Unreal City, unreal times - The Kilburn Manifesto and T.S Elliot

.....we stopped in the colonnade,

10And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

The Waste Land.

I am sitting in a coffee shop, just off Trafalgar Square, the sun streams in through the skylights, as i look around me i imagine i am in some continental capital having just arrived, enjoying the sun, not a care in the world, sitting with other carefree denizens of the city. Snapping away, comparing images...

I have been reading and re-reading The Waste Land by T. S. Elliot. And as i read it and listen to it spoken, it strikes me with a shock that we are in the same place that Elliot found himself reflecting on, in the years after 1918.

A bomb has detonated, and we are in that split second before everything is blasted apart. Like scenes from the film Inception, the fabric around us is suspended in mid air between one state and another. it all looks the same but it isn't. Capitalism, is frozen in free-fall. And we stand looking at the damage, taking pictures. 

... Son of Man you cannot say or guess,

for you know only a heap of Broken Images"

More than ever, we don't know, we cannot guess, but we see and feel the break, and we don't know what images to believe in anymore... scrabbling around for answers...

I recently read a superb analysis of how we got here, how we got to this point. it is called After Neo Liberalism: Analysing the Present' and is part of something called The Kilburn Manifesto: It is something we all should read and reflect on.. You can find it here: 

And if you want to read one man's cultural response to crisis read The Wasteland, and reflect on the many and varied refrences to an 'Unreal City'.. That Square Mile in London which is stuck in mid air, exploded apart, and yet frozen in that moment.. yet to fall to the ground. 

 After all Elliot should know. He was once a Bank Clerk.... 

St Peters's Rome.. Marble, Marble everywhere, but no redemption?

St Peters Basilica, Rome. Feeling pulverised into submission by Aesthetic excess. Marble made to look like skin, bronze, wood, folds of cloth... So much Gilt..

As I type, my back has had enough and my brain cannot take anymore. I have been here before, and there is only so much glory one can imbibe at one sitting, and that is before you start contemplating all the recent traumas of the Roman Catholic church. All that Guilt...

I stopped believing a long time ago, so i am detached, but only Semi-detached, like having one little toe still dipped in the Holy Water (once a Catholic..why does the thought of Chester Swimming baths come to mind?; diseases passed around?? urgh..)..

Looking again at all this carved pomposity, all this 'stuff'.. i am overwhelmed a) by the sheer bombast and unshakable hard-as-marble faith on display; b) by the thousands of people who still come here simply to pray, and not just gawp in awed silence, and c) by the energy, passion and devotion dedicated to an idea. God.

What an idea - All this, a beautiful testament to a power beyond us.. these astonishing feats of aesthetic wonderment. But much of this it seems to me is designed to cow you into submission.. to cow us into genuflection before the idea of something beyond our own humanity, beyond ourselves, greater than ourselves... ultimately sitting in judgement over ourselves. All that imposed Guilt.. From the moment you walk into Confession at the age of 6 or 7 years old.

Don't get me wrong, Catholicism has taught me much about the world, about what is good about the world, about how good we can be. (I will never forget those Priests, who have shaped me in good ways, or the faith that bore me through my younger days).

But it seems to me that like many of our institutions we have been used to live by / with, the Church has been found wanting, exposed as weak, corrupt, self serving - too eager to cover up it's own behaviour, than behave in truly Christian ways. An institution, to borrow a horrible phrase from a recent convert Tony Blair: Not fit for Purpose.

and that is immense in it's implications. Where do we go now?

Because looking at all this Carved Marble, we have not come very far, since we looked out at the lightning and thunderstorms from our dank caves and decided we didn't like being alone and had better invent something bigger we could blame / placate, worship. And lets be honest, it is an invention, something WE thought up. God was dead the moment we had to make him/her up.

but we are still looking... everywhere perhaps but the one place we should be looking. Redemption inside, not out here amongst all this marble. And Guilt.

Two Tribes - 17th April 2013

I have been in Therapy now for nearly a year.

Life moves so quickly these days, blink and you miss it.

Margaret Thatchers funeral today. All my anger has abated, it was almost an incidental news item. So many words spoken about her since her death was announced, her legacy, her divisive nature, her battles, her philosophies, her enemies. Two tribes.

For me, aged 50 now, the Thatcher past seems an ancient land, forgotten memories which have returned to me today.

Growing up in the shadow of the very real threat of a new cold war, which could heat up at any moment - unreal and absurdist... - (famously when Reagan was asked to test sound levels for a radio broadcast he decided to announce he had 'outlawed Russia forever' and would begin bombing in 5 minutes - a funny aside which went viral before we knew what 'going viral' meant). Two tribes.

Industrial strife nightly on the news bulletins (fixed times - three channels only); pitched battles between workers and the Police who often taunted strikers waving their overtime pay in their faces. Truncheon charges, mounted Police, like some terrible throwback to the Peterloo Massacre. There were two tribes.

The intolerance of any dissenting voices especially from the left. The rise of the extreme right wing Tabloid press, trumpeting the Tory governments agenda - such as the bribing of the working class by huge public sell-offs of Utilities we already owned and which we always thought would sit on the Monopoly board - immutable we thought. How naive we were.

There were two tribes. And they were at war.

And now we live in a society which is infinitely worse because of her legacy, because we no longer have tribes (which at least hinted at shared beliefs), but now we are all individuals, who have been bludgeoned into distrusting the old tribes, and who live their lives according to a philosophy of entitled individual empowerment, and the selfish pursuit of 'success' measured out not in happiness or contentment, but in purchased goods and access to the latest 'anything'.

Thatcher was wrong, Yes right now there is a society, a very fractured 'society', filled with very fractured people.

I have been in Therapy for a year now, and that process is about finding your voice. We should all be finding our voices.