Profiting together

So, in Aleppo, before the civil war, there was fourteen kilometres of covered souk.  There was a street of spice merchants, a street of carpet sellers, a street of silversmiths, and on and on, providing everything. They were presumably happy to be rubbing shoulders with their competitors.  Which seems bizarre to me.  This market structure was ancient and the stall holders were all pretty ancient too... they had been doing this for a long time.  They must have thought they were in the best place for business.  One spice merchant only provided a very small part of the overall demand for spices in Aleppo, the street as a whole catered for all of the local (?) demand.  As a co-op it worked;  each merchant able to cater for a certain number of clients.  Each person received just the attention they wanted, they could haggle each week with the same person to buy something they needed.

None of it is based upon scarcity, and a community supports itself.  

It's a balanced exchange to do with subsistence, not profit.  Balanced things are vulnerable.

It all falls apart when Tescos opens up outside the souk, buying in vast bulk at low low prices & undercutting the individual traders.  Or the president starts to drop barrel bombs on it.

In another part of Aleppo was a whole area dedicated to the making of spare parts for the very large number of pre 1948 American cars.  The city was full of these leviathan vehicles, stranded like glittering whales, after independence.  There was no trade agreement with the US.  All the parts were made in small open workshops in one area of the town.  There was also a particular sideline, the manufacture of jewelled wheel hubs and multi coloured lighting, mainly for massive kahki painted Buicks which were the taxis. Matt low key colour on the outside, totally mad light-show inside. Again all the 'rival' businesses were next to each other.

In the middle of Nairobi next to Kibera slum, is the noisiest place I have ever been.  Lots and lots (hundreds maybe) of open air workshops beating aluminium into cooking pots. Businesses choosing to be next door to the same business. 

Capitalism is based upon scarcity.  If there is too little of something to go round it appeals to the individual who can afford to pay for it, they remain an individual, and the profit increase creates more money for fewer people.

Aleppo and Kibera were not interested in individuals profiting.  Survival and subsistence were mutual supports.  When we can stop creating shortage to produce profit, then we stand the possibility of surviving.

Baffle 150117

Reinvention.  The prospect of reinventing myself is… knackering.  Why would I want to do that?  Because, it feels like I have become invisible… ‘feels like’ is important, hang onto it.  It feels like all the people who used to employ me have all gone on a long sabbatical taking my contact details with them.  They have retired, moved on, found they had to reinvent themselves too.  I am not sure if I was ever a young Turk, but I had a good go at it.  There doesn’t appear to have been an interregnum between that and transparency.  (On that: the best reason to get Amazon Prime on trial is to watch all of Transparent in one hit & straight after…cancel your trial – it is totally wonderful… the rest of APrime isn’t half so good… yet).  Like I had thought there would be a hiatus, a brief moment between acne and grey hair… that didn’t happen either.  A stream drying up doesn’t happen as you watch it, but all of a sudden: dust devils where there where mayflies.  It is difficult not to sound bitter, and I’m not… really;  baffled not bitter.  Baffled and beginning to understand the power & importance of the baffle.  Not knowing WTF is going on:  I do get it about Brexit, Trump and globalisation – it’s all about Certainty… more later.  This particular WTF is how… why… did the work stop coming? First off,  I asked it to.  I was in need of a break.  A rest.  A new breathe.  I wanted my work to change me.  Not some posse of young heartless producers, they didn’t decide not to employ me… how could they?  They never saw me, I am invisible to them.  Victim of ageism?  Probably.  My cranky left knee certainly is.  But… here’s the tricky bit.  No work becomes space, a gap to use, wiggle room plus.

So, what have I done with my gap? 

Built a kiln...

...  and a website.

And started a photographic project which seems to be growing in exponential directions… fphucknose where… but nowhere I’d expected.  I return to “I don’t know” again & again, & it is not a get out, oh no, it’s the way in. If I get lost?  What’s to loose?  I’m so fucking old I know that I can find a way, even when it’s foggy.  And it’s opposite of Certainty.  My father had a couple of simple phrases… he was an actor who was ordained a C of E priest.  He had a brilliant sense of humour, about most things.  I asked him once, ”what’s the opposite of compassion?”, he didn’t even break stride, “indifference” bounced straight back.  Very cool, that’s why he became a priest.  Ok, clever clogs, “what’s the opposite of faith?” (slam-dunk) “Certainty!!”.  Being this age at this moment, or, being me at this moment, I see scared and insecure folk being blamed for wrecking the NHS with non-emergencies blocking up A&E.  If the normal channels of uncertainty and inquiry, like “what do you think might be the reason for this pain in my arm?”, have dried up… like a dust devilled stream… you take your uncertainty to the certain people – paramedics, hospitals.  I have worked with paramedics, they are truly amazing, if I could be that sure about one single thing in my life… they know stuff.  They save lives… so of course they are the ones people turn to when they don’t know what’s wrong with them.  They used to take uncertainty and fear to all the boarded up, failed community resources… but they failed. 

Who else offers certainty?   Farage May Trump Brexit.  Good list! They all pretend to be certain of the truth, it’s bollocks.  The flip side of certainty is Faith.  Difficult word, Faith, tricky idea, but at core it’s not a thing, it’s a process.  Faith demands questioning everything every moment, and then asking it again.  It is a process of living, based upon investigating everything that comes at you.  It demands engagement, intimacy and commitment.  It demands compassion and kindness and it can create meaning.

The science of knowing is called epistemology (I’m impressed too), it is the studying of how knowing stuff works and why it is works.  About how decisions & choices are made.

How are choices made?  They are made in the Gap… a character enters a scene:  they bring with them a set of expectations and wants.  The heart of drama is conflict, so expectations and wants are always thwarted, and the character has to choose what to do next.  This is the Gap, the space that opens up between expectation and reality, between fantasy and truth.  And the Gap is where we all live, all the time, choosing what to do next.  It is a difficult place to live, constantly ‘in the moment’, constantly awake.  Avoidence strategies develop, the ability to live ‘as if’ certain circumstances were true, as if we were rich, beautiful, loveable, acne free, anything but normal, ordinary, always here in this moment.

‘Feels like’:  there are all those visceral sensations my body creates in response to any number of stimulae.  The conclusion I am coming to is that my body has a reaction to fear, desire, rage, excitement… etc etc… except that the physical reaction is pretty much the same whatever is going on, a bottomless pit of gaping, yawning oof! somewhere near my belly button.  It’s not that discriminating, as sensations go, and yet I go to enormous lengths to either supress or satisfy this need, granting detailed diagnosis.  For years it was cigarettes, that has gone thank god, but the sensations stick around.  It would be handy if it was a range of perceptive, useful reactions.  It’s not.  It’s a pretty standard, across-the-board single reaction to most stuff that happens.  A kind of ‘flump-flumpety-flump’ feeling, somewhere low down.  So, the lesson is not to invest it with enormous perceptivity or accuracy – it’s just that reaction thing-that-happens when other stuff happens.  Deal with it.  The other way lies addiction:  becoming addicted to suppressing or indulging feelings.  After a point the feelings become the crutch, the reason, the quest.  What can I do that creates ‘that’ feeling? And then the next sensation is ‘feeling’ invisible and worthless if the feelings can’t be conjured up.  And you‘re in… slam dunkeroo… dealing with addiction as tight to your skin as a leapordskin onesie. It seems impossible to share, discuss, put out there.  So, round it goes.  Invisibility sanctions pushing feelings to higher extremes, because you can do anything when no one sees you. Numbness & insubstantialness hold hands.  All for a feeling.

Two days running last week I ran into two contemporary directors.  Both men I had shared open plan offices with.  Both men I respect and felt threatened by in the past.  Both of them, independently of each other, told me how invisible they felt they had become.  It’s sad we are all the same predicament, and a MASSIVE relief.  Sharing invisibility.

Intimate observations - for Larry

Order > disorder > reorder = three phases of life… not my idea, Richard Rohr's meditations / insights, arrive in my inbox every morning. A Christian contemplative, writing in America.  He is a  thinker who is using his faith and the structure and language of Christian thought to investigate.  With time I have found it easier to accept his choice of words, and allowed myself to hear what he is saying.  Finding a way, a path, maybe a reordering of my assumptions.

Order > disorder > reorder is his idea.  The infant needs order to survive, growing up creates disorder, and now reordering is the opportunity to see the chaos for what it is, and to see its opposite.  With time and awareness most things cease to be exclusive, and become inclusive. Everything can be here.  Reordering demands attention, thought, contemplation even.  What little I know of contemplation itis not harder thinking, it may even be thinking less and listening more.  Time is important too.  Whatever way it works, it is at core an intimacy with self.

Exploring reorder I have taken the decision to go into workplaces and photograph my way to an understandingof what's there.  On the principle of not judging but accepting, and finding my own place within it, or not.

Taking pictures in Price's Bakery, through a cold winter night, allowed me an opportunity to shoot my way into an intimacy with a particular work place.  Jeff, Jim and Adrian work almost ceaselessly to produce the loaves for the next day.  Each night is hard, each night they repeat the journey of the night before.  Like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill.  It is skilful & focussed work.

I had no idea what I would see when I started that night.  By six the following morning I could no longer focus, or find another image - and they still had 4 hours to work.  

I have thought a lot about this space and the pictures I took in it.  It took a couple of days to get the huge number of images (458 shots) down to the thirty odd pictures I like.  The edit became a contemplation, not thinking thinking.  In the edit I learnt more about what I had been doing than I was aware of at the time.  And how my relationship with the three men changed through the night.  I was privileged that they let me into their world so readily, even offering me a job at the end of it… which I still may take them up on.  Conversation was sparse (maybe initially because I was there) because there was a lot to do, and it had to be finished on time.  No need to discuss very much, they have done this all before.  There are no seats, no one sits, even for snack breaks.  But it was not a mindless production line.  The relationship is with the living dough, handled and cajoled into shapes and formers, kneaded and pulled by hand,  raising agents and the heat of the ovens, create a transformative and organic space.  And the work seems shared evenly between them, each moving to help complete tasks.  Although the equipment is modern, t's an ancient space.  I could see how by the end of a traditional solid fuel firing the community would then arrive to use the still hot ovens to cook their food, which still happens in many places in the world.  In Syria the bakeries are easy targets for government bombs.  This place and the work is at the heart of many communities.  A hot heart, beating through a cold night. Craft and skill making delicious food, by hand, they have not been replaced by computers.

When I decided to leave, Jeff rushed out and came back with a piping hot fruit loaf.  But the whole night had been a gift they had given me: access to their work place and work.  The hot loaf steamed in the cold air walking home.  Only with hindsight,  do I see how close they let me get.  I will go back for more pictures, and for more bread.  My work drew me into that space, and the camera gave me access.  All four of us were doing something we had, in our own ways, done hundreds or thousands of times before.

I entered a stranger and left a friend.  I brought a need into a space that did not need me, and we found a way to accommodate both the making of the bread and the taking of the pictures.

Bread being life, life being repetitive, reordering the chaos is an endless task.  Things constantly rise up and fall apart, and fall into conflict.  In small, intimate ways developing the skill of seeing, and ability to allow form to arise out of formlessness, the making of bread or a picture sequence is similar.  What follows is understanding of connection and intimacy despite difference.  And all is consumed and repeated, falling again into chaos, offering the opportunity to gettit.  

"When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself" Shunryu Suzuki →

There is a t'ai qi principle of 70% which is about turning up again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, until it's done.  It is fantastically easy to get caught up in catastrophisation: creating a crises that I have to save the day by solving: it is addictive stuff, high highs and black-dog pits.  And the more caught up in it I get the the duller the next hit.  The duller the hit the greater the effort... etc etc.  Spiral time.  70% demands attention, connection and completion, and breathing.  The first rude joke my father told me has stayed with me, and now still surprises me with its dodgy zen quality:  On a hillside, an old bull and a young bull look down at a herd of cows.  The young bull, eyes crossed with excitement, "Let's run down and fuck one!" The old bull replies, "Let's walk down and fuck 'em all".  I was some sort of early teen, we were on a walk, on a hillside as it happens, in Dorset, I'm sure I laughed not really getting it. He had not said "fuck" in that man-to-man way, to me before.  I didn't mind not getting it - I had been included in a man thing.  So, it stuck.  My first encounter with 70%.  

At school I was never a sprinter,  I thought I was fat, and maybe I was a bit.  Second row prop and  I was a good swimmer, and for a brief moment (probably one gala) swam for the county.  Competitiveness never really got me, I realise now I mind too much about loosing.  Becoming a tv director was counter-intuitive,  I'm not happily competitive and my brain freezes over when I am rushed.  Early days and stunt men would completely banjax me with, "no, no, it's like this: take the swing in the wide, get the emotion in the mid, and take the hit on the reverse angle... guv"  i knew I had to respond in kind, and quickly, so would completely bollocks it by putting myself in a ludicrously complicated situation that I didn't have time to shoot my way out of.  One of the main joys of 70% is having time to think and to talk, and do it well.

Yesterday we had a truly satisfying bonfire.  Started well, it burnt everything we put on it.  It's still going now, outside in the dark, 36 hours later.  And this morning Andrew and Larry came to help me repair the track to Jo's house, which is deeply pot-holed.  I had ordered 2 tons of scalpings, enough for the whole winter, I thought.  The first half ton went into one pot-hole, and I realised we were going to run out very quickly.  After about an hour we were finished, several holes filled, many more as deep as ever.  Over coffee and Eccles cakes I apologised for not having ordered more scalpings. Andrew just said "70%!" - we had filled the ones we filled pretty well.  We had learnt a lot about the bottomlessness of pot-holes.  We were still speaking to each other, and able to plan what happened next.  And each of us had time to do a next thing before lunch.  Repairing a road may not be as glamorous as making an episode of Casualty, but I will come back tomorrow, or whenever the next few tons get delivered, and continue to enjoy doing it.  It's not a chore.  And I had time to finish other work I had started yesterday, including bringing the bonfire back to life.  The reminders of my father, and of reading Shunryu Suzuki talking about a good bonfire, arose in the 30 unused %.

Watching the sunset while discussing fear, Trump and pot-holes with the smoking heap (I have always had a very intimate relationship with bonfires, again down to my dad, a pyromaniac of epic vision) I realised that in two days I had achieved more than I had expected.  70% creating more from less.j

"As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualise it.  As soon as you intellectualise something, it is no longer what you saw" Shunryu Suzuki