like the sun…

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

East of the Sun, West of the Moon © 1913 Kay Nielsen

Carl Jung compared a human life to a single day, in which we are the sun rising, reaching to the heights, then slipping down to night. Today I am 51, and this image strikes me again now, as it did the first time I read about it. Jung maintained that the first half of life, for all its confusion and dissonance, is relatively easy, as, like the sun, we rise ever higher, casting our light over ever greater reaches, seeing ever further. Eventually we reach our midday, the midpoint of life. When this occurs varies, it seems to me: I am not sure if someone who dies in their 20s achieves their midlife in their teens. I suspect not. I suspect that this is like the sun being snuffed out mid-morning – a powerful metaphor for the shock of early death: psychically, a wrenching insult against the ‘proper way of things’. What is more problematical is whether, in any place or time where most people die at 40 (say), midlife is reached at 20 – I suspect so – that we map our lives, subconsciously, to the time we think we have. This leads naturally to how this perception changes when considering lives, like many lived today, in which people expect to live longer than their parents. I wonder indeed if this indistinct, slipping end point may not be part of the reason for some of our confusion about death. Not that that seems to me likely to be the main reason for such confusion; this surely has to do with the obsession we have with the morning of our lives – with youth. For what is this other than an obsession with keeping our gaze fixed on where we came from, rather than on where we are going?

Jung said that the secret to life is not the morning, but rather the afternoon. For it is then that our sun begins to descend to its ultimate quenching. Jung talked about a process he terms ‘individuation’ – that is the setting right of those things within us that are in disorder. Analogous, perhaps, to the feeling people often have who know they are soon to die of wanting to put their affairs in order. Certainly, by the end, we lose everything: literally everything. But it is not as if we reach our sunset carrying everything we have accumulated in life. Much of what we have had we will have lost: family, friends, our vigour, our hair, our teeth. But also, if we are wise: our fear, our confusions, our lusts, our greed, our gluttonies. Perhaps also, admittedly, our hope is lost (for I have no belief in an afterlife). Looking back to youth, an ever harder thing to do with failing sight and memory, is surely to get it all wrong? When moving forwards, looking back must be wrong. Worse, like any threat, death is more terrifying if you turn your back on it.

So, I am 51 today, and very happy to be so, happy to be in the afternoon of my life. Happy to accept that I no longer can find the right words in conversation, and that I forget all kinds of things all the time. My hair is performing a disappearing trick and many of my appetites have diminished. But I am more present than I have ever been – and that makes me see reality a little more clearly, and the time I have left moves more slowly. I am more at peace with myself. I value silence more, solitude, but also other people. I am more tolerant of my faults and failings, and thus those of others. I worry for the world, but do not feel any longer it is somehow all my responsibility. I do what I can. Most of all I advance, a step at a time, enjoying the view, trying to face in the direction I’m going…

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a New Renaissance II…

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

©2009 www.landcommodities.com

I am returning to flesh out my contention that we are living through a new Renaissance, because I feel it helps me make sense of what I see happening around me, and I hope it may be of use to others out there…

For most of human history, the number of ‘artists’ working at any given time were necessarily few – thus perhaps the excitement with which we unearth any artefact, however basic – and the further back we go, the greater the amazement with which we greet such finds. Rightly so. But how can we compare our time with any previous one? It seems to me obvious that today there are more artists living and working, not only than there have ever been but by several orders of magnitude. Further, these artists have access to more influences, and to vastly more powerful tools, than any of their forebears; so much so that I feel we are now living through a period of creativity unprecedented in human experience.

Consider first how much greater the population is than it has ever been: when I was born in 1961 there were less than 3 billion people on our planet; now there are more than 7 billion! Further, because of spreading education, an ever larger proportion of that population is reaching the threshold where artistic production is possible; because of increasing wealth, larger numbers are able to find the time to engage in creative endeavours; also because of these factors, the audience for such creations is constantly growing.

This New Renaissance is simultaneously fed and over-fed by the ever increasing speed and interconnectivity of our forms of communication. Fed by near-immediate access to all previous and current creative work: over-fed because the feast provided is so rich, that it is hard not to consume it gluttonously – to the point where the urge to create can be choked.

In the past, individual ‘geniuses’ arose as isolated spikes in a largely flat landscape. The rarity of such people was a natural consequence of how modest the population was, how close to the breadline, how ignorant. This ignorance meant that anyone lucky enough to receive an education, shone. Exceedingly slow communication, if not outright isolation, meant that each ‘genius’ fed on a unique diet of influences and so his productions were necessarily unlike those of any other.

The internet ensures that ever few artists are isolated in this sense. (Even those that are will most likely be, by the same token, deprived enough so as not to have the ‘entry fee’ to the creative community). Artists today, increasingly, feed on the same input as each other, and can, at all times, maintain a clear view on what their peers are doing. Thus there is a tendency for creative production to become homogeneous. Nevertheless, the sheer breadth and depth of the creative community (consider how only relatively recently women have been allowed and able to participate) means that, even along the crest of this perpetually breaking wave, peaks do appear, and those in huge numbers. Adding to this is the ever increasing speed with which the feedback loop of influence-creation-influence is spinning.

This seems to me an explanation for the explosion, the tsunami indeed, of creativity that we are experiencing sweeping us forward. In the first Renaissance, on top of the limitations I describe above, the ability to create was further limited by the patronage needed to provide an artist with the means to create. Today, everyone is a patron – the creative community is itself so vast it has perhaps become a source of patronage on its own. Once we find a new compensation model that will allow the universal publishing and distribution machine that is the internet to spread our creative products without restriction, then I expect the New Renaissance to flower brilliantly…

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into 2012…

Monday, January 23rd, 2012
walking on the beach new year 2012

walking on the beach new year's day 2012 © David Litteljohn

I came back from my adventure in Iran becalmed; no wind in my sails. It was foolish to expect to find those things I sought there; as if travelling were like going to a supermarket. Iran was a profound experience that I am still processing…

Soon after I returned, my dog, Ninja, died; at 15, a frail old lady by the end. Her kidneys failed. I cradled her in my arms as the vet injected her with an overdose.

Christmas came. I grumble every year and tell anyone who wants to listen (or who doesn’t) that I hate it. I abhor the way capitalism goes rampant. But this is only a layer thrown over the faded one the Christians, in turn, used to cover up the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Beneath all the layers, there lies the hope and expectation, in the depth of winter, of the sun’s rebirth; the hope there is in the year beginning to swing back towards the light, towards the resurgence of Nature. This is a deep yearning, particularly in the North of the world. At this time I am forced out of my hermitic existence into the company of people, into the embrace and drama of family. Perhaps there too I (we) seek a rebirth.

A rat dug its way into my house and took up residence in its walls and ceiling. The beast never actually got into my house proper – into those parts I live in. Well, my sister claims she saw it towards the end of its ‘visit’ scurrying across the floor, but I wonder if that might not have been a mouse. We often have mice, but a rat seems altogether more threatening. Is it the folk memory of the Black Death that makes us so afraid of them? Apparently they carry disease, though I wonder if this is true of a country rat. Out here what is it that makes a rat, among so many other wild creatures, particularly odious? Even in the city, I would think that any disease a rat brings into our houses comes from the filth that we spread around us; perhaps we hate rats because they remind us too much of ourselves.

In spite of my, no doubt, sentimental love of the country and its beasts, I tried to kill him. But he outwitted me. Several times I found the trap snapped closed, with the tahini bait (I had run out of peanut butter) stolen. A couple of times I found a poor field mouse mangled in the jaws of the trap. When I tried to block his entry tunnel with rocks, he dug under them and, as if to mock me, took to racing about in my ceiling. Eventually I closed his tunnel with chicken wire. I think he’s gone now. By the end of his visit, I had become quite used to him. In spite of my ancestral fears, I wonder why I should resent some creature seeking shelter within the no-man’s land of the hollows in my house?

A gale blew a tree down over the power cable to my house. For three days we had no electricity. The thin skin of the human virtuality tore. The cold of winter seeped into my home. We scurried about trying to get things done before the sun went down – for, afterwards, though we had candles, trying to find anything, or do anything, was far more difficult. There was also silence. A profound and absolute silence. The rarest, strangest phenomenon: the one thing that cannot exist in the human virtuality is silence.

In the end, desperate to reconnect to that virtuality, I dug out the generator the previous owner had left, and that I had not laid eyes on in the four years I have lived here. Miraculously (seemingly so, for one used to electricity appearing ‘magically’ from the sockets in my walls), pouring gasoline into it, we could run the central heating, have showers, even power the TV for an evening. Very strange this business of converting gasoline directly into TV programmes. Also strange was discovering how much energy each system consumes: boiling a kettle caused the roar of the 4.8KW generator to rise to a screech.

So, with the skin of ‘civilisation’ torn back to reveal the cold, unforgiving and relentless reality beneath, I was left casting nervous glances towards the finite amount of gasoline I had disappearing, anxious it might run out before I had finished watching my programme.

So many of us now live entirely cocooned in the human virtuality, that it is almost impossible to see the underlying reality upon which we build our lives. Living in a house in the middle of nowhere, I would seem in a better position than many to glimpse that reality, yet it takes a storm for me to ‘really’ experience it – and what was my reaction? – a determined bid to reconnect, to force my way back into the cocoon…

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