

The importance of speaking, of listening, of being heard. Maybe plants and animals also need us --to speak, listen to them, in deep dialogue. This idea is not new. Shamans have tapped into this language for thousands of years.

Do shamans exist? –You tell me

But here we are, in a circle, eating grapes, spitting pips, talking hands, humming tip to tail; what is and is not speaking? What was the knowing of that woman who touched Vicky’s had, on the bus, heard and accepted her tears?

It is the silences that are stunning, Like last week, when Mrs P announced the arrival of her 90^th birthday, not knowing ‘how much longer’ she would be around. The hush in the room; the quiet here, we each identifying our sense of loss, longing, anticipation, and dread. How alike we all are, tho’ on different stages of journey.

I remember, once, hearing ‘reincarnation’ explained in a maverick way: you are returning to this life, so leave the world a place you want to be in. The selflessness of the Buddhist way transformed into a self-fullness and self-respect I hadn’t understood before.

We are all the same: we need the same things. Air, water, shelter, touch. Things we can rely on.

And so we finish, touching our own hearts with our own hands, breathing breath to skin, feeling the comfort of our own hand cradling our own hearts.

Such due care takes place in the room, such due observance of different needs, abilities, and hopes or desires.  Such deep multiplicities.

Zsuzsi, with Entelechy, The Albany, Deptford, June 17, 2015

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

Post 11: Elders 1: We sit in a circle.

Arrival at the Albany. Image: Roswither Chester

The theatre group begins.

We sit in a circle, elders and younger people, beginning a new process. David passes his glasses case to R in a quasi-reverential gesture, referencing the traditions of the tribal ‘talking-stick’ that sanctions  the holder to speak uninterrupted. We each take a turn naming ourselves, and from where we have come. 

D is turning 90 on Friday…if she lives that long. A hush brushes the skin of each of us in the room. M identifies the county where she was born. F asserts she was born in the same room in which she gave birth to her son. Several talk about being born in countries that differ from where their parents came.  H proudly proclaims an ancestry shared between Cornwall and Wales.

M, from Argentina, strikes a dramatic chord indicating her escape from civil war; in a second round she reveals that her bloodline is German, not Argentinean. Several others in the group reveal similar splits and gaps in lineage. A fine story of resilience unfolds: intimacies, sorrows, deaths, transcendences, clear lineages and admixtures, cocktails of mixed identities, shaken, sipped, passed and stirred. David wishes a tape recorder had been turned on. M says we can rely on collected individual memories to reconstitute what has been important.  E, only 20, exhorts us to eschew the supremacy of technology that her generation too readily relies on.

Mr P takes hold of the case and weighed and measured it in his hands. He takes his time. It is as if he is singing to it too. Becky notes all of this, so graciously noted. It gives him great joy to be recognised--the precision knowledge of the engineer. Becky sees the world in his gesture, memory in the veins of his hands.

The architecture of our responses. The structure of what hums.

We share stories that differ and oversect. Tales of rivers and borders, escapes and escapades.  The people here need to be in this room. It is a place of high drama, and of the softest of experiences, the remembered kick of a baby in the womb, the touch of a loved one, now gone.

Image: Roswither Chester

This is each of us, flying in the present moment, in the warmth of the exchange. It is clear each of us, no matter how young or old, has experienced falling from such shared awareness, into isolation, a place we would rather not be, within and outside these walls, I hear again and again how Meet me…must continue. It has become family, home. Or, for many, a place that differs from the childhood homes that carried gruff and angry residues—the blaming and shaming that arises from a lack of context in which to understand difficulty, disagreement, grief, and even love. P says to me, “If only we could reach in and clean those minds.” But we have to be in a place that is unfearful in order to share in this way.

Colin helps us sense surface, muscle and bone; Esme helps us breathe, Rebecca helps us  sigh and release, I guide the group to  embrace the sense of being held in air. I am surprised when several people say they felt they were transported to Australia in this last exercise.  We are where we have lived, and breathed, and suffered, and loved.  This is the rise and fall of our lives.

Zsuzsi, June 10, 2015.


c. Z Soboslay 2015.

Post 9: Coinage (Size Does Matter)

But I have come home promising myself I will learn the coin currency tonight. Here is the template. I learn the coins by touch, order and reorder them across the table. 

The lady in the cafe congratulates me the next day. I hand her the right change for my coffee, to the penny.




c. Z Soboslay 2015.

Post 8: London Bridge

London Bridge Station.  An intersection of silks and workers, tourists and vagabonds. A flower-seller, who dares to colour his roses Rainbow.

Of course, there is another delay on the Southern Line.   ‘Driver shortage’,  ‘Staff sick’, ‘Signal failure’. Anything else? Does it matter knowing, anyway?  I guess, the messages are an attempt to hold chaos at bay, but chaos pre-exists the reasons anyway. 

London Bridge. Old buttressing the new; the Shard's view,  Starbucks, Sainsbury’s, and a newsagent not claiming to provide anything more universal or contemporary than papers chocolate and crisps. Bless the crisps, they (too often) keep the wolf at bay--during the delays. 

“A self-serve teller is available if you don’t want to queue," calls out a Sainsbury's attendant. Another, young attendant looks hopefully at me. “Would you like to use it?” she says. I explain that I still can’t get a handle on the small change; I know the bag of crisps is something less than pound. “Let me help you," she, says, so we share the delight of my self-service purchase being truly and fully-serviced. She grabs the crisps and swipes them to the machine, grasps the change jangling in my hand and counts out 95 p. It is a delight and I am out of there in less than a minute. One minute less waiting for that train.

1pence, 2 pence, 5 p--copper coins are obsolete in my homeland. The colony moves on and the motherland keeps a hold of its mettle. And the imprint is so small, on each of these coins. Do I have to admit to being older, greyer, and more blind? I do try to read the coin but that bloody great Shard bounces twilight into laser-lights and blinds you, yes. Ageing urges you to make up wilder stories. Ahem.

So here is my tribute to that young attendant. and to all the others who are very glad to count one’ s money on one’s behalf. Serving at the self-service. Liberating. 

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

Post 7: Another bus, another Friday

I see a young man on the sidewalk, wearing nothing but satin boxer shorts, no shirt, how shiny those boxers, how pale his chest, policemen stationed either side. The man is as hazy as the sky was yesterday.  All three look in different directions, trying to make a decision. Where has this man come from? Where does he need to go? The only clarity is, who is wearing clothes, and who doesn't.

Same day, next hour, the sun splattering more wildly, wind tapping the hairless head of an old woman in the middle of the road. She is gaunt, harrowed, dazed. Median strip, traffic roaring, a  policeman and policewoman either side. They wear blue gloves: is her skin dangerous. They hold her. She is wearing nothing but a short raincoat, no bottoms. 

What is it about Fridays.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

  

Post 6: FRIDAYS (this close to chaos...)

But I tell you, we are this close to the edge of chaos, most of the time.

It is a cool, windy day. I hail a bus and climb in.  I tap my oster card near the driver’s window and slide down the narrow aisle. I welcome the embrace of the chair, the warmth of the buses; I find comfort in the continuity of the  warmth, the recorded nnounements, the embrace of the chair, the one route, maybe a change at a single stop, back on again to another wrapping interior.

And then it happened.  As it has to, at some time.  A fight breaks out.

The bus I climb in to, up to, tap my travel card to ride on, decides it is going no further than the next stop. So it drives 500 metres, then stops; the driver commands, ‘everybody out’.  I have a monthly card, so for me it doesn’t matter. I've paid up for the whole day. But for others, it must matter. A lot.

I get out and very simply hop on another bus behind. One woman gets onto the second bus without tapping her card. The driver argues with her. She should have asked for a ‘transfer ticket’. She says the other driver didn’t’ offer. He says she has to have it. Another man pitches in. He argues on her behalf. It gets heated very quickly. I note here that the woman and the second man are of African origin, the driver is white. I wish the driver would just give over and say, ‘know what to do next time love’, but it is the end of a Friday. Is that why he won't, he can't, he has to hold on.

Someone comes down the internal stairs of the bus. He is covered in tattoos. He is a white man. He launches towards the young black man. F**ing get off the bus. I have to get somewhere.

The young black man counters. He is shouting. Don’t shout at me! says tattoo man. He repeats this: DON'T SHOUT AT ME, as if that is the worst thing in the world that could happen to him.  The shouting-at seems worse than the delay, has he forgotten the delay.  I see a black man and a black woman near me start to laugh. Why are they laughing. Tattoo man is upset, black woman and black man are so angry.

"Right, that's it, folks,"  the driver announces. "It's out of my hands. I’ve called the police. "  He opens the bus doors and most of us get off quick. In London, there is always an alterative within 15 minutes anyway.

What is intriguing is that my  last glimpse, back to the bus, is that the young black man, the black woman, and tattoo man, all remain on the bus, tattoo man making an angry phone call to whoever it was he was meant to meet, wherever he had to be.  All three (plus the driver) seemed to be waiting for the  police. It would have been so very simple to just have walked away. Why did they all just not walk away?



c. Z Soboslay 2015.

Post 4: Entelechy: Arts and Elders

image: Roswither Chester

Entelechy

the supposed vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism or other system or organization.

Meet Me at the Albany are Tuesdays of artist-lead activities attended by up to 35 elders from the borough around The Albany.  And lunch, and cups of tea. Someone used to play the piano every week, they want him back. T. still breaks into song without him anyway. F. used to run London's premier comedy club. I see his sharp teeth bite and his eyes gleam,  or is that his teeth gleam and his eyes spiral, when he gets the opportunity. And a softer but still sharp side when he brings his grandchildren.  

But this is not a meeting-place for people who used to do something. This is not a 'reminiscence project', nor is it about the hierarchy of what 'service providers' can provide. The elders say they need to be here. Being present helps constitute a Present, a for-now, me-now, amongst others. Some of these others, specifically, are artists. And many many volunteers, both very young and some also old. The artists, specifically, are people who spend their working lives paying attention to something [crafts, stories] being made. 

My own experience in the health system, as patient, therapist, artist and teacher, is that the relational aspect of responsive care is quite apart from any process of ‘justification’. Nor is it just ‘intuitive’, but something which can be trained. But which needs practice. Everyone is learning from each other here.

I perceive an intrinsic respect for this perspective, embedded in the dialogues.



c. Z Soboslay 2015.