“We fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that’s the end.” Hamlet, Act IV, Scene III

In the previous post I tried to set out a distinction between death (which can remain beautiful – a frozen moment just beyond life) and decay (which is always grotesque – all beauty drain and consumed by maggots) and then examine how, in ecological terms, decay is healthy, while unrotting death fails to complete the cycle of life. It is only once decay sets in that a body can become useful again.

All ecosystems require the evolution of appropriate agents of decay to remain healthy. I finished by expressing a hunch that ritual can be seen as an agent of decay in our culture, and that currently it is lacking. There is plenty of death – plenty of redundancy and refuse – but little decay. The end result of this is a lot of dead material to trip us up, but fewer and fewer resources released back into the ground to fund newness.

I’ve been re-reading Hamlet recently, and re-reading Will in the World – How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare alongside it too. The section that deals with Hamlet describes the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet (occasionally corrupted as Hamlet in various public records). Reading into the events of the time, the funeral of the boy must have had added strain: Shakespeare’s family had definite Catholic leanings, and yet the ceremony in 1596 would have had to have been a strictly Protestant affair. As such, families such as Shakespeare’s may well have grieved the loss of the more colourful and rich Catholic ritual that expressed a far more open relationship with the dead.

“It is possible that he found the service, with its deliberate refusal to address the dead child as ‘thou’, its reduction of ritual, its narrowing of ceremony, its denial of any possibility of communication, painfully inadequate.”

The theatre of funeral was removed; the agent of decay reduced. Bodies were lowered, cold, into the ground, like coal. Unfit for transition. At the same time, the theatres in London were regularly shut by the Protestant moralisers. Early 17th century London was a society unsure of how to decompose the dead material that surrounded, and use it to regenerate.

It feels as if we are at a similar place today. With the economic crisis and accompanying political crises, as well as the crumbling of trust in the press with phone-hacking scandals and the Leveson inquiry, it seems as though there is a lot of ‘dead’ material around. What we can now see is that the problem is whether we can evolve appropriate agents of decay to help process this dead material and reformulate it.

The Occupy protest movement is perhaps part of this process. Right-wing observers like to portray those involved as dirty maggots and bottom-feeders anyway, but this should perhaps be taken as a compliment. They are crawling over the dead matter, trying to work out what can yet be reused, and how these rich resources can fund new directions.

It strikes me that this is precisely where the church ought to be basing itself. As a faith based on death and resurrection, Christianity’s natural habitat is decaying matter. This is what others fled from in disgust – the lepers, the sick – but what Jesus went straight towards, mixing mud and spit.

Locating oneself in this place of decay is going to be profoundly uncomfortable. There is something heroic about those who can preach death of faith: it is cold and hard, steel sharp and cutting. But the reason why the communities that Pete Rollins is talking about in Insurrection offer such a shocking vision is that they are not based around the death of faith, but around the putrid decay of faith – the decomposition of it into something more base, more akin to shit, to soil, to raw earth… where, as compost, it can feed newness.

This is perhaps the best description of Ikon: a putrid community. One that embraces not just death, but decay and decomposition.

There is a theological problem here though. The orthodox idea of Jesus’ physical resurrection is very keen to affirm that Jesus’ body did not see any decay. To evangelical belief the idea of Jesus’ bruised and broken dead body carries with it a mystique of martyrdom and heroism… but the idea of it entering a state of decay is totally taboo. And yet, there is a sense in which it was only by the decaying of this body that its riches could be released.

In 2 Corinthians 4:16, Paul says that

“though outwardly we are decaying, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day…”

Perhaps we need to see this not as a negative-positive construction, but as a positive-positive one. The outward decay is to be welcomed…is the very thing that funds the inner renewal.

Either way, what we must certainly do is ensure that the theatre of ritual remains… that agents of decay are encouraged and given space, and that we do not hold on to our dead too tightly. The old, embalmed Lenins we all keep must be allowed to warm and rot.

I ended up on the 7th floor of a multi-story car park in Peckham this evening, at an event hosted by Bold Tendencies, which looked at the car parks from an architectural and anthropological point of view.

One contributor made the point that the problem of car parking only became such as Henry Ford developed his production line techniques to make the Model T: there were suddenly so many of the damn things coming out of the factory gates every day that it became a nightmare working out where to put them all.

I think this throws up some interesting points. Firstly, if I say I’m going to a park, there’s an inherent idea of freedom and movement within a city context. A park is an open space, where we have a wider and more open horizon. But a car park is precisely opposite to this. Cars are sold to us as objects that give us masses of freedom – think of all the ads with uncluttered open roads – and yet in a car park we find them castrated and motionless: the car park is a place to store objects that are redundant. The ceilings are low and dark, the space reduced in order to pack more vehicles in.

We mostly use car parks when we travel in to city centres for shopping. So the car park – this problem space created by the economics of mass production, is the place where we go in order to consume and transport back more and more stuff, all of which has been sold to us via the same message that it will bring us more freedom and self-worth.

I think this is why car parks, no matter how well dressed up, are inherently depressing places: they are where the consumer dream hits the concrete buffers. All these things that have promised so much, transported in cars that cocoon us in leather and conditioned air… and here we are on level 4, underground, trying to find the right change, the smell of piss burning in the stairwell.

I went to see Michelangelo Frammartino’s new film last night, Le Quattro Volte. This is a very difficult film to do justice to on the page, but I will simply say: try to go and see it. Do all you can to get to see it at the cinema. This is cinema. Not plasma TV or night in with a video.

The film is set in the mountains round Serra San Bruno in the south of Italy and is basically documentary drama – in other words, this is everyday rural life, but with some elements of staging. It is almost entirely silent (there are far more words in the slightly annoying trailer above than in the whole film), but more than that, it is a quite extraordinary meditation on humanity’s place within the world. Frammartino himself says this:

I want to put mans role into perspective and turn my gaze away from him. I want to know: can cinema free itself from the dogma that says human beings should play the central role?

I don’t want to give too much away – though it would be hard to say anything that was a ‘spoiler’ here – but his vision is enacted here as the film as it begins appears to be about an old goat-herder, but then becomes about the goats themselves, then the trees in which the goats shelter, and then the charcoal that is made from these trees. In other words, the ‘four turns’ of the film are human, animal, vegetable and mineral – a cycle of life and death from ashes to ashes.

None of this is to do justice to the incredible cinematography, which has some stunning shots and elevates the camera to an instrument of deep perception. There is not only fabulous humour, but a very subtle and beautiful theology woven into the film too, and being almost silent and only 88 mins long the piece could literally stand as an act of meditative worship on its own. It carries a gentle critique of the power of the church, the old goat-herd drinking an infusion made from dust sweepings from the church floor, which he seems to believe will cure his respiratory problems… Yet it is outside of the stone walls in the community rituals of Easter and Christmas, the dressing up, the parading, the erecting of a huge tree in the town square, that the most healing moments seem to be found.

But don’t take my word for it. Just do all you can and go and see it. Mark Kermode’s review below:

On Saturday evening the moon was the fullest and closest it has been for twenty years. We got lucky in London – the sky was perfectly clear and the colours were quite incredible. Someone got a fabulous shot at Glastonbury Tor too, which has been doing the rounds.

I have a hunch that the moon is the beginning of all religion. In our inter-relations we have always understood the concept of the ‘other’ – a person outside of my self who is autonomous, important, valuable. But what the moon does, what it has always done, is to draw us out of this horizontal plane of ‘me + others’ into a third dimension: me + others + ‘out there.’

The existence of a ‘heavenly body’ which is close enough to be observable by the naked eye, and yet which moves and wanes and reappears, has, I think drawn us to the idea of the ‘big other’ in a way that the sun may not, for the sun is too bright, too powerful to be gazed at, while the moon is cooler, more mysterious.

I’m reminded of some lines from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, in which he equates a hard and perfectly delineated rationalism with ‘lunacy’:’

The circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.

It’s a nice metaphorical twist, but I’d disagree, in that the moon has always had a greater mystery than the sun and has drawn the mystics to it. No one can bear the full force of the sun for long, but the moon draws us into close observation, out of ourselves and our flat earths, and into the realm of the above.

Perhaps this is why those lucky 12 who went to the moon all came back changed men. If you’ve not read Andrew Smith’s Moondust, you absolutely should. It tracks down all of the key figures in the Apollo missions and charts what has happened to those who walked on the moon. For every one of them it was hugely profound and has had a lasting impact on the rest of their lives, not simply in terms of their celebrity, but the way they live too.

The moon draws and releases the tides, waxes and wanes and draws our eyes into the night. There is no man on the moon – we’ve been there and seen that. He came and walked the earth instead, and has now gone further into the night. Still, we look up and wonder though.

Although the official records will say that bookmakers paid out on a ‘white Christmas’ in London in 1999 and 1996 (the technical definition being a snowflake falling on the London Weather Centre on that day) the last proper blanketing of snow on Christmas Day was apparently in 1895, which is right back in the picture-postcard days of gas-lamps and horse-drawn carriages.

So, given that we are heading to have some pretty decent snow-cover on Christmas Day this year…

White Christmas, London, 2010

So, this, then, after all these years
is a White Christmas in London:
the reek of burning clutches
sliding buses and late parcels
snaking queues at abandoned airports
while angry trains, delayed and sniping,
lose power and freeze on lines
alongside motorways stuffed
with abandoned cars,
the empty shells of thwarted plans.

And this, then, after all these years
is where we’ve digressed from
the nostalgic postcards with
breasted robins and holly
in its Dickensian element:
where we once entered the stillness
of silent nights and
were moved only
by the nativity journey,
we now fetishise movement,
and, determined to travel
head out on naive journeys
refusing the silence and stillness
of here and now,
running after elsewhere,
grinding to brown slush
that which would, left alone
retain its clear beauty.

Stop moving, people. Localise. And enjoy.

Other Other [1]

Our attempts to engage ‘the other’ open us up to real complications – in particular with regard to the ‘other others’ who are by definition not being helped by us if we are focusing on helping one set of others. We might generously let someone pull out in front of us in a line of traffic, but this might be profoundly unhelpful to the person behind us whom we can’t see, who is trying to get to an urgent appointment.

As Gav pointed out in the comments on the previous post, once we start thinking about trying to help the ‘other other’ we are immediately caught in a loop which goes on to the ‘other other other’ and beyond into absurdity.

The question then becomes, what can I do in response to this? One answer is to do nothing. I can’t help anyone without potentially hurting someone else – I can’t let someone out into traffic without potentially messing up someone else’s journey – so I should do nothing and just get on with my own life. I hope that we can dismiss this as a lazy and selfish response that denies our human ability to act and do good.

I have seen some evidence of this path being taken, but far more common is the alternative which is to attempt to do everything. And I’ve seen too many Christian ministers attempting this to even begin to count them. There is so much need, so much hurt, so many people to minister to that I need to give every single moment to serving the other and the other others and the other other others… until I burn out and drop down dead.

In ‘Other’ I quote John Milbank, who uses the example of our debt of gratitude to those who have given their lives in war for our freedom:

‘Where I cannot be reconciled with the lost one, I owe him an infinite debt of mourning and regret. So great a debt do I in fact owe, that my energies cannot legitimately be freed up to perform my duties towards the living. But those demands of the living also are infinite and infinitely legitimate, and so, here […] arises an irresolvable problem: I should not cease mourning and apologizing, and yet I should.’

Having been ‘saved’ we owe such an infinite debt of gratitude that we simply cannot work hard enough to repay it. So we work so so hard, so hard that we don’t see our families, so hard that we don’t get recreation time, so hard that we don’t see that we are killing ourselves in the process…

Earlier in the book I encourage people to ‘forget about resurrection’ – because living in the comfortable knowledge of it leads to apathy and no motivation to act. But it is here in the face of this infinite debt that resurrection comes back to us from the dead:

It is faith in resurrection that prevents us from being obliterated by this huge obligation to serve the whole mass of needy humanity.

A belief that ‘this is not it’ is dangerous because it can appear to legitimize inaction in the face of human rights abuses and environmental catastrophe. But the hope of resurrection also frees us from the infinite obligation to have to serve every single other in every part of our lives. And it’s from this base that we can move forward, slip the deadlock, and actually begin to act in good faith.

Buy ‘Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures‘ now.

First up: resist turning up the thermostat. Please. For the sake of everyone, now and in the future, we can’t afford to heat the huge air volumes in our houses by burning fuel. It’s highly inefficient. I was brought up in a very cold, large Victorian vicarage where we simply couldn’t afford to heat the house properly. It seems that people have become so comfortable that they expect to be able to walk around in t-shirts indoors in winter. We have to change that mindset, so here’s some better ways to stay warm:

1. Insulate. You won’t feel cold if your body doesn’t lose heat. It’s perfectly possible to be a warm body in a cold environment if you insulate it properly. It’s not fashionable, but pop another jumper on, and pull on a hat, draw a rug over your knees. Granny chic has to be in this year!

2. Do some work. Heat and Energy are the same thing. Work is the process of transferring energies, which always has heat as a by-product. So if you are cold, the best way to warm up is to change some energy stores into heat: ie do some exercise. There’s no way you’re going to warm up by sitting around shivering! A brisk bit of hoovering? Quick bike ride? Game of chase? All going to leave you feeling toasty.

3. Localise heating. You don’t need to heat the whole house to warm up. Localise your heating with hot drinks and snacks, or, if you have to, locking down radiators in parts of the house so that only certain places are being warmed.

Whatever you do though, turning the thermostat up by 2 degrees is the worst possible way to gain 2 degrees!

The story of the Chilean miners has been one of the most incredibly moving events I can remember. There’s something of the two-fingers-up-to-nature which is both exhilarating and troubling, and something of the deeply archetypal and transformative about the rescue…

33

Sliding, encased, through the bowels the earth
thirty-three steel turds are evacuated
into the gleaming bowl of bright white.
Infernal, labyrinthine, twisting
this intestinal mine had tried to digest them
blocked their way out
enveloped them in darkness
suffocated them in rancid air
left rotting in the guts to be absorbed
into the black rock.

Mother Earth, consumed by anger
at we who quarried your depths
and tore at your womb,
we were not vanquished this time.
With heavy bits we drilled down
into your belly, not ready to give
them up, and now we winch them
one by one from your hole,
dragged filthy, squeezed slowly
out of your pits to be transformed again:
these little shits that you would have
broken up and absorbed
are embraced, and tenderly taken
to sobbing children and aching mothers
and regenerated as fathers, as lovers
as men, walking proud, and waving;
not dirt, our minds and tools
lifting them from their certain graves,
heroes, testaments to our winning spirits
for now, for now we will not be taken
as detritus, but sing and embrace as
loved sons and daughters of this bright heaven.

©KB 13/10/2010

Nick Clegg – Deputy Prime Minister – has travelled to Pakistan to ‘see for himself’ the horrific destruction that the recent flooding has caused. It annoys me that politicians always feel the need to do this, especially when environmental issues are involved. Everyone has to fly off and see the melting polar ice caps for themselves to ‘prove their green credentials.’ Not content to see the images of chaos and suffering, political leaders have to fly half way round the world to ‘see for themselves.’ I can understand politicians within Pakistan needing to go and visit, I can understand Obama needing to go to the gulf of Mexico, I can see why Bush not going straight to New Orleans was wrong.

But imagine if a leading figure from each nation had to fly with their entourage to ‘see for themselves’ what had happened when disaster struck. It becomes absurd. Especially given that these floods, hurricanes and melting ice are caused by global warming which is itself caused by the huge increase in human movement – flying in particular.

Though I am critical of the ‘virtual world’ in many ways, I think it’s also hugely beneficial: people can experience something of other areas without having to travel, without having to add tonnes of carbon emissions to confirm for themselves what must be patently true anyway. Did Clegg doubt the scale of the disaster until he’d seen it for himself? Did he not trust the television pictures or the words of his civil servants?

I’m reminded of Jesus’ words to Thomas – the disciple who had to physically witness his resurrection before he would believe:

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

I wish more people would take that line when it came to being able to act compassionately in the face of terrible disasters.

London is continually fascinating. As humans we are always quick to project personalities onto our creations; London the person is complex, darkly funny, steeped in history, welcoming all but criticising many, intelligent, crafty… a heavy drinker who enjoys the night.

‘London Nights‘ looks like a brilliant series of 10 radio programmes, looking at the city after dark, following police helicopters, newspaper sellers and inner-city farmers. It begins tonight, so tune in or grab the podcast.

I’ll be using iPlayer to listen to it later as tonight I’m off to hear Slajov Zizek at the Queen Elizabeth Hall:

Headlining the 2010 London Literature Festival, he brings his unique perspective to the biggest subject – the end of capitalism. ‘There should no longer be any doubt – global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis’ and Zizek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse. But how can we face up to living in the end times? Zizek discusses his vision.

I’m very much looking forward to this as my next book seems to be heading towards a synthesis of Marx and Christ’s views of alienation and the need for radical change.

Then on Wednesday it’s the final Apple before the summer, which beautifully brings these themes together. Speaking on ‘Is The City a Machine for the Making of Gods?’ Anthony Paul Smith will be examining whether the city is actually going to be the path to salvation from ecological and apocalypse.

Seriously – you have to try to come along. It’s free. The beer is wonderful. It’s at 7:30. At the Betsey Trotwood.