“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’ve resisted commenting too quickly on the tragedy that’s unfolded in Norway. I think sometimes we need to hold back from immediately pushing views into a space that should simply be reserved for grief and self-examination. But as the nation of Norway itself begins to process what’s happened, I wanted to offer a couple of thoughts.

Firstly, a warning: another Anders Behring Breivik is coming. They are already planning, stockpiling and fantasising. More people are going to die in a horrible attack, and more people are going to have to grieve lives cut short by high calibre bullets from automatic weapons. This, I’m afraid, is what we can expect if we are to pursue a world that embraces ‘the other.’

Breivik’s hatred, the entirety of his actions, were fuelled by a rejection of an emerging Norway that included people from different backgrounds. Muslims, Somali immigrants… it doesn’t matter who they are really, simply that they are different and are seen by Breivik as contaminating the purity of Norway.

He has a utopian view of Norway, and as I have written in Other, this must lead to violence if it is to be sustained. I quoted Anthony Dworkin, who writes of utopians that:

‘their guiding inspiration is that conflict and coercion can be finessed away by a correct reordering of society… but they cannot fulfil their objectives without attempting to remake human nature, or eliminate groups within society that are seen as agents of corruption or reaction… The real harm came in the 20th Century, when utopians abandoned the idea of withdrawing from the world and instead attempted to remake it.’

Al Qaeda, the far right, Zionists, the British National Party – they are all the same. They have a view of a ‘clean’ world which is not contaminated by ‘the other’ – whoever that may be. They thus have two options: to either withdraw into bounded, closed utopian communities, which they end up having to defend (like Waco) or to go out on crusades and attempt to cleanse the world through acts of violence.

The question we must face is: what will our response be? Unfortunately there will be those who will decide that the best form of defence is attack, and that we must increase security even more, and increase powers to stop and search and encourage people to inform on one another if they suspect they are acting in an ‘un-American’ or ‘un-Wherever’ way. And we must sift through society and violently root out extremism wherever we find it.

You will find terror cells, and some attacks may be prevented, but you cannot eliminate the threat of extremism through force. There is no final act of cleansing which will rid a country of all extremists and thus render it free forever from the threat of extremism.

Instead, we must re-double our efforts to love the other. This is not a blind and foolish love, for it needs to be sensitive to the difficulties people feel when faced with change and difference. Multiculturalism is a far more complex project than liberal elites have assumed. We need to work with people, especially within working class, blue-collar communities who see their jobs under threat and their housing being taken. We need, all of us, to better understand our common humanity, and offer places – TAZ spaces if you will – where people can meet and feast together.

I think it’s really interesting that the mass response from the people of Norway has been a ‘march of the roses.’ Flowers that have always represented love. Would this have been the response in the US or the UK? I wonder.

Perhaps through this tragedy Norway can teach us something about how to respond when hatred boils over into violence. For we know it will happen again. And again. And we need to be ready. Perhaps not with guns, but with roses.

Interesting piece in The Independent yesterday, asking why people bother going to festivals when the sound quality is crap, there’s mud everywhere, you can’t sleep, and people push and spill beer all over you.

I visited Glastonbury once, many years ago now, and left utterly mystified. Why, I wondered at the time, did so many people feel, and with such obvious sincerity, that the music they loved would be enhanced by a pervasive smell of excrement and kebabs? Why was it thought to be an advantage to sit on a carpet of compressed garbage and observe one’s heroes from a distance at which they were virtually invisible?

This is a good question. Despite the great TV coverage, there is a part of me that still feels jealous of those who are actually there. And that’s, I think why, despite slightly depressed numbers this year, people will continue to go to festivals, especially in a digital age.

Why? Well, I’ve written more fully about the importance of festive, carnival spaces in Other. Glastonbury is (or can be – outside of the uber-commercial aspects) a TAZ. It is a place ‘penetrated by the marvellous’ – and exists for a short time only, but in that short time it re-frames us. Festivals are also dirty spaces. The fact that you don’t wash much and change your hygiene and sleep boundaries again force us to engage with otherness, and feel restored because of it.

But there’s also the indescribable sense of presence at festivals. You are THERE. And you are there together. And no matter how good your 3D TV and surround sound system, you won’t feel that unless you really are prepared to get down and dirty and be in the crowd. And that’s the sad thing about so much technology – it wants to replicate this sense of ‘togetherness’ but without the dirt. It wants us to be ‘in the action’ – at a football match or festival – but in a sterilised, mediated environment. And that’s just never going to cut it.

Which is why, after much thought, I had to be at Wild Goose. Where I won’t be blogging or tweeting much, just getting filthy and being with people, even if the sound quality is crap.

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:

No thanks...

Jeremy Rifkin’s talk about empathy leads us to some interesting conclusions about heaven. Because empathy is about engaging with those who are other, and experiencing some of their pain, heaven – as traditionally seen – must be a place where there is no empathy, because pain cannot be experienced.

The typically Christian view of heaven is of a post-apocalyptic, post-judgemental place where the saved go to enjoy eternity, while the rest of humanity suffers in horrible pain. Taking what Rifkin says, those entering this heaven will have to leave their empathetic sensibilities at the Pearly Gates, because there cannot be empathy for those left behind. If there were, there would be regret and sadness, and these are not permitted.

That Christians should have an enduring sense of empathy thus leads us, I believe, to have to reject the traditional idea of heaven. It simply cannot be that God would call us to love the other – but only until a time when he sweeps us off, and tells us to forget them.

Instead, I’d want to propose an idea of ‘dirty heaven.’ I’m stealing this partly from Jay Winter’s concept of minor utopias, which, as I discuss in Other,

“sketch out a world very different from the one we live in, but from which not all social conflict or all oppression has been eliminated.”

We need to work to establish good places where there is peace and people can find wholeness. But we should never seek to isolate these into utopias or ‘heavens’ – and should always be looking to ‘leave heaven’ in order to engage with and empathise with the other. This is dirt work, and is exactly in the path that Jesus trod.

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

Mine’s now on YouTube, and carries a simple message: if you want to find the Kingdom of Heaven, you’re going to have to abandon your pursuit of paradise. In other words, the purified utopian ideal is dangerous; God is found in the dirt of the incarnation.

The furore over the state of the athletes’ accommodation at the forthcoming Commonwealth Games has focused largely on the issue of cleanliness.

Putting the issues of security and hygiene aside for a moment – these are separate concerns that require a different reaction – I think the  cleanliness issue is interesting in the way it relates to our different cultural ‘dirt boundaries.’

Dirt, as defined by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, is ‘matter out of place.’ A coke can in a newly ploughed field is litter – is dirt. But move the coke can into your fridge, and it is now the soil from the field that is ‘dirt’ on a ‘clean’ can of coke. In other words, dirt can be more relative than we think.

In different cultures, different things are prescribed as dirty. On the Indian subcontinent, for example, you will regularly see people evacuating their nasal and throat passages onto the street. Disgusting. Until you hear that local people see the practice of blowing your nose into a handkerchief and putting your snot back in your pocket as…filthy.

What we classify as dirty or clean tells us something about how we order our society, who or what is included or excluded. Lepers and women were excluded in Jesus’ day – and in crossing the ‘dirt boundary’ to engage with them he challenged his society to not only consider the way it denominated dirt/clean and included/excluded but also how it’s mechanisms of cleansing worked too.

So…with the issue of cleanliness of the athletes’ accommodation we may need to ask if this is simply an issue of different cultural understanding of what dirt is. India is a far dustier – far ‘dirtier’ place. But herein lies an opportunity which seems to fit well with the modern idea of the post-colonial Commonwealth system: by going to the games to engage with and grapple with the dirt of another culture a chance to see renewal in all the cultures that clash arises. Sure, the athletes do not want to be in danger, and nor do they want to fall ill. But by going and engaging, and getting a little dirty, they may find that their understanding of the emerging India as a complex and still caste-based society may be enhanced, in a way that simply would not occur in a sterile games village.

Dirt tells us that things are out of place. And it seems that the construction of these games has meant that slums have been cleared andmoney has been finding its way into the wrong places too. Attending these games and engaging these issues is what India needs if we are to help bring justice to the many forgotten and untouchables in its ranks.

Had a fine morning yesterday with Barry Taylor at the Tate Britain. We went round the very wonderful Rude Britannia exhibition, which is a lot deeper and richer than saucy postcards, though there are plenty like this one above to tickle your fancy. Different rooms of exhibition have been co-curated by the likes of Harry Hill, Steve Bell and the cartoonists from Viz, and offer a huge range of perspectives on satire, political commentary and the plain absurd. It’s very funny, and also offers great relief (no jokes please) as one is left with the feeling, looking at political cartoons from 1780, that nothing has changed: dirt and heresy and tricksterism is still a hugely important mode of cultural expression, one that, by saying the unsayable, attempts to change the unchangeable. And gradually, it does.

In a way, that’s how the conversation fell with Barry afterwards over a coffee. What’s going on in the UK church that excites you? Barry asked. It is likely a critique of my own failings, but I struggled to find anything I was really excited about. It seems that we are in a bit of a doldrums time, between one phase of emerging expressions or whatever, and another, and with many appearing to move back towards the institutions who can offer support and security, rather than risk remaining on the edge. I wonder whether others feel the same? Can anything change? And who are the tricksters out there offering dirty bridgeheads into those new territories?

It was great talking to Barry though, who, as a Brit living in LA has a unique perspective. I really hope we can hook up on some stuff in the future. He’s off to Italy, lucky guy. Perhaps he’ll get some better football out there than the rubbish we’ve had to put up with over here!

Violence of Heaven [ 1 ] |  Violence of Heaven [ 2 ] | Violence of Heaven [ 3 ]

According to Revelation – the apocalypic birth narrative of our future utopia – “when heaven is established, it will be a bloody business.” I have been trying to argue that any attempt to establish utopia – whether that be heaven or the perfect revolutionary proletarian republic – is a violent business, and we should therefore look for other models.

The violence of utopia comes from its desire to purge impurity – either when that impurity threatens it from within, or when a utopian group goes out to expand its boundaries. The removal of violence requires us to change our dirt boundaries, just as Jesus did. As I write in the new book:

Dworkin outlines what a middle position might look like by examining Jay Winter’s idea of ‘minor utopias’. Winter’s book Dreams of Peace and Freedom describes these places as ones that ‘sketch out a world very different from the one we live in, but from which not all social conflict or all oppression has been eliminated’.

It is in the light of this description that I think we can gain a new perspective [on] Jesus’ miracles in his very short ministry. In each of these examples we can see that they carry hints of ‘a world very different from the one we live in’, while not attempting to be permanent statements or manifestations of that new world order, and certainly not attempting to eliminate all social conflict or oppression. Jesus fed 5,000 people, but only for one afternoon.

If he were to continue this as a daily event, would it have to be restricted to those who were there for the original miracle? If so, who would check? What would happen to those who made a living from making bread or catching fish if Jesus continued to undercut their sales by this miraculous multiplication? Would he still have to be there today, feeding a population of six billion and more with free food? What sort of people would that make us into, and what sort of God would it be that we were worshipping?

We can see that Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the 5000 only works if we are prepared to take it as a temporary event. The attempt to solidify it into a utopia where no one need eat again necessarily descends into violence and absurdity. We have to accept that hunger will return, and thus accept a world ‘from which not all social conflict or all oppression has been eliminated.’

The question this leaves us with is this: does the elimination of violence from heaven actually requires heaven to be a place where impurity and impermanence is accepted?