“It’s Easter Day tomorrow, that’s the day that Jesus woke up … I think I’ll pray, I’d better find a prayer mat”. At 6 years old, my daughter has an unusually well developed sense of religious conviction … even if she does get a little confused over the traditional forms.
We decided to send both our children to a multi-cultural school, where 50% of the kids are from an Islamic background, though not all from the same brand of Islam. My son has emerged with a strong sense of his individuality and his potential contribution to a global community. My daughter seems to be entrenching herself into the minority ethos – a born subversive.
It’s all to do with a sense of identity, who you feel you belong with, and who you want to keep away from, what you love, what you hate. And that’s something I’m really wrestling with at the moment, which is the essence of this blog.
My identity as a would-be subversive artist was forged at military school (my father suffered from a form of paranoia in which he fantasised he was a soldier. In reality he was a small-time provincial lawyer). A small group of us organised ourselves into an anarchist collective, which involved the production of volumes of incomprehensible surrealist poetry, and subversive ‘actions’ such as leaving our roaches in the headmaster’s private library, or spraying the school armoury (!) with a CND logo.
The realisation that this brand of art was unlikely to turn a profit, coupled with the lack of a family fortune, led me to study sciences at university, where I endured the company of spotty, pale, anorak-clad scientific reductionists for 3 years, after which I escaped into psychology for my doctorate.
Since then I’ve flirted with the communities of academic psychologists, psychotherapists, art therapists, poets, painters, musicians, visual artists, teachers, environmentalists, IT professionals, and logicians.
Spiritually, I feel closest to the psychotherapists and art therapists and their goal of personal emancipation; in terms of what I enjoy, I feel closest to the visual artists and the musicians; The IT professionals generate the best remuneration; the embattled environmental movement are the most accepting of any support they can get; the teachers expect nothing but total life commitment; the logicians … well, they’re just different.
After 8 years, I’m heartily sick of the IT business, and I now have the time to look at other opportunities … with other identities. I’ve become a specialist in ritual, but I’m wary of entering the murky world of the ritualists and religious studies academics; I’ve got some teaching work in art therapy departments, but to pursue that too deeply is to give up all hope of being taken seriously as an artist; I’ve marketed my services to consumers of ‘alternative wedding ceremonies’, but with zero success; my latest exhibition might open some doors in the visual arts world, but am I really prepared to slaughter my dependable cash-cow to return to such a precarious financial future?
