Saying It and Doing It
Are Two Different Things
Containers
1 Greetings from amidst a gale. Here indoors, before sitting down to write, I finished restoring and oiling an old leather backpack. It had the word ‘SEA’ written off-centre on the lid in indelible pen but that is now covered with a patch of oak bark tanned deer leather, complete with a line of tufty fur, like the foam on a wave. Was it some sailor’s duffel bag? A poet’s off-kilter overnighter? Three-quarters of a planned SEAL? I do not know but now it is chestnut rather than straw coloured and I cannot wait to take it out tomorrow to the cliff top and gather some sea beet leaves in it.
For three weeks while pain has come and gone, then come again, it’s been hard to write, for the first time since starting this Substack over two years ago. There’s been no lack of thinking or planning essays but the necessary time at a laptop has felt physically impossible until today, medicated with ordinary painkillers and a brisk if limping walk this morning. Thankyou for continuing to read and subscribe here while I do not stick to my usual Monday 7am deadline.
There is much to come in the New Year, if not before. Pieces on faith and yielding are growing in the drafts folder and my upcoming plan to see Iain McGilchrist again means I am finally planning to finish the essays relating his work, the Taoist Classics and certain embodied insights from 25 years of T’ai Chi. Iain and I have been talking about these things for over a dozen years, so perhaps we will film a conversation about it when I head north in March, if I do the work justice in the meantime. You can watch our first recorded conversation here.
Over the last three weeks, my body asked me very clearly to draw, to sew and to rest. When I tried to do too much, I was floored. It has been a humbling few weeks yet full of its own simple joys in the form of some extremely convivial time around tables with new friends and family. I have learned much from close friends who live with various forms of chronic fatigue or pain. I do not have their hard-won grace but I was glad of the reminder that impatience with the pace of recovery doesn’t remove a single second from the time it takes to get well. However it appears that hand-sewing leather pouches may well be some kind of secret health elixir. You heard it here first.
This week, two sketches from the mental drawing board, in lieu of finished paintings.
Trespasses
On one of the first mornings of January 2024 I woke from a dream which had only the simplest and starkest of content. Instead of my usual dream adventures, quests, meetings and challenges, there was simple black text on white in bold capitals-
A YEAR OF FORGIVENESS OF DEBT
No sound, no commentary. I opened my eyes and made a note of the words but I needn’t have bothered, as they have stayed with me all year like a guilty secret. I turn around and the words are still there, now like a promise rather than a threat.
This Lent, I was reading the Gospels from a copy sent to me by an old friend, David Bentley Hart’s doggedly literal translation of the New Testament2 from the earliest possible Greek sources. I was struck by many things but particularly the constant themes of money, riches, debt and poverty in Jesus’ teaching. I love the writing of my friend David Benjamin Blower 3 and his essays this year returned me again to the literal (while also utterly mystical) reality of a path where accumulation of wealth and power are absolutely antithetical to liberation. The similarities with the Taoist path are clear and I am glad in my heart to have a dual heritage, as well as the ragged fringes of what else I’ve read or practiced sincerely over the years.
Quietly, without talking to anyone else about it until this month, I’ve been pondering that headline on my inner eyelids from January. Over many months of looking askance at it, stealing quick glances, then only latterly looking at it squarely in the face, I find it asks me to completely reappraise my relationship to the debts that are owed me (in actual money) and to change the position I take to the things I have considered to be ‘harms’ done to me by others.
I no longer want to identify with victimhood (regardless of whether I have been a victim of deliberate harm). If I look back to my twenties and early thirties, I was a master of making excuses. Now I take responsibility for my own actions in the world and am glad of the teachers who have asked me to step up, time and again, rather than shrink away from challenges. This sets me against the prevailing culture but as the Classics say, ‘the sage is out of step with the times but in tune with the seasons.’4
What have I not forgiven, both in others and in myself? Where do I barricade myself against grace?
What stories have I told that keep reinforcing debt and payback, score-keeping, the tallying of things, an attitude of scarcity? I set about cultivating a more settled heart that neither scrimps in love nor scrounges it. I hang my practice on the Heartwork that I’ve been teaching here over the last year, on prayer and on relationship, with the Great Mystery, people and Earth. Nothing is grand. Everything is everyday.
An uncomfortable new clarity brings the possibility of a real, friendly exchange with the broke inner nineteen-year-old squatter I once was. That teen feared scarcity (and mystery) as much as she did spiders and could count beans and keep scores with great accuracy. This inward rapprochement must be done in the privacy of my own heart (and in the occasional warm light of deep talks with trusted friends). However, I write a little of it here because there has been some wonderful writing about money, lack of money and precarity on Substack over the last few months5 and I have appreciated it and felt solidarity in it.
Money talk is not always about money. Sometimes it’s the only way to get a foothold on the cold glass edifice of Modernity. Sometimes you have to kick in the abstractions with your ancient Doc Marten’s. Then, under the guise of one’s (real) misgivings about class and society, prise off a few panes of the triple glazing that clads the towering, yet spiritually hollow, bunker of those who hoard wealth and keep us toiling in sadness and alienation.6
As
says in the last chapter of his new book, (whilst discussing William Morris):‘How to recover a sense of absolute belonging and mutuality with all things?’
For me it has to start with wiping the slate clean. I think it will take all winter to peer into all the cracks where I have been hoarding harm or avoiding the generosity strewn so obviously in every direction.
I will write more when I know more, from the other side.
Thinking points
From the last few weeks
Technologists openly manipulate us with exquisitely precise prompts to meet or create our desire but scratch their heads as so many of us turn our backs, refuse to upgrade, log off, or return to simpler means. Remember, their cleverness has a nap, and only rubs one way.
Pornography spotlights the sex act and renders all mystery flat and we wonder why millions of people despair that they are unlikely ever to bond deeply with anyone.
Much Western Contemporary Art foregrounds the concept and relegates craft to a manufacturer and the art world is puzzled that no-one but a tiny elite cares about it at all. (As if Van Eyck, Gentileschi, or Blake didn’t have concepts as well as deep craft…)
Explaining a joke kills it.
Telling me why I should trust you actively prevents me doing so.
Rereading the Taoist Classics and Iain McGilchrist, seeing the deep resonances between ‘semi-transparency’, ‘necessary distance’, wei wu wei, and ‘using the false to cultivate the real’. Implicit is greater than explicit, every time, in conveying any good, real or important thing.
Has our endless contemporary desire for pleasure at all costs made us shallow and callous compared to those who live well with difficulty both now and before us?
Attempting to always feel good is the solvent which dissolves any tiny crystals of joy before they have a chance to properly form. Joy requires time and pressure to grow. The largest crystals I’ve found are always in conjunction with difficulty.7 You can hold them up to the light and everything is transformed when you look through it, even with just one eye.
Founding and paid subscriber Zoom meeting
I would like to host an online get together in January for anyone who’d like to come along. The last Heartwork class was on Thanksgiving, so most people watched the recording later and we didn’t get to hang out. Here’s a poll for all paid subscribers. We can have a theme or just see what people want to talk about once on the call. Let me know what you think.
This week’s appreciation is for my old art tutor at Kingston University, Jeff Dellow, who sadly passed away earlier this month. Jeff was Head of Painting when I studied for my BA in Fine Art Painting at Kingston University 1991-94 and was a widely-shown abstract painter. I remember him as possibly the only friendly and settled presence in the whole painting department and the only tutor who seemed to take an interest in both one’s artwork and intellectual life. He never stooped to the prod then undermine methods of ‘teaching’ or the slimy, over-friendly behaviour prevalent at the time. Instead he would talk quietly and animatedly about colour, books and poetic intention in our art. I now know I was never meant to be an abstract painter but I gave it my best shot and got into Chelsea School of Art for my MA, thanks mostly to Jeff’s encouragement. He lent me Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and some books by Foucault during my time at the uni. I was on the fence about Post-Modernism8 but tried hard to understand different threads in it and eventually enjoyed reading around and within it. Now, even from the other side of the fence, it is Jeff’s warm intelligence and passion for the possibilities within painting that I appreciate most. He will be greatly missed. There will be a public memorial event some time in early 2024 and I will post details when I receive them.
Listen here to Bobby Byrd’s Saying It and Doing It Are Two Different Things.
At the link is a review from the Atlantic which well describes the rip-tide feeling of reading this New Testament, if like me you grew up swimming in the KJV and NIV translations.
I am on the last chapter of his new book The Messianic Commons. It’s great, I’ll write about it soon. You can buy it at this link.
I’m no sage yet but I am happy to be somewhat in tune with nature yet utterly out of fashion.
My local newspaper today reports that Christchurch’s foodbank was raided at the weekend and that all the food for extremely low income families had been stolen. As I read the headline leaving a shop today, my heart sank. On coming home and reading about it further, I hear of astounding generosity provoked by that selfishness. To succumb to despair, whether prompted by huge foreign events or seemingly small local ones, is to miss the opportunity to recommit to love and connection.
I am writing this for younger Caro, who would not hear of such things, and could only learn them the hard way.
Mostly due to the terrible personal behaviour of most of the writers I investigated, rather than strictly based what they were writing. Which makes me an incorrigible Romantic, perhaps?
I'm so glad you've written this, Caro. Like a promissory note for the composting of the ledgers.
Was wondering your thoughts on practice and grounding of faith - I have been feeling a want/need for a spiritual practice in community- I have a connection and draw to Daoism and Christianity - don’t want to buffet pick, but want a committed practice (beyond my qigong and tai chi practice) with others and feel somewhat homeless in this regard