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Prague spring, 2011

  • Posted on May 9, 2012 at 1:35 pm

In spring 2011, a burial was unearthed, of a male interred as a female, and was promptly billed by the press as ‘WTF? First Gay Caveman!’. In all likelihood the person was transgendered, accepted, even revered as in so many ancestral cultures.

The 1968 Prague Spring was a period of rapid political liberalisation . . .

Five thousand years, layering
this on that, of change on chance
to be dug, this day, these

crouched bones face – respected
male bones placed, inflected
by pots, not knives – east

away from warrior west, in the
suburbs of Prague-to-be: a woman
who is not a man, for

five thousand years, in which
we have learned to write with
fast fingers, blog and fear.

One grave, one loved person, and
five thousand years – from clay tablet
to wired world – in a waste of words.

Not gay. No cave. No vestments.
Just acceptance lost this spring,
in Prague, pressed, and buried.

2012 © Andie Davidson

Published in Realisations.

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Enough?

  • Posted on May 8, 2012 at 8:53 am

It’s a bank holiday. At some time in the past the banks must have worked so much harder than the rest of us that they deserved an extra day, so since 1871, for so many days per year, the banks decided it was OK not to make money. Of course they do now, even on bank holidays, because a 24 hour global culture doesn’t require their undivided attention to keep going.

But a strike day? A day off sick? Whoa! Now that’s different. We lose money. And economists are great at calculating the cost to the country of a snowy day. Everything is costed on the basis of unstoppable money-making. The cost to the economy of only working 35 hours a week is immense. And the cost of sleeping . . .

We have no acceptable limit, only the balance of forces between increasing GDP and the limits to health. Who sets this agenda?

And today is another day of births and deaths. Like every day, people will die too soon, too young. Never too old. And that nebulous non-community called scientists will predict that we need not die below the age of 150, now we know the role epigenetics plays in DNA degradation. Once we know why cells die off without replacement, why chromosomal telomeres shorten and bodies age, why not put it right? I suppose we should be thinking ecologically too, and sorting out our pets to live as long as ourselves, breeding butterflies that live many years instead of days. Why not, if we can? Don’t get me wrong, losing a friend or loved one brings grief, but it is the way the circle of life works on planet Earth, and it does avoid exponential population growth and the ethics of deciding when people simply have to die to save cost and space.

We have no acceptable limit, only the balance of forces between love of life and the limits to endurance. Who sets this agenda?

And it isn’t a bank holiday in China or India, where today too many people are earning too little for comfort, working too hard for their health, and living shorter lives than we are, making goods at prices we can’t afford to make them for. How much advertising of FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) is based on ‘value’ (ie, price without quality being too poor)? When is cheap, cheap enough? What is the smallest margin, the least a worker can be paid, for us to have more than we need? Again, is there an agreed limit, or just a stretching out to the boundaries of tolerance and awareness?

We have no acceptable limit, only the balance of forces between greed and someone else who has no choice. Who sets this agenda?

Are we all really seeking to maximise and minimise everything? A longest and healthiest life, with as many consumer goods and individual rights as can be squeezed out? Wringing the last drop of fossil fuels from the ground, reaching as near as possible those tipping points of survival? Are we ever tall enough, ever the right size and shape, educated enough, wealthy enough, intelligent enough, busy enough, working hard enough? And who is setting these agendas? Why is this bank holiday a waste of money and lost revenue, and yet tomorrow will not be a waste of health and relaxation with others?

People in various European countries are getting very edgy about austerity. In order to live in prosperous economies, these people know some of them (not all) must actually suffer – not just do with a bit less. We can be terribly bad about managing our own expectations and even worse about sharing equally according to need. And we are not very good at calculating the cost to us of not recognising our limits. The agenda setters? We all are. We accept the guff that advertisers pour over us every day. We rise to it and demand the best and latest at the cheapest and as much as we can. Automatic greed that has become an expectation steps aside from ethical living and becomes a right.

What if. What if we stopped believing these needs. What if there was no ‘ultimate’ mobile phone, entertainment device, vehicle etc.? What if we stopped pursuing and started appreciating a phone (for example) that just makes calls and started asking directions, interacting with people, getting there more slowly, feeling safe and assisted when bits of life break down? Why is nothing ever good enough?

It was an interesting thought just over a year ago, when I took voluntary redundancy, realising that I was being offered enough money to step aside for a year and work out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I earned next to nothing in all that time, I used the car less, walked more, read and learned to write creatively again. And I found out, finally, what I should have known about myself long ago, but was too busy, too embroiled with work and life, to work out. And at last I feel a lot more ready to live with what I have, travel less far, enjoy small things, and especially people and friends, and even die young. Why? Because there is more fulfilment in simply being true to myself than there was in my old 45 hour week in an office. The rest is up to me, to be useful, to be creative, and to take responsibility for the things that matter most. (Is there an app for that?)

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Arty, stuck and artistic

  • Posted on May 6, 2012 at 3:23 pm

Original art by Aaron Holmes

Art, and reality, are beyond mere inspiration.

Brighton Festival in May includes the rich diversity of a month of Open Houses, when local artists and crafters somehow manage to lose furniture, personal treasures and general clutter into spare (or not) rooms, and present some wonderful collections of original art, jewelery, photography, sculpture and other crafts in more clear space than I seem to have. And there are so many of them! I could never dream of touring all that is on offer, and yes, it is tiring as well as inspiring. You can get art overload, however much you appreciate it. And I really like being able to talk with the artists. I’m always intrigued as to who is making a living, who is ticking along in spare time, and how they find their lives as artists. But also I like talking about what inspires them, why they do what they do, and how it drives them. I like understanding the link between inspiration and skill, deliberation and accident, and reflect on the similarity with wordsmithing.

I’ve often said, ‘put me in a studio with lots of gear and just leave me, and I’d think of something new to create every day’. I just feel such enormous creative drive, but I also know I would never survive as an artist. I see all this brilliant work in the Open Houses, the product of training and years of experience, and there is so much, it has too few places to go. I see stacks of canvasses that will go nowhere, and yes, a few successful artists who are going somehwere.

I’d like to contrast two artists we visited yesterday.

The first worked entirely by inspiration and accident. He was surrounded by canvases that had been there quite a long time, accumulating on a grand scale, leaving very little living space. There were some very happy accidents of light, I have to say, but I might have been tempted to treat the canvases as I would a photograph, and severely crop them! He reminded me of inspirational poets who will not rework their lines lest they become somehow humanised instead of divine! In fact he deliberately blanked all thought out as he worked, and so, as far as I could see, he wasn’t really learning at all. Someone asked a price for a smaller example of the canvases he wasn’t selling, and it was so inflated I knew it would still be there if I came back next year. But he was happy, so who am I to say?

The second artist was young, and similarly untrained. His house was impeccable, the presentation was professional, the lighting perfect and his orderly canvasses were amazing. They too were full of accidents, but deliberate – or at least guided – ones. He worked in layers, with some idea of how the end result might turn out. A large canvas, he said, took up to six weeks, working flat, very wet and using an airbrush to blow the paint around. His prices were similar to the first artist, but he was living from it, selling enough, and was every bit as inspired – but learning, constantly moving on. His theme last year was completely different, next will be different again. You can gaze into his paintings, just as abstract as the first artist, but perfectly controlled, and really get lost. Being in a position of both not earning and not having wall space, there was no way we could afford one of these magnificent scapes. But no way either I could walk out empty handed, so parting with more money than I should afford, comparing prices with a wig, a therapy session, a hairdresser bill, I bought my wife a small, mounted original – because its value for future reflection and enjoyment was worth more than the money in the bank.

We don’t really buy art, for all the above reasons, but we have pieces by three artists now, and in each case, following studio conversations with the artists. The pictures remind me of those exchanges and those studios, as much as being beautiful objects in their own right.

The first artist yesterday, I felt was really stuck. He thought he was free by emptying his mind and ‘letting it happen’, but in fact he looked very encumbered by the unsaleable products. The second was really working hard, thinking about everything he was doing, and it gave him his freedom. The reason he had far fewer canvasses (and so much more light and space) was that each piece had much more value, and so he produced less and sold more.

So I’m back to writing (it takes less space behind the sofa too, and dries remarkably quickly), and dreaming of freedom of expression with control and deliberation. We make our own reality (yes, I like to go along with that) and learning by watching and appreciating what comes out, makes it much more valuable. This year’s trip around Open Houses was my first revealing my authentic personal canvas, far less stuck, still arty and with much more artistic value than last year.

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Missing persons

  • Posted on April 29, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Maybe we were all surprised at the sudden re-emergence of the Madeleine McCann story. Not because she’s forgotten, but because it seemed no-one knew what else to do. Then 192 missed leads were identified, a photo of how she would look today, and then a clear statement from the Portuguese police that there was no reason to reopen the case.

The case. Madeleine is a case now.

This morning I listened to another mother whose son, then aged 15, disappeared from a railway platform on his way home from school over 30 years ago. It reminded me of another programme on missing persons a week earlier, outlining all the problems of not being able to deal with a death and grieve properly. Even the slightest, tiniest hope, causes agonies over and again, because there is no closure. How could anyone give up on a loved one just because of the passing of time? Death, even a reason or possible explanation, is better than living with the eternal possibility of restoration.

These are not files. These are not cases. These are people, and there are maybe a quarter of a million people go missing each year. 99 per cent are resolved within a year, which means every year over 2,000 remain missing, with an unsurprising bulge in the data in late-teens people, and another around mid-life. (Source: Missing Persons Bureau)

But it was the link between this kind of non-bereavement and the many stories that keep coming up among trans people (and LGB too) that struck me today. Real people who finally own up to themselves, their innnate birth identity and a lifetime of disorientation, and achieve what I describe as authentication, only to be rejected by those closest to them. Terrible stories of parents disowning children, partners disowning the other, and yes, described as bereavement in both directions.

I had a weekend of considering bereavement and missing persons.

For I too am a bereaver by losing my old male identity. Yes, I have ‘killed off’ the persona formerly presented as me. I didn’t exactly ask permission, because in the end it could not be negotiated. It wasn’t like an argument over who has the car, or whether to watch football or domestic makeovers, or whether I like a coat that you don’t. It was about my fundamental authenticity. At one level it is all about change (and therefore loss) whilst at another level there is no change at all. Inside, as so many of us always say, there is ‘me’, full of all the same capacities, emotions, intentions and aspirations – and love.

And so there is a missing person. Put me in a file, call me a case, let me be un-dead, and I shall still be pleading from inside that thin dark space: ‘I am here!’.

And who put me there really? I did. Why?

I’m in that missing persons file because it’s the only place where I am truly me, where I can clothe my inner with respectability. And as much as I call, write or strive to make contact, the only thing that is wanted back is the inauthentic outer that was taken away. Yes, some missing persons have a reason to disappear, and can find no other way out. Find me as I really am, by all means, but don’t live in expectation of the old persona’s return.

I want to be found. Not the old outer persona – if that is what is wanted, then it isn’t me you want at all. You want something that I am not, more than the someone that I am. And the someone isn’t a missing person at all.

No-one chooses to place themselves in a position of becoming bereaved either. But I have done that too. It hasn’t happened to me, it is a direct consequence of finding out the truth about myself and acting on it. My mental picture is that of a dedicated worker who has been a model employee and a real contributor, helpful and achieving all through a long career. Then HR turns up with your original, yellowed, 30-year old application form and says: ‘You never had the required degree did you? I’m afraid you aren’t qualified for this job so I’m terminating your employment. Clear your desk and go.’ Yes: I am saying that HR has a choice – policy or value, whereas you can never go back a lifetime and get the qualification you never had. Was the career performance no qualification at all?

I am not bitter. After all I have found myself, and there can’t be a much bigger goal in life than that. But I am disappointed about that qualification which would entitle me to continued partnership. And these are just words after all, that I will hear back to me and must let go.

 

My happy note in the midst of this was finally releasing the agony and achieving my first public concert looking more glamorous than I have ever before as a trumpet player. I can’t express how deep that ran in me, even if I can’t share it quite as I would like.

Write lightly,
yours truly,
dear diary.

(Who remembers where that comes from? Ideal for a blog. And it comes from Threshhold of a Dream. How appropriate.)

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Living in the present

  • Posted on April 23, 2012 at 11:57 pm

There is no yesterday: yesterday does not exist.
There is no tomorrow: tomorrow does not exist.
For our yesterdays are merely our interpretations,
and our tomorrows are but our imaginings.

There is only now. There is only this.

This is how I worked it out some time ago. I guess it’s Buddhist at heart. I still believe it’s true. This is the nature of time, of existence, of life. But like you, I fear the future for what it might take away, and grieve the past as past futures – so badly imagined and now so critically interpreted.

And then I sit and meditate, and all my awareness is that I am whole, that I am safe, that I am present. And that unmistakeably, I am woman. And I look around now and I see men of all kinds busy being men, and I think: how could I ever have believed I was really one of those? As I came home today I had a sense of overwhelming gratitude that being a man was not my future, that all my tomorrows are as a woman.

Which all sounds terribly obsessed with gender, and not at all to do with the here and now. In a previous blog I spoke of the plea that ‘I am still here!’, meaning that inside I have not changed, that this now is the same as all my past nows in terms of how I am expressed. Maybe. I struggle for illustrations that make this make sense to other people. It’s like putting glasses on for the first time and realising what normal is supposed to feel like: the same eyes, but seeing clearly, the same you looking out, and everyone else calling you four-eyes. Who? Me?

Something in me is crying out to be loved for who I am, not for what I appear to be, or have appeared to be.

Does my present re-interpret my past, and change it?

I hold out my hand, and say: this is my hand, the same hand, that tells the story of my life, as you – as I – have known it. It has been wondered at, it has been functional, it has known drains and delicacy, it has destroyed and it has created. It has helped and it has healed. It has enacted at all times for me.

And this is my heart, the same heart that first loved, that felt, that feels, that hopes. Unchanged, all its hopes and expressions have been from the same source as they are today. Only today I know that if my heart has gender at all, it is not the heart of a man. In every present moment now past, I should have known, but my interpretation of the past is that I did not know. Un-named, ungendered, this female heart of mine, like my hand, did so much. As the source of so much, it was unquestioned, and was nothing but loved and accepted in return. Every interpretation, every imagining, created a present that was fitting, that was good.

But this heart of mine is now named! I am so completely filled with the joy of that recognition, that my present is alive and lit as never before, despite all the other anxious matters of employment, earning, returning to economic viability, and finding my social place again. But there go my imaginings … Will I be able to find fulfilling work, with the now inherent disadvantages of not just being 55, and female, but trans? Be present! Tomorrow does not exist!

And there go my interpretations too. Have I only been loved because I was living under false pretences? My hand was the hand of a woman?! My heart was a female heart?! If that had been known, would either have had consent? Does my present invalidate all my past, reinterpreting it?

And there goes my present … There is only now – and now, I am a woman in some inappropriate places. What my hand did yesterday it may not do today. All that came from my heart yesterday may be an inappropriate expression of its aspirations for tomorrow.

I am woman. There is only now. Yesterday does not exist. Tomorrow does not exist. There is only this, and in this alone is where all love lies – and where it has only ever lain. I must trust, I must be present. In truth, nothing else actually exists at all.

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