Consuming love?

Co-incidence, synchronicity, chance, luck or providence are matters concerned with the same thing but from a different point of view dealing with the question Why?. This last week I have returned to the same issues I was struggling with in August 2003 issues of disordered and ordered desires and I drew the images then as I reflected on Margaret Silf's book Inner Compass.

..."ordered desires expand us without diminishing the other. They draw us into a creative relationship with what lies beyond ourselves without tempting us to try to possess it."

Last night I happened to watch Love/Juice which was directed by Kaze Shindo and has had some acclaim. Two young women, Kyoko and Chinatsu live together in an apartment in Tokyo. Best friends, they share and everything together, including using the same bed. Together they cruise the local clubs and bars for fun, do drugs, etc. However things change as Chinatsu confesses love for Kyoko. Reviewers have seen this movie as a lesbian fresh-faced take on the narrow line between friendship and love. But they missed the huge visual metaphor of fish in the film deeply symbolic of the girls' relationships with each other and others. A lot of time is given to a local aquarium where the camera indulges itself with lingering shots of fish consuming other fish. This movie presented me a real insight into a world of disordered desires. This world was a web of consuming the other, of hedonism and self-centredness, of trying to possess the other. But there is another way to live. Instead of living in our needs, in the web we might instead begin, in Silf's words, "the process of sifting out the deepest desire" and allowing that to attract us like a bee to a flower. (Because of the ultra violet spectrum bee's eyes see my flower drawn is black! You go figure!)

But this precious treasure - this light and power that now shines within us - is held in perishable containers, that is in our weak bodies. So everyone can see that our glorious power is from God and is not our own. 2 Cor 4:7

Only one voice

“When I started learning the cello, I fell in love with the instrument because it seemed like a voice — my voice.” Rostropovich

Mstislav Rostropovich, the Russian cellist and conductor died this year. This image comes from an unplanned mini concert by the Berlin Wall at its downfall.

In the 1970s he supported the banned novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn not only by allowing him to live with them but by writing an open letter of protest tothe Russian President. This led to him being himself restricted and then to go into exile in the West and his Soviet citizenship was revoked in 1978. In the West, violinist Yehudi Menuhin recalled , “he was like a little boy, laughing, shouting, pinching himself to make sure these really were the streets in Paris” but this freedom cost him greatly in a loss of homeland.

In 2002 in an interview he said "Suffering is essential for art ... You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life. If he (is) only happy with his life, I think that he (does not fully) understand what is happiness.”

Slava, as he was known, was also a good pianist as well as cellist. A little mischief happened during a concert series where he was accompanying his wife on piano and he noted the page turner wasn't very attentive. So the following night, again playing for his wife, Slava placed completely the wrong music on the piano but played the correct score from memory. The page turner had absolutely no idea what was happening!

Human beings are complex and defy definition whatever science or psychology or philosophy etc say. I am constantly fascinated that so many artists are also activists and humorists or tricksters or all and more. We all have more than one voice. Even in moments of sadness or grief or tears it is possible to find a momentary smile, a glimpse of hope, or a flash of heaven.

Whose stuff is it and what's it for?

Wednesday night cycling home I came on a pile of stuff. The owners of an apartment were throwing out stuff left behind by a previous tenant. There was a lot of stuff. But I couldn't not look and see what there was! In the end I came away with a broken double or contra bass bow and a large electric rice cooker. I hope to find good homes for them eventually after I've repaired the bow.

On Wednesday Sept 10 2003 I wrote this quotation from Margaret Silf's book Inner Compass:-

"Because nothing is mine in any real or pertinent way I have (ultimately) nothing to fear from apparent losses in my life and (ultimately) nothing to gain from transient acquisitions or achievements - though of course it won't feel like this at the surface of me. If I can begin to live from the free centre where these things are really true for me, I become free of the constant need to hold onto what I fear to lose or strive neurotically after what I hope to gain. All the energy that has been needed to maintain this holding on and striving after becomes freed for the thrilling challenge of becoming who I really am."

I might aspire to this but I haven't achieve this thinking, at least not yet. A happy moment with a Korean ESL student sprang to mind who at a dinner party at my home, she declared "You're just like my grandma" (할머니 harmonie & yes I can sort of read Korean!). The others at the table were a little stunned but I recognized the connection and behaviour immediately. What a gift as I felt it was a complement! The virtuous Asian mother is self sacrificing for the children, and when she becomes a grandmother she frequently transform this with new softness. She will save all the best to give away to her grandchildren, chocolates candies etc. Strangely at that moment it was said I was pulling out some chocolates from the freezer! I was always taught FHB, family hold back for the guest and I've watch a mother or grandmother putting food on the guests plate while they can't see.

Competitiveness can never have a grandmother's selfless care and love. This is part of compassion.

I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; Be patient, bearing with one another in love. Eph 4:1

Two Perspectives on Bamboo

This image is called 'Bamboo in the Snow' by Stephanie Shimerdla. I took brush painting lessons for a while but really couldn't learn it.

I'm a 竹升 - juk-sing a label given to OBCs, overseas born Chinese. If you take a section of bamboo you will find that the 2 ends are blocked by an internal divider - that is how bamboo grows; you can see the external joints quite clearly. The label refers to the empty space between the nodes and to OBCs and their communication skills especially in Chinese but perhaps also to cultural acceptance.

I came across Augustine Ichiro Okumura, a Japanese theologian and Carmelite monk, in his book Awakening to Prayer in August 2003 and he uses bamboo in a very different way.

"The part of the bamboo that stretches upward symbolizes the course of life and the points could represent the prayer that cuts ... the bamboo joints encircle it on the outside like a cord thus symbolizing that prayer too is one with life. Prayer is that divine seed whose roots draw food from earthly existence. ... The important thing in prayer is not the duration ... but to interrupt what one is doing ... Only a sharp break will allow the whole of life to become prayer because life itself is not itself a prayer! Thus the invisible power of of the bamboo joint that acts on the trunk and creates the tree so sturdy that no tempest can break it symbolizes the life of prayer. nevertheless, however important the joints, they do not constitute the whole bamboo. In human life, als, the many occupations of the day are to be found between its prayer breaks."

As I have been thinking about sabbath as keeping, doing and being my own struggle has been not keeping prayer but the disciplines of rest and self-care. Okumura responds to this. "How to pray in the course of a busy modern life is an important problem. It would be highly dangerous , however, to endorse the cheap solution of thinking indiscriminately that every activity itself is a prayer ... [unlike the angels we are also physical bodies!]" Five years later I'm still working on this and perhaps for another 5 years yet.

Finding life at the abyss

Wednesday night's movie in the series the Love of God was Babel.

In a remote corner of the Moroccan desert, a shot rings out - and a fragile loose chain of events starts and steadily tightens linking an American tourist couple's desperate struggle, two Moroccan boys and their father, a Mexican nanny illegally crossing into Mexico with two American children, and a deaf Japanese teenage girl whose father is sought by the police. Disparate pieces spread across the globe exposing cultures in collision across huge distances in an ever shrinking world, all of them sharing desperation, a sense of dislocation and in their own deserts.

The title Babel alludes to the great tower built in Gen. 11:9, interestingly it is thought to share a root with the Hebrew verb balal, 'to confuse or confound'. In fact in English babble is to talk meaninglessly. I've come across many interpretations for the story, the most common being the reason was the pride of humans, which ultimately led to the Flood as a response. However a good friend and scholar from almost ten years ago proposed that this was in fact a response to humanity's refusal to go and populate the earth, i.e. a disobedient act of staying together instead of fulfilling their divinely ordered purpose.

Anyhow I found shape and interest in the patterns which the pieces of Babel made up. Then again I love to listen to music and the interplay between the different parts that make up the music rather than the whole. I suspect this must be connected in my thing about taking things apart to understand how they fit together. Anyhow Babel did not go the way of the notes provided for reflection either for me.

The clue was in a question asked of the Mexican nanny by one of the American children as they found themselves lost and abandoned in the desert. "Did we do something bad?" and the nanny's reply was "No. I did something stupid." This for me at least actually glued everything together. The Moroccan boys, the Mexican nanny and the Japanese teenager had an innocence or were just plain naive. They weren't bad as such but they acted stupidly and had to take the consequences. Through much of the film I felt the smell of death looming, impending and I was surprised by the ending in feeling a sense of life. That life is not as isolating as we think it is at times.

There was nudity and it was graphic, however that said it wasn't simply eroticism. Sometimes we strip ourselves whether physically, emotionally or even spiritually for the wrong reasons or motives looking for compassion. Perhaps there seems to be no hope and it is a jump into the abyss. Sometimes we are stripped whether physically, emotionally or even spiritually and it feels like we are in the abyss. But there is still hope that compassion and understanding might come. I frequently find myself having done something stupid and somehow it is still possible to find life.

He found them in a desert land, in an empty, howling wasteland. He surrounded them and watched over them; he guarded them as he would guard his own eyes. Like an eagle that rouses her chicks and hovers over her young, so he spread his wings to take them up and carried them safely on his pinions. The Lord alone guided them; (Deut 32:10-12a)

Compassion vs competition

I am constantly troubled by the competitiveness of some people to the point that there seems to be no compassion. It's argued that 'competition is healthy it drives development and the advancement of human progress.' But somehow there is a deeper endemic problem. It is a form of Darwinism’s Survival of the fittest thinking. This sees that all life is ultimately competitive. Biologists have known that the natural tendency of the animal population is to explode, but the limited food supply keep them in check. When there are too many consumers then some will starve to death. In order to survive, animals must compete for food, killing each other if need be or simply starving out the competitors.

Thomas Malthus took this to a logical conclusion that giving food to the poor or starving was self-defeating, since it would simply support population growth and create more of the same hunger and misery that welfare or aid was meant to relieve. Of course we say that Malthus’ deduction was inhumane but when we look globally there are so many disguised versions still around. I hear the economic argument “We can’t afford to do this” so frequently nowadays. Often it is not as if the money is not available, it simply means "I think to spend the money would be a waste".

Unfortunately this “survival of the fittest” thinking does not merely apply to food. I think of a nest of recently hatched baby eagles. If there is a third hatchling often the others will peck and drive it from the nest to certain death. In human families this may be competition for the love of parents for needs to be met or affirmation or simply attention from the limited time resources of the parents. But does life have to competitive in fact is this symptomatic of individualistic societies or is this plain selfishness?

Do we have to live in survival of the fittest thinking? I've aware of increasing deductions from ethology into comparative psychology and then applied to human behaviour as normative and acceptable. For example we can talk in dog/wolf terms of alpha males and alpha females in a fight for social supremacy or the social pecking order, if we draw on bird research. It initially is a label for behaviour and personality but it quickly becomes an excuse for patterns of behaviour lacking compassion. There is no possible critique of the behaviour. Where does altruism and even love and multi-perspectivism fit into this worldview?

Much less quoted is research into animal altruism. For example, dogs often adopt orphaned animals from outside their species such as cats etc, and dolphins etc have rescued human beings at risk to themselves. Research and attempts to theorize about altruism in evolutionary terms have ended in the theories of kin selection and reciprocal altruism, where there is argued a benefit to the group or both parties involved and within survival. But in animals can this truly be altruism. The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy notes "In evolutionary biology, an organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself." We should note it is not risk but cost to itself. Strangely we would more call this sacrificial love, a care for the weaker, the exercise of compassion.

In human behaviour terms, competitive behaviour outside the scheduled competition is simply bad manners. If the person was a child a reprimand and corrective would be sought. Humans are not merely animals but agents from whom we can expect responsible behaviour which includes compassion. I haven't even started thinking about humility and pride etc yet. Am I asking too much to expect that compassion has a higher value than winning in the human race?

Without Words

"I sing a lot without any words, because for me, music is a language, basically. I don't always need to hear words. Music makes you feel something, makes you think about so much images, and i think i can express myself more with the music than words." (Jorane)

Jorane is a French Canadian chanteuse who accompanies herself on cello. I've seen her perform live twice and both times she was captivating and having something vibrantly special. That said, like many musical artists, her early material seems to me her best. (But I'm open to change my opinion) There is a brash intensity, playful self-indulgent gallic charm such that she can be mischievous elf in one moment and dark siren in the next. Her music tends to be a little more on the darker side, but still it is difficult to describe or classify as even Jorane herself says this.

"It's a bit like my story life ! The first album was said to be unclassable, but in real life, I think people always considered me as unclassable too. In high school a friend of mine told me : "Jo, it's an eternal handing-over in question !" I think she was right."

"What feeds me? Life, travels, all these people that I meet on the road, landscapes, nature, a lot." ... "My Christian name is Johanne but during a trip of co-operation [to construct a school] in Haiti, the children changed all our names. It was like a game for them and I decided to keep the name that they gave me. It was a strong moment for me, it became a name that means a lot to me. I would not have changed for any other name. I wrote a piece, Elmita, on a woman that I met over there. These Haitian women and these mothers touched me because they are very strong, very proud, it seems like the whole country rests on their shoulders."

Name changes in many cultures are rites of passage and movement to one stage to another. In the Biblical story Abram became Abraham, Jacob Israel, and Saul Paul to name a few. Haiti left its mark on Jorane in a name change. But also something much deeper. Following on from my thoughts on The Motorcycle Diaries somehow I think unless we let the world touch us, to open us to other possibilities or other alternative realities then despair and ultimately death is all there is.

I think one of her strengths is when she moves to singing becoming sound music rather than word music, she enters a deeper realm of the psyche and moves towards the ineffable, which incidentally is the title of one of her tracks.(click to play at Youtube) But it is not a road of gentleness and serenity but rougher and with twists and turns and undulations. In the faith journey there is a point when questioning and even language loses its importance and what we are left with is raw stripped down faith, a moment when we are called analogously to take music or life seriously.

Finding a voice

Jack Bruce, renowned bass player whose bands included Cream, Alexis Korner's Blues Inc., the Graham Bond Organization, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and, briefly, Manfred Mann. Why is he playing a cello? Well at 16 he won a scholarship to study cello and composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music but dropped out over differences with his teachers and perhaps also as recorded on one website, poverty.

Cream, being a trio, allowed Bruce to become an innovator in terms of the role of the bass guitar. His forceful, aggressive style has changed the whole understanding of bass playing, and it has become as much a lead instrument. In Cream it was a foil to Clapton's guitar.

"I became the lead singer in Cream by default. It wasn't until Cream that Eric encouraged me to be a singer. We always had a competition as to who didn't want to be the lead singer. I guess I sort of lost." "Cream's success has been a double-edged sword for me. I still earn a lot of money from it and it's given me financial freedom and the opportunity to play whatever I've wanted to. When I see an article about me and it says 'Jack Bruce of Cream' it kind of annoys me a little bit because I've done so many other things."

In an interview with the BBC they asked "You play bass guitar, piano, cello and acoustic guitar and you sing. Which satisfies you most as a performer?" and his reply was "Singing. It's transcendental."

Voice is so important and has become the catch word in post-colonial, post-modern, or feminist studies. Finding our voice in life is difficult and perhaps very important to me is that this has a transcendental dimension. Moreover to find your voice is to find meaning and purpose in life, but literally to find in today a good reason to go beyond today. Strangely Bruce's cello has appeared on his recordings in recent years, as opportunity and reason to play has been found.

But as I think in the context of Nodame Cantabile, Nodame (the female lead character) has a voice a cantabile style but no real purpose because she wants to play music for herself how she wants. Chiaki (the male lead) has purpose but no voice. Perhaps voice has two meanings: an ability and quality to express oneself and the opportunity, or relationship in which, to be heard. To those who struggle and feel alone I feel important that need to be able to express the situation and to be heard. No-one should cry alone though sadly it happens most of the time. (see my earlier post The Pain of God click here )