Burning The Books

Dialogue with Maria Pattison (part 2)

On possibility and failure..

M: So The Art of Possibility is by Benjamin Zander who has ten practices, for those who want to work within the realm of possibility..one was from the position of always having an ‘A”, you are already an A star pupil, all you have to work out is how you got there.

A: Hm, but what happens if you don’t get there? How does failure figure, within these things, I love all that stuff, really…. but when everything crashed around us, I thought, afterwards, I wasn’t so well equipped to deal with massive failure and loss! And allowing for that being all right and part of the journey so I am really interested in how that figures. You are talking about aspirations aren’t you I guess…

M:Yes, I mean I used to have this inner mantra, which was ‘failure is not an option’

A: That’s quite testosterone isn’t it? And lacking in compassion maybe? I have been a lot like that in my life… and now I think the real learning has happened when things didn’t work out in the way I had expected..

M: Yes, I mean I didn’t expect my marriage to not last.

A: Yes..it’s a bit like how we don’t talk about death when we are young, we are not given the option to consider and confront it, which is being addressed now, it’s that shadow side, you know, which has its place. I don’t want it to dominate but it has its place, trying to look at it without too much fear or judgement, I mean the Tibetan Buddhists are mindful of it every day, as just part of life ..

M: And we all have our shadow personalities and we have to accept them otherwise they will get really strong, the more society says or the more we tell ourselves ‘that’s not me, I don’t want that bit’ , the more power we give it. And we have to just know we are flawed, not perfect and that’s ok. That’s what working with these kids (The Pantry) does as well, that you can see that despite some of the behaviours …that they are really lovely. And if we can see that in other people, we can move a bit better towards seeing it in ourselves (…)

A: I think that’s one thing around roles and the value of interdisciplinarity now , is that, if you think about the old definition of artists… it’s like when I send my email I have on my signature, ‘artist, mother human being’, and that’s really significant for me, people have commented on that because actually It’s really important to be…in your human, primarily when you are making, well any kind of work…and breaking down that preconception of how you feel that you- should- be -acting -in this- situation (as an artist) and what people expect you to do. I think I told you that when I did that Liverpool intervention, I didn’t say, I was an artist, I learnt from this one man, who said ‘you’re doing a wonderful public service’, so I the started saying ‘I’m performing a public service for one day only’ and I think people were more receptive. I mean some people enquired further and got what it was, but it wasn’t necessarily helpful to have that label (of artist) and I wasn’t that attached to it either, at that stage in the project.

M: Yes I guess the label of artist can often separate and segregate whereas public servant opens up an interest and an enquiry.

Extracts over the next week from a dialogue with Maria Pattison, theatre practitioner and director, co-director of The Pantry, currently completing an MA in Ethical Leadership at Kings College London. I was curious to ask her about a number of themes relevant to the project; forgiveness, failure, generosity, service and servant leadership. All dialogues were recorded on a car journey back from a Pantry residency weekend we ran together in Suffolk.

On generosity and hormones

Maria:‘So, The Moral Molecule by Paul Zak, is research into how our levels of oxytocin – which is considered mainly a female hormone – rise or lower in relationship to our ability to be generous. And the feel-good factor is related to generosity, so there are lots of contexts in which scientists measure this….so what research shows is that high levels of testosterone counteract oxytocin, so when peoples oxytocin levels are low, they lose touch with being able to think in another persons shoes or being able to act generously or with compassion.

So oxytocin could be considered to be saying the main drive of a spiritual experience as well. So high levels of oxytocin mean we will be more generous in our attitudes towards people, we will give them more, we will donate more money to charity etc., and when we other hormones come into play, stress or anxiety that takes down oxytocin, so that’s what we were saying – you can’t be generous when you are really stressed because it creates a kind of conflict.

When human beings come together and they form little communities, it raises oxytocin, so that’s why places like the market, literally a marketplace, where people are coming together, they are not just coming together to buy their bread, they are actually coming together to have human interaction. So when there are societies that have these places of interaction you get a more generous and more open hearted communal society, and that’s where market forces and compassion come together, So you know we are getting to a stage in society where we are buying online and not doing that and we are not having these conversations. So what I have been thinking about is, that this research in Africa where tribal warfare is still really high, showed that if you put something into the community like an Internet café where people have to come together, then you start to bring more oxytocin into the society. So you start to create a sense of communal well-being through a tangential force. And I was thinking about this with bread, because you know one of the ways people are investing in economic growth in Africa is by setting up bread co-operatives and that’s all very well, but you will still get mainly women clustering in those places and what is needed is – because it’s the testosterone that’s the problem – communal ways of bringing people with high levels of testosterone together.

In terms of artist interventions and my own, the mere fact that people come together creates the right environment and that’s all that is necessary so what you do when you are there is almost immaterial. So that takes away for me in terms of creating workshops a whole level of anxiety because the underlying needs are being addressed in the way we are coming together (in The Pantry) the way we have the conversations…whether its cooking, art, filmmaking, drama, actually its the quality of the conversations

A: And also conversation is a practice…dialogue is a practice

M: Yes dialogue is a practice.