Burning The Books

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.



‘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….