Burning The Books

‘When ritual is embedded in a story that people believe, they act accordingly, playing out the roles the story assigns to them and responding to the reality the story establishes’ (Sacred Economics, Eisenstein)

Searching for material on the connection between sin and debt and drawn once more to using public ritual in my work, with a link to the idea of money as an unreality, and the concept around the story around debt as a dark fairytale ready for the flames of an imaginary hell – I found the perfect book. Margaret Atwood’s “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of wealth’, where she masterfully explores ‘debt as a human construct – thus as an imaginative construct- and how this construct mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear’. Debt as sin, debt as a figment of our collective imagination, debt as inherent in human patterning, debt as plot, the shadow side and a host of references to the myths through human history that draw apon these threads. Perfect.

A number of other books have been published recently including the brilliant Charles Eisensteins ‘Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition’, which I am just reading now, and before that ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ by David Graeber (of Occupy Wall Street, talking here online). From these there is much to underpin the themes of the project and that at the time in 2011 were being activated in my own life.

And now for the Debtors Anonymous section of the blog, where, by request, I get my own story out of the way so we can move onto broader issues but also to show you the emotional footnotes of a page of the Book of Debts that was burned in Liverpool.

Back then, I had gotten into the position of using of credit as an income supplement, not only to support our own unsustainable lifestyle as a growing family in an unaffordable house, but to support others close to me, in particular my own brother. At a crucial moment following our mother’s death he had loaned us money to cover a deferred ‘education’ loan that actually turned out to be a high -interest bank loan+PPI agreement (before Lloyds were called to account and Debt Charities were up and running) and they started to collect – at the rate of £1000 a month. This almost as much money as we were earning at the time but, not knowing our rights we thought we had not choice but to pay it. We were also still living beyond our means -on credit – when my brother arrived for the collection of the debt owed a year earlier than agreed, having rapidly spent up all his inheritance and in need of a place to stay and financial support while he ‘sold’ his flat (which was later repossessed for lack of payments, taking with it a large amount of equity which had constituted his payback and future egg-nest). He then pushed the limits of what we were able to pay back so far that we literally went broke. And I allowed this to happen.

Six months later he moved to France without keeping his agreement to take over the loans I had signed on, (though there were were a few initial attempts..) leaving me/us in legal possession of a number of his debts to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds, including a rather expensive car that he was driving, seriously in arrears on payments and in my name. To cut it short, the compound interest on his debts + our own led to a disastrous spiral of events which ended up stripping us of most of what we owned materially, destroying any access to credit and creating huge amounts of anxiety, shame (doh, I did WHAT?!) intermittent depression and a sense of betrayal, vulnerability and disbelief.

But there is a thin silver lining to every dark threatening cloud.



‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors…’ Lords Prayer (early version)

I still had one Jesus Army flyer left. Light-headed by now from the appropriateness of what I was encountering to my own personal story, I moved down through the backstreets and into another small square, where there was a mini salsa festival going on. I danced for a while among the crowd – aware of dancing as one of my favourite free gifts ever. Then I popped into a pub with my flyer in hand, where a crowd of relatively tanked up and meaty football fans intently watching a match swung round to look at me and my Jesus Army flyer. That morning I had seen a crowd of Liverpool fans on the station platform at Lewes where I live, and I asked them who had won the match. ‘Game was on Wednesday, love, they’re probably still down there robbing!” They asked me if I was a time traveller and did I want a drink? If not, I had better get back in my tardis, then. Ok. I left, sheepishly deciding against trying to gift the flyer to them as a goal seemed on the verge of being scored..

I found a café inside a mall, at this point really wishing the whole thing could be over. I was tired. In the table in front of me was a plastic stand-up menu holder. The size of the holder was the exact size of the Jesus Army flyer, so I slipped it in on top of the menu, leaving it was as a ‘gift’ for someone who wouldn’t know it. All done, I thought.

Heading back towards the Bluecoat, I came across a very angry-sounding fundamentalist Christian on a megaphone challenging anyone who would listen to repent.. Behind him, a young Philippino guy stood with the PA and ‘Repent Now!’ poster, incongruently beaming at me as if welcoming me to Disneyland.

Two young guys started a conversation with the megaphone guy, challenging him on just about everything he had to say. I felt compelled to join in. They were arguing him about the concept of sin, with which I personally have a huge problem. In the face of some of the other encounters I had had, especially outside Northern Rock and the Jesus Army earlier, it seemed relevant, if futile to engage in the current discussion as to why he thought that a child who had been raped and hadn’t repented their sins would go to hell but those who had raped her and had repented wouldn’t. But kind of in keeping with what was coming up. We stood there for about 20 mins arguing vociferously but playfully with him, then I swung round, and there stood a stray member of the Jesus Army, beaming at me. She told me she had noticed me earlier in the procession and wanted to talk to me about her community, which was a lot more forgiving than this man’s version of her faith. I had all kinds of thoughts spinning in my head around debt, sin, repentance, guilt and shame… and I poured some of these out, conceding that her version of the Christian faith seemed bit softer than the megaphone mans, as I really found the idea of being born with sin and burned in hell if I didn’t repent just beyond anything I could accept these days. She smiled sweetly at me, telling me that yes the JA are into love and joy and community, but that the Bible DOES say that the wages of sin ARE death, and would I like to come to one of their gatherings? I declined with a smile and said I had a 5pm deadline, hastily accepting her card and heading into the Bluecoat. I still have the card to this day, so not all gifts were circulated!. I think I was at that point saturated but had been given more than enough clues as to the direction of the work:

Gift, debt, sin, guilt, absolution, payback, here were the headlines of the work I knew I had to now develop over the next month.



It is said that our children and grandchildren will be paying out these bailout and stimulus debts, but they could also simply be declared into non-existence. They are only as real as the story we agree on that contains them. Our grandchildren will pay them only if the story, the system of meanings, that defines those debts still exists. ‘ (Sacred economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition’, Charles Eisenstein)

I watched as the Jesus Army paper plane caught a breeze and landed…right in front of the offices of Northern Rock, just behind me. This took my breath away. We were in the process of negociating a ‘short sale’ of our family home with them (where your property is in negative equity and the sale will mean you owe the mortgage company money afterwards, in our case £30k). It had been a hellish year financially, the pinnacle of which had been realizing that we had to either short sell or walk away from our house – our absolute (but illusory) symbol of security – and had ended up in a repossession proceeding that summer. We were later able to short sale it rather than have it go to auction, limiting the total debt owed, but the dealings with NR to enable this to happen had been katfka-esque to say the least. However, I had at that point started to feel relief at the prospect of NOT being the joint owner of an asset mainly owned by a bank which itself was in meltdown and moved through the terror and shame of losing something that had been bought partly with money gifted to me through my mother’s inheritance.

The turning point had been sitting in the county court and having what amounted to a philosophical conversation with the judge and the NR lawyer -who were really quite helpful and just human beings in fact – about why 85% of people don’t turn up for repossession hearings when in most cases they could be helped to find solutions to staying in their homes. Shame was brought up as the main reason. I could understand this and something in me began to get both detached and interested in the subject. The notion of failure attached to not being able to afford the roof over our heads and this being public was one we had been painfully immersed in. Somehow we had moved through this and realized that we weren’t our house, or our broken credit rating, and that the most liberating thing would be to get rid of both. And that it was all a kind of absurd game, a story, the plotline of which we had to start to rewrite.

So, emboldened by my previous encounters, I was ready to go and have some kind of playful discussion in the Northern Rock offices right there when I noticed they were closed as it was the weekend. Shame. So I wrote them a letter, thanking them for the opportunity they had given me to liberate myself from my deep fear of debt, authority and institutional norms around finance and to move onto new horizons. For good measure, I enclosed 20p, as a symbolic gift in recognition of the financial contract with them that we had broken, and because I wanted to keep the gift going. I finished the letter with ‘Our contract with you will soon be at an end’ .Which isn’t technically true, as we are still paying them a small amount towards the shortfall owed, which, like most debts these days owed by millions, based on notional number trails on a computer, will never fully be repaid….



‘A circulation of gifts nourishes those parts of our spirit that are not entirely personal , parts that derive from nature, the group, the race or the Gods’ (Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and The Artist in the Modern World’)

Off I went onto the streets, with a single lottery ticket to give away, a totally out of character behavior which made me smile. I decided that I would walk into the centre of the main precinct – Liverpool One – sit myself down and give it to the first person whose gaze I met. I sat on one of the central seating areas and looked up into the eyes of a young woman selling the Big Issue. I promptly offered her the ticket as a gift. She explained that she had recently arrived from Rumania with 2 children and we had a chat about how it was to land in Liverpool. Even after assuring her I didn’t want anything in return, she refused to accept the ticket but thanked me warmly for offering it to her. I then offered to buy the Big Issue in exchange for her accepting the ticket. She immediately accepted, provided that we split the proceeds if she won any money, scratched off the numbers and giggled when there wasn’t a match, shrugging her shoulders and wandering off. The story that would have unfolded if it had been a match would have been an interesting one…

I sat and rolled up a cigarette. Now I had a Big Issue to give away and wondered what the next exchange might be. I looked up to see a huge procession of people moving towards me. It was the Jesus Army, with purple flags, beaming faces, singing Jesus versions of Beatles and football (‘We love you Jesus, we do…” )songs . I knew I was in Liverpool. Someone from the procession was giving out flyers and handed me two. Instinctively I offered my Big Issue to them in return. We began a conversation and I decided to join the Jesus Army for half an hour and see where it took me, flyer-gift in hand. The disarming thing was there were people on both sides flanking the procession and joining in with the songs, like they were old time musical hits. It was a totally feel-good experience at that moment and I launched wholeheartedly into the centre of the procession, enjoying my disguise.

A woman with 3 children started speaking to me, asking me how I had found Jesus. I explained I was just a guest and was technically a Muslim, but my spiritual practice stood outside of mainstream religion. She looked puzzled then lit up and explained how she had converted from Islam to Christianity and now lived in the Jesus Army community full time. Although it was interesting to hear about what she felt was missing from one faith that the other provided for her, after a while it became slightly uncomfortable as I realized it was a preliminary conversion conversation and I felt the urge to run away. I said politely said goodbye and sat down on a bench, folding one of my fliers into a paper aeroplane and lighting another cigarette.



The main appeal of Present In Public for me was how timely it was, given where I was at in my own life and practice and the wholly integrated and refreshing way in which Tim proposed to work with us to enable us to devise individual works within the context of a group process. This happened over 8 weeks through a series of gift-and-exchange-based tasks and interventions which included us all spending 24 hours together in a ‘research and exchange process’ between the Bluecoat, the streets of Liverpool and his house in Anfield, weekly pairings of artists for the artistic equivalent of co-counseling (my view!), an anonymous blog in which we were all expected to choose another artist’s project and write on it, gifting our perspective while the work was still being formed, and many more playful moments including singing each other to sleep, receiving small gifts from Tim which could be a call to action and writing each other letters as a send-off before the final performance day arrived.

One of our first tasks when we arrived for session one was to take to the streets and indoor spaces of Liverpool on a busy Saturday afternoon with a set of optional research exercises, such as ‘make someone an offer they can’t refuse’, ‘offer something to someone that would be appropriate in a different space but isn’t appropriate where you are’ or ‘be still in the space until something is given to you’. I’ve worked with gift and exchange exercises to create work before, but never ‘naked’, i.e., with no build-up /assistance/materials/reflection time, as in The Gifts (2010), It’s what draws me to live art practice – the light-footed, in-the-moment nature of it.

With a time limit of 3 hours, I decided to go out onto the streets, with the intention to literally be led by my feet and these research exercises foremost in my head… feeling immediately out of my comfort zone and at that time still a smoker, I took out my tobacco and realized I had run out of papers. I went into the local supermarket to get some and at the counter I noticed the lottery ticket stand staring up at me, as if inviting me to action. I never play the lottery, I’m kind of against it in principle. I looked up at the cashier, bought some rizlas, asked for a lottery ticket and found myself offering her the ticket as a gift. She looked at me with a mixture of alarm and bemusement, politely but playfully refusing. ‘But what if it’s a winner?’ I insisted. Her line manager hovered behind her, curtly informing me that employees were not allowed to accept gifts. Of course. The cashier winked at me and joked that if it was a winning ticket, she’d gladly meet me after her shift to split the proceeds and spend them. It became clear that I had to keep the gift moving though and that was what shaped my encounters over the following hours.