Burning The Books

‘Because it creates gratitude or obligation, to willingly receive a gift is itself a form of generosity, it says: ‘I am willing to owe you one. Or in a more sophisticated gift culture, it says: ‘I am willing to be in the debt of the community’ (Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein)

I have just finally finished reading Sacred Economics. In the final chapters CE talks a lot about gift, the starting point from which I then came to approach this subject of debt, its shadow side. His reframing of debt – social debt – within communities as an essential operator to making them work in the fullest sense possible brings up so many relevant points to this project and my own experience that was it source.

This notion of being able to receive gifts fully -in the form of money or other help for survival at our most confronting moments as a family when it all crashed for us – when in a state of material powerlessness, without fear of being in obligation, is something that we have had to learn intensively over the last few years. One sentence resonated particularly with me:

As in infancy, periods of helplessness reconnect us to the principle of the gift’

I had the growing impression through the book that its author had been through some kind of personal crisis which had transformed his thinking, and this does in fact get revealed in the closing chapters. Like us, he and his family had to go through acute material loss and the generosity of those around them to survive. It feels to me that this experience -as well as his reaction as human being to the ecological and social change in a broader sense – has on some deep level informed, the lucidity and breadth of his perspective. I am sure many will totally take issue with his ideas, but to me the overall synthesis of his and others ideas into a roadmap forward is fresh and potentially life-changing. I identified with this drive I felt he had, that comes when one has nothing left to lose and arises from a deeper need to to use what one has left – in my case my own practice – and put it at the service of others. The notion of art as servitude is also something touched apon in that book and that I have been thinking about in relation to how I operate in relation to the Book of Debts – servant, guardian, scribe, conduit?

Gift and service are of course closely interlinked and there are many questions around how we define them both depending on our value system.

When I wake up feeling like I am using one of my creative ‘gifts’ fully in my everyday life, when in flows, it feels like a form of true service. Service to who? To myself? To future audiences /public? To art? To the idea, as an entity In itself? To God/The Universe/Everything?

However both the ideas in the book and the notion of service – and how this kind of art sits within them – are rooted in the idea of the interconnectedness of all things, the non-hierachical nature of the way human beings can truly relate, and in this sense do both gift and service become a kind of currency that just makes society work better ? Within that way of looking at the world, debt has the capacity to operate as a form of gratitude – confronting to consider and at odds with /eclipsed by so many of the visible ways debt seems to be operating in society that gives it a dark and often violent name, I thought.

Then I opened up my next book ‘Debt : The First 5000 years’ by David Graeber’ and first off is the Oxford English Dictionary definition:

Debt

Noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2. The state of owing money. 3. A feeling of gratitude for a favour or service.

This is something I also want to look at more closely as I widen the definition of debts that may allow for a broader range of entries into the Book…



So, now, in this present research process, I remember how much of a Pandora’s box it can be. Opening up ideas and possibilities then opens up even more ideas and possibilities. And time starts to shrink with all there is to explore. Exciting though. One of the essential mediating factors and at the heart of this project is the network of relationships around it – like a human satellite- that give me both a mirror to reflect back and a staff to take me forward (can’t resist those biblical metaphors).

Some of them are very direct and clear-cut relationships, such as working my producer Andrew Mitchelson, who has been a brilliant support since last summer and helped me shape the narrative of the project and pull together our GFA as well as just having sheer belief that this something worth taking out wide and far. I also have the extremely helpful mentoring support of Ju Row Farr at Blast Theory, who I talk with monthly and gives me perspective and lines of questioning, to help draw the lines of the path I am following. Now getting on board are Simon and Jason from The Swarm, who are going to work with us to create the digital ‘persona’ of Burning the Books, to open up the project to online audiences and to help devise a space, a map for the public to be drawn into and navigate the process of connecting with the project. There are also the galleries, venues and communities we are going to work with for this R+D period and beyond (much more on that later).

Moving outwards, I also now have a circle of interested supporters (like investors, but with attention, not money) who have agreed to gift me their perspective on the project, at least once over the next year. Some of them will be contributors to the book directly at an early stage, one-to-one through the response to a set of questions around debts /stories they are considering submitting that include feedback on what it was like to answer those questions. This will help us refine what the most sensitive and appropriate process of entering into a relationship with the book – and myself – might be, both on and offline.

One of the questions from today with Ju that came up was over the language used within the conceptual framework of the project. Am I co-opting the language of the financial sector, asking for people to categorise their debts into financial, emotional, ecological, metaphysical etc? It will be easy to allow people to submit numbers towards a final total figure of debt collected by the book, but how do we measure what we owe, if what we owe or are owed is non- monetary? Is this contingent on measuring what we give in the first place? And how could that be represented in this project, as part of a ledger of debts and credits? What language should be used for this?

Eisenstein talks of this in his book Sacred Economics, considering the relationship between money and/as measure ; ‘the immeasurable was excluded from science – ‘consign it to the flames’ Hume said- and from economics as well. Thus is has come to pass that standard of living has diverged from quality of life. The former is a quantifiable standard: the latter is not’ and yet ‘of all the things that human beings make and do for each other, it is the unquantifiable ones that contribute most to human happiness’. Discuss!

It is this place, the place of the immeasurable, which could be the most challenging aspect of this project and also the most interesting. From the feedback I have been given so far and my own reflections on this, it is much more relevant to allow space for others to consider their debts holistically, whether in the form of money and /or, objects, relationships, love, etc. It is through referencing but then transgressing the format of a list of figures on paper, with their reductionist power, which only tell one, measurable, aspect of any given story, that the power of the bigger story of the book can be released.

‘It is not without reason that our financial elites have been called a priesthood. Donning ceremonial garb, speaking an arcane language, wielding mysterious inscriptions, they can with a mere word or a mere stroke of a pen, cause fortunes and nations to rise and fall’ (Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein)

To shortcut back to the Present in Public intervention in Liverpool, it evolved into this project, Burning the Books. The other artists interventions and their processes, with which this project is interconnected (thankyou to all of them and their generous contribution to my own process!) are very much worth checking out and are detailed here.

I spent that November day on the streets of the Liverpool One, approaching members of the public as a kind of confessor-cum-scribe, in a long black velvet coat – large sackcloth book in-hand and ‘collected debts’ – financial, emotional and spiritual -from whoever would give them to me.

This role evolved through reading Margaret Atwood’s consideration in Payback of the ancient concept that ‘there is an underlying balancing principle in the universe, according to which we should act’ and her journey into the mythologies of the afterlife to meet the figures there whose role it was to restore ancient balances. In particular in ancient Egypt, ‘Thoth, moon-god ..the god of time…the god of measurements and numbers and astronomy and engineering skills, and …a supernatural scribe or clerk’ and in Christianity ‘Angel Gabriel..the ‘recording angel’, the one credited with keeping God’s ledger book up to date’ . There is also a reference in my role to my pre-Islamic Iranian roots which I will go into later.

(Having just googled this to get the url I notice there was a documentary released last year inspired by that book. And here is Atwood’s Payback lecture I mentioned before on Youtube)

Liverpool on a Saturday afternoon was actually the perfect place to start this project – the stereotype of scousers being up a good chat about anything WAS true for me that day!.

I learnt within half an hour to preface my approach to people with ‘I’m not asking you for money and I’m not part of any religious organisation’. Neither did I say I was an artist or tell my own story unless pressed. This often meant a more authentic conversation as many people seemed more at ease knowing what my agenda was, though some didn’t care, they were just disarmed by the idea. My favourite line to use became that I was performing a free public service for one day only which they were invited to make use of.

Each person who would talk to me was invited to – anonymously – gift me information to add to the book, by telling me directly of a debt they owed or were owed, to whom and whether they were or would ever be ready or able to pay it back / forgive it. I then scribed this information into the book. In almost every case they opted to have their contribution recited publicly before burning.

In total I collected £3,285,103, 870.00 in unpaid debt that day, and an extraordinarily diverse range of personal debts and their stories – from small amounts of money owed to councils, credit card companies, unexpressed love and apologies owed between couples and to deceased spouses, to over £3 billion pounds in taxes owed by Philip Green submitted by Occupy Liverpool protestors outside Top Shop (I think it’s ok to disclose this don’t you) to souls owed to Jesus by some of those street Christians I mentioned in my earlier recounting of my research exercise.

At the end of the day, as it got dark, we staged a ceremony in the courtyard of the Bluecoat, where I read out a short address on the balance of debt and credit, followed by a listing of the contents of the book, inviting the audience to collaborate in a process of playful absolution and ending in the physical torching of the book and the imaginary annihilation of everything owed.

The recital and burning ceremony was filmed by the curator Tim and can be viewed here on youtube.





What about the cultural and socio-economic context we are living in, can’t I just have blamed that in my recounting of my story here?. Or, as many thinkers/writers including Atwood and Eisenstein have recently explored, blame the primal human programming from our hunter-gatherer days that has a huge proportion of us ‘grab it now’ and believe we can grow sufficiently to pay it later, inflated by credit opportunities and an entire global economy built on this very premise?

Yes it has a large part to play for sure and there will be more referencing of that wider socio-political story here, though Strike Debt, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, has available all the information we need to know about the mechanics of the debt industry and their shady operating tactics, their own Debt resistance manual, kit and an extraordinary social initiative launched last November – Rolling Jubilee – through which debt, a cheap commodity these days, is being collectively bought up and written off by an open collective of contributors in an act of simultaneous critique and liberation.

But the external story we have all been living inside is not the whole story.

Eisenstein brings this up in Sacred Economics, (yes I know I am quoting it a lot, but it’s just so hitting the spot in relation to what is coming up here. I’ve also just noticed you can read it online for free/by donation). He says, like the Sufi’s I love and many have said before in different ways:

‘on a personal level, the deepest possible revolution we can enact is a revolution in our sense of self, in our identity” (Sacred Economics, Eisenstein)

An obvious statement for some, but for others a confronting one when there is so much out there to blame and to bring to account at this time. I see it as a mirror between the two worlds, so without, as within, and all that. Inseparable.

And nowhere to hide.

My public work has been focused on setting up live frameworks that invite people to consider and contribute to narratives rooted in broad life themes and reflect as individuals on their personal relationship to and narratives of their lived experience of those themes.

This project is a continuation of that approach, but with less ‘stuff’ around it, (existing commission brief, single venue, large amount of generated installation material, consideration of its after-life etc).

My own experience, shared here, which was the first entry into the Liverpool edition of the Book, is what initiated the content for this concept, which stemmed from a broader interest in the darker side of gift. Initially I did not intend to disclose my own related experience in detail, for a project I saw as ‘stripped down’ and focused on the ‘other’. But as well as those others involved in the current stage of the project – who I will talk about later once we are up to date – many I have talked to or gave me contributions on that day in Liverpool – asked me what my personal interest and motivation was in the project. So just as I have done in the past – where I have laid the initiating narrative from my own life out as a bridge for other to cross the projects I have been involved in – so here it has been detailed and all vulnerabilities laid open. And it has been very hard to write. Sometimes it felt like loss of credit rating was equivalent to loss of credibility rating. And then I realized that is simply the pathology of debt at work with its chief companions of guilt, shame and pride playing their part. And this is also the language of the work, of the Book itself.

What people who read this blog make of this approach and their relationship to the Book if they choose to contribute to it when it opens its pages again, is really up to them. I will be its servant, there to collect, discuss, recite and lovingly destroy.



‘..Let the poor man look deep into generosity

Let bread see a hungry man.

Let kindling behold a spark from the flint

An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits,

When they are held up to each other,

That’s when the real making begins

That’s what art and crafting are…

(Childhood Friends, Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks)

I now see, with time, that the catalyst that the extraordinary situation with my brother, featuring as the catalyst in the unfolding of our own story of the ‘loss’ of our previous way of living – was, from a broader perspective – a huge gift.

Why? Firstly, the cold shower of being on a debt management plan (a temporary fix until/unless we grow considerably, financially) – halted a really stressful, nasty series of aggressive harassments by creditors on a daily basis over a 6 month period. Which was a huge relief. It also started the process of cold turkey off from our perceived need to consume and support unsustainably and gave us the information we needed to know what rights we had to resist the amount of debt being asked of us above and beyond surviving as a family. It was and is a kind of fast which has borne inner fruit and created strengths in other areas, just after almost breaking me in two. Almost broken, mainly because my relationship with my closest sibling (and almost at one point, my marriage) had been consumed alongside my credit-rating, house, pride and so-called security. I saw the spectre of my mother and felt shame every time I thought about it for a very long time afterwards.

Secondly, having realized too late I had effectively acted out my own late mothers behavior in entering into a financially co-dependent relationship with my brother, I had to face up to how little I had learned up to the point of signing those agreements for him about setting boundaries and needing to rescue men. Agreements which far exceeded what we owed and therefore constituted an extreme form of emotionally-loaded interest, to someone who was living in our house and whose idiosyncratic spending habits and mental well-being I was as concerned about as my own at that point. It’s not appropriate to comment on why I think he did what he did in any great detail for obvious reasons. Learning how to say no had always made me feel uncomfortable, now I notice from this how I am more able to draw boundaries with greater fluency and without the guilt -not only with money but in other areas- because I ask and know what the limits are more clearly.

Lastly, it has necessitated the learning on how to receive from others with lessening discomfort. Without a number of close friends in our community stepping in in the aftermath of losing our house and a year of insufficiently paid work to cover our living costs, (but too much to receive sufficient working tax credit to create a cushion), two young kids and mounting debts, we could very well have ended up on the streets. But we live in a community brimming full of what Eisenstein and others have called social capital – and overcoming my ego’s need to be in control and to be the one who provides, hosts, treats and says yes to whatever I or others fancy -in order to embrace a more collective source of life support- was perhaps the deepest lesson to learn and the most uncomfortable. Things are now coming into balance.

So, although I’m still deeply sad at the impact the story I have told has had on the relationship with my closest living sibling and I no longer blame him, (though I do hold him accountable for his part in it), it has led to a complete re-evaluation of values and attitudes around both money and relationships that has been essential to my emotional survival as a human being! And once again, had the effect of changing the direction of the work I make.