Before Hindsight

My partner has entered a state of emotional and physical collapse. Her joints have swelled up, and she’s spent most of her waking hours this week weeping. Is this the inevitable result of 4 years as a school counsellor?

It’s one thing to listen to an adult recounting how they were sexually abused at 13, it’s another to listen to a 13 year old who expects to go home that evening and be sexually abused … while the social services, health and police flail around impotently, failing to protect anybody.

A big problem is the school is in a well-off area. People, especially teachers and parents, expect wealth will protect the kids – and conversely that poverty leaves them vulnerable. The reality is often the opposite – all close family out at work, paying for School Fees, for 90% of their waking lives, children are at the mercy of whoever steps in to fill the childcare gap. Unemployed parents may be depressed, lonely, isolated, desperate … but they are there, with their children. Poor kids know how to survive on the streets. Wealthy kids are lost in the scary world beyond their Private School gates.

I am constantly amazed at the consensus which denies the struggle and suffering lying just beneath the surface of life. The celebrity culture, the glitz and the glamour, the stuff that’s drawing us in, telling us it’s OK, and the worst thing that could happen is our laundry doesn’t come out whiter than white.

One of my many doses of reality came when I took on a role at my childrens’ after school club. I gradually became aware of children who would come for a while, then disappear, then reappear some months later … and who weren’t connected with the school.

These were the stateless children – whose parents had come to the UK to take refuge from political upheaval, but whose pleas for asylum had been denied by the Home Office. At the airport, about to be forced aboard the deportation plane, the Foreign Office had intervened – “You can’t get on that aeroplane, your lives are in danger at your destination”. Merciful. But then a whole family finds itself stateless: with no rights. No rights of residency, work, benefits, housing, not even the right to be heard in court. Non-people.

My (ultimately futile) concern over the stateless families of Oxford consumed my spare time for a year, until I was accused of racism by someone with an axe to grind. It all seemed ridiculous, having a “but you said that” – “No I didn’t, I said this.” slanging match in the face of what we were trying to deal with. Anyway, Ofsted intervened and closed down the club, as the children were no longer protected.

I’m often tempted simply to make issue-based art about all these aspects of life. But what I’m more fascinated by is this: What is it that enables people to survive, even thrive, in these circumstances? What is it that draws people into these depths of other peoples’ darkness? And what is it that keeps us (relatively) sane?

Richard Dawkins and his Selfish Gene isn’t enough; nor is Damien Hirst’s pickled lamb “Skipping round the fields yesterday, makes you think dunnit?”. No, it doesn’t. It probably gives the privileged and complacent bourgeoisie the illusion that they’re thinking for a few minutes, but it doesn’t really get to the grit, the despair, the fear, panic, anguish and desolation that life is really built from.

In the extremes, people either turn to the sacred, or abandon it. That’s one of the things that fascinates me about the sacred – When the axe falls, some can’t live without it, others can’t live with it.

I can’t live without it.

This evening, though, I’m back on the bottle, erasing the daily fact that I’m suddenly responsible for this whole chabang – kids, meals, laundry, shopping, school runs, business with the added bonus of an incapacitated adult. I’ll get used to it soon, and money will just continue to happen – if the sick leave runs out, we’ll easily survive on less; it’s a privilege to have something to lose.

I am currently breathing one huge sigh of relief. Both birthday parties, the Aquaphonics pool event, and the notorious April 20^th gig, are all done. The pool event, delayed by a week and preceded by the impromptu car park gig, was unexpectedly successful – 6 musicians turned up, and 20 audience, which was beyond expectations.

We’ve come away with 100 still photos, half of them taken underwater by my son, and 8 hours of video, which we have to edit down to 15 minutes for Helen’s degree presentation.

The sound was almost diastrous. On my little 4 track mixer the record light flashes when it’s recording, so assumed this was the same on our digital WAV recorder … but no, red light flashing means “paused”, so we only got about 6 minutes of soundtrack that way. Never mind, the video cameras were recording sound too, and the quality is OK. Got some underwater sound, too.

The day itself was mad, up at dawn organising flowers and balloons for my Mum’s party. Had the brainwave of recycling the flowers as gifts for musicians at the gig. Then off to the party venue to arrange tables, chairs, flowers, balloons. Found a CD player there containing a CD “Favourite love songs from the war”, which made the ideal background. Then greeting family arriving from around the country, making teas and coffees, then the food arrived and was eaten, followed by a long stint of washing up. As soon as we had locked up the pavilion and waved everybody off, leapt into the van to collect video equipment and Helen, and then directly to set up for the gig.

My son (who swam around with a snorkel and underwater camera for 2 hours), and I were totally knacked the next day, and just lolled about in the garden while my partner made us tea and hot chocolate! Such a treasure. Then Monday came and I realised I had just 36 hours to prepare for a gig whose content was still a mystery. Cobbled together 3 experimental pieces; Monday evening managed to recruit a musician from the Improvisers to assist, and then Tuesday rehearsing.

Some parts of the gig were very successful, especially the poetry, and some parts prove a point – that the techniques I experimented with will probably work well in a ritual context.

What next? A little less intensity. I’ve resumed the computer work, facing up to the customers I’ve been neglecting, and apologising profusely. They’re all charities, though, very forgiving, many of them support the environmental and social aspects of my creative work, and a couple even came along to the gigs.

I’m fascinated by the images coming out of Aquaphonics. This is a totally new way for me to make images, and many of them are breathtakingly beautiful. Now I’ve taken my ritual work into the realm of conceptual art, I need to spend some time thinking the other way – how can I take these techniques, especially the imaging, into my ritual work?

Unravelling all the video and sound, and posting the choice bits on the net, is a part time project for years to come … I daren’t devote myself wholly to the task, or I wouldn’t get any new work done for years!

I also want to return to the pyrotechnics. The ACE bid for research funding wasn’t successful, mainly due to the small audiences involved. But I’m not about to increase my audience size – if you’re getting your audience to participate in dance and movement in the half darkness with pyrotechnics around, there are clear health and safety reasons to keep numbers down.

And there’s the improvised mountaineering idea too … still mulling it over, waiting for the key idea that will pull everything together. But I’m going to have a bit of a rest, first – and tomorrow, I’m going to be attending someone else’s project for a change. It’ll be nice to watch someone else sweating in the limelight for a bit.

Disaster!

We turned up to the venue of Aquaphonics at 6.00 pm as arranged to start setting up. We’d got the projectors set up, and were just testing the cameras when the manager came in and said: “Look, You can’t do this, because you haven’t booked the venue”. No apologies, or “There must have been some terrible mistake”, or “Look, this is really awkward, but …”.

We spent some time arguing about whether we had booked the venue or not, but it soon became clear that this was immaterial. The fact of the matter was this: The building was going to be locked at 7.30, and the only way around this would be to wrestle the manager and staff to the floor and tie them up. There are sound arguments as to why this would not be a good career move, and the manager is a pretty chunky bloke.

In the end, we made the best of it we could. I turned my camper van into a little tea & coffee booth and handed out the chocolates we’d bought as “thank you” gifts to the would-be audience and musicians who turned up.

This seemed to put everyone in a very up-beat mood, and it wasn’t long before the musicians were setting up in the car park, and the audience settling down in my camping chairs.

We had a bit of a wild and whacky time, “car park jazz” from the musicians, with the live artists in the audience putting on an improvised movement show. We all had a good laugh and a great time … and it seems that outdoor improvisation has come to me, in advance of me coming to it!

The venue is definitely, Definitely, DEFINITELY booked for Saturday coming (17^th April) … please let me know if you’re coming as numbers are limited. Also, please bring swimming cozzie, as there’ll be a free-for-all swim at the end …

Today, my son is 13, four days ago my Mum was 80, and I’m smack in the middle of the organisation of both birthday parties.

This is where my parenting enters uncharted waters. For the first 13 years life was pretty good – my parents were kind, responsible people, though I became exasperated with their snobbery and formality; and although school involved steering a course between sadistic paedophiles and achievement-obsessed failed adults, I had a close bunch of friends and enjoyed many of the sports and lessons.

I wasn’t your average boy. I had no interest in cars or football. My main pastimes were propagating my collection of cacti, solving maths puzzles, making origami models, and to my father’s undying dismay, French knitting. By 13 I had also carved out a niche in the playground as the kid who listened to other kids’ problems.

The biggest barrier to communication with my Mum remains the question over whether a child’s personality should affect decisions regarding their education. She still believes the military education I was suddenly consigned to at 13 is best, and that my inability to reconcile myself to it betrays a lack of determination. I still believe a path of creative subversion was probably the best anyone could wrest from that desperate situation.

It was a sudden, and premature, home-leaving. From 13, I hated my parents for arranging this impossible ordeal, and, of course, hated my school. Respite was to be found in the bar at Reading station on the 12-times-a-year 200 mile journey between the two.

3 long years of liminal existence, of non-belonging and self-doubt, before I realised that the whole world was bonkers, and that I, and a small group of anarchist friends, were the only sane people within it. Thirty years later, the only small adjustment I would make to this world view is that I, too, am completely bonkers.

Thus it is that I can bring myself to celebrate my Mum’s 80^th birthday, as a fellow bonkers traveller in a world of bonkers travellers.

Another thing I gained from my schooling was a love of the outdoors. Initially as a refuge from the general bonkers-ness, later for the sheer joy, beauty and euphoria of the wilderness.

Over Easter I took time away from work and creative exploits to indulge this passion with my son. He is a keen climber already, and though I endeavour to follow wherever he goes, it is often with shaking legs and a sickening sense of imminent destruction. We managed Pen-Y-Ghent and Inglebrough in Yorkshire, and Blencathra in Cumbria, though the previously stated aim of Scafell Pike eluded us due to gales and snow.

We also took a look down Gaping Gill in the Dales, where a small river disappears down a rather large hole. In my 20s I was a keen pot-holer and had wriggled and writhed my way through the sinuous and serpentine tunnels that lead to the bottom of this underground cascade. My son, after gazing into the darkness of the Gill announced: “I’m going to make it my life’s ambition to go to the bottom of that hole …”.

I guess it’s a human thing … The Peruvian Incas sacrificed their children at the tops of mountains, or threw them down “bottomless pits” in an effort to come to terms with the extraordinary feelings such places arouse within us. And yet there is nobody else in my family history (in living memory, at least), who either went to the top of a mountain, or to the bottom of a cave.

The weekend has begun to clarify my vague intentions to bring improvised performance to mountains … and maybe also extend it to caves. It must come back to the spiritual and the ritual – the Tibetans, Amerindians, Incas and other mountain peoples who worshipped their fierce landscapes. I feel more research coming on: who else is doing this, what’s the anthropology, how does the psychology fit in? But first, I think I’ll indulge myself in a little more pure experimental, euphoric, intuitive, expressive, fervent and passionate human bonkers-ness on hillsides … and, like the ridges of the mountains, just see where it goes.