The Political Possibilities of Gentleness in Folklore and Ethnology

This is the transcribed text of a talk that I gave to an audience of folklorists in Estonia in March 2007 at a conference at the University of Tartu.

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Why don't I just leave all those people alone?
Why don't I just stay at home and read?
Why don't I just let all that stuff go? I've already got too much stuff in my life; too many books, too many things; why don't I just let it all go?
Why do I have to remember everything? Why do I have to write down everything other people remember? Why do I have to even bother talking to people?

Is my desire to collect greater than my desire to respect?

Is my desire to record greater than my ability to just be present with people?

Is my desire to write greater than my desire to listen?

Is my desire for knowledge greater than my desire for wisdom?

An Irish fiddler, Paddy Cronin, was being interviewed at a summer school called the Willy Clancy Summer School a number of years ago, and he was asked what he thought about young people playing traditional music and he said something like, 'they're not playing traditional music, they're collecting tunes'.

Jean Ritchie was up for a National Heritage Award in the United States and as she was accepting the reward she was asked something to the tune of, would she like to be remembered as a singer, and she said, no, she wouldn't like to be remembered as a singer, she would like to be remembered as a person who sings.

I was working with some students this year on a folklore course and a number of them came from an Irish language speaking district of Donegal, an area that had been the focus of a lot of collecting work in the nineteenth century, and I introduced them to the philosophies of a number of the people who had been doing the collecting. I introduced them to the idea that a number of these people considered people from their own communities as 'resources for tradition' as 'raw materials for the nation' and my students got very angry. They thought that quite a number of people at that time in the nineteenth century might have got very angry if they had known that that is how these people thought about them and their lives, and about what was important to them.

I was reading an article recently by Ríonach Uí Ógáin, a folklorist based in Dublin, and she's been doing a lot of work on the field diaries of Seamus Ennis, and she recently published a book, a magnificent book, which is mainly in the Irish language, the diaries of Seamus Ennis. But she has this very nice article published in Bealoideas, the Irish folklore journal, about the relationship between Seamus Ennis and Colm Ó Caodháin, who was a person who lived in Conemara who Seamus identified as someone with whom he could work to collect songs and stories and various other things from. But there's one line in the article, and in the diaries of Seamus Ennis, which sits with me and makes me very sad. Seamus Ennis had a wonderful relationship with this man by all accounts. By the accounts of the diary he was a great friend of his. He more or less lived with him on many occasions and was invited by Colm to live with him semi-permanently at one point. But there's one point at the end of his diaries in relation to Colm where he says, 'Bhí mé réidh leis'. 'I was finished with him.' He'd done all the collecting that needed to be done; it was time to move on. 'Bhí mé réidh leis'.

The ethnomusicologist Kofi Agawu has a line in the middle of an article that he wrote, where he says, 'the imperial urge dies hard'.

I was once speaking to someone, I was working as a music journalist, and I was speaking to someone about various things, and interviewing her, and in the middle of the interview we stopped talking about what we were talking about and the attention turned to myself and my own family, and I let it slip that my parents didn't sing traditional songs or play any instruments, and she goes, with a little disappointment if not disdain, 'oh. I thought you came from a traditional family.'

I was sitting beside the sociolinguist Joshua Fishman at a conference a number of years ago and it was about a year from the end of my Ph.D. and he turned to me and asked what I was working on, and I babbled my Ph.D. abstract back at him in rather large prose. In the middle of it he just put his hand up in a sign for me to stop, and said, 'Speak to me as if I'm your grandfather.'

I had two grandfathers. One granfather was named Joe, he worked in quarries, he worked as a postman, a quiet gentle man. My other grandfather was called Johnny, a farmer, apparently a very smart man, with a sharp wit, he sang many songs, many long songs. I didn't know him very well because when I was growing up I was scared of old people and he was an old person. But I'm guessing that neither of my grandfathers and neither of my grandmothers would have much time for people who couldn't communicate with them respectfully. And part of the work that I'm trying to do at the moment is, in a sense, to honour them and to honour the relationship with my grandfathers, with my grandmothers, Kathleen Edith and Mary, with my parents, John and Teresa, and with the rest of my family who are too numerous to mention. And I think that's very, very important for me at the moment, to consider this relationship with the people in the communities where I live, the people in the community of family in which I have grown up, and the ways in which, as an academic, I have been conditioned and trained to write in ways which could often be regarded as very disrespectful if I were to be standing here speaking to them.

Why do I do the work that I do?

I don't regard myself as a folklorist, I don't regard myself as an ethnomusicologist, I don't regard myself as an anthropologist. I regard myself as a person who sings songs. I regard myself as a person who practises some of the methodologies of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folkloristics.

But one of the reasons that I do the work that I do is because I regard any academic position, any role as a professional thinker, someone who is paid to think thoughts about life and about human beings to be a very, very privileged position, and to be one which is deeply political whether we like it or not. We're the professional thinkers. We get time to think about the world. We get time to think about life. Not many people get as much time as we do.

There's a lot of violence in the world. There are people getting blown up. There are people getting murdered. There are people getting raped. There are people dying all the time. People die. It happens. But I think we do have an opportunity as professional thinkers to really take that responsibility very seriously, that we do have a part to contribute to the diminishment, the lessening of dynamics of violence, coercion, fear, anger, hate, domination, and oppression in the communities in which we live.

On the other hand, historically speaking, in the disciplines we work in [speaking to an audience of folklorists] many of the practices that have been undertaken in the name of the things that we do have contributed to domination, to oppression, to anger, have not helped a lot, and there's a lot of damage reparation and damage control that tends to go on in the work that we do.

And the silences and exclusions that have been a consequence of the work that, for example, folklorists have done, and the silences, exclusions, and blindnesses that tend to be structured into the work that we often continue to do, are not accidental. They tend to be a consequence of the epistemologies that we use, and we talk about epistemology quite often, but we don't really have any open discussions about epistemology.

Epistemology is sort of like pedagogy. We're teachers, but we very, very seldom talk about what pedagogy means for us and what it can mean for us. Similarly, we very, very seldom talk about what epistemology might mean. And too many times our epistemologies are still grounded in Kantian, Platonic, Hegelian, etc. etc. etc. Euro-American, 'Western', whatever you want to call them, models which are deeply fragmented at their heart, in terms of subject-object dichotomies, in terms of various ways of thinking about the world which, from our starting assumptions, often shut down the heart, shut down any sense of holistic relationship and often leave us in a position where our very starting points dessicate our work. And what I'm interested in is the way in which, in thinking about trying to honour the people I live with, work with, admire, love, in what ways have our epistemologies, in what ways have our methodologies, in what ways have our discourses made the people I admire and love not only discursively invisible but politically irrelevant?

What I've been looking at in my work are two themes; one is the theme of 'enclosure', the other is the theme of gentleness.

When I talk about enclosure, I'm talking about expansionary social dynamics that involve accelerative or intensifying commodification of everyday life, emerging from the dominance of the expectation that uncertainty can be or should be eliminated. What I'm looking at in my work is the way in which certain unhelpful dynamics of social change are driven by these tendencies we often have to eliminate uncertainty.

I work with the assumption that uncertainty is a constant and variable aspect of my experience. So to seek to eliminate uncertainty, for me, is to deeply disrespect the character of that experience. Historically, seeking to eliminate uncertainty has also often meant seeking to eliminate the aspect of emotion from our work. The idea of the 'objective scientist' is very much at the heart of this notion of the elimination of uncertainty. Often it very much involves simply eliminating people from our work, because people can be unpredictable and uncertain and keeping people and their biographies, keeping people and the richness of their lives away from the heart of our work (actually, the heartlessness of our work, sometimes) is actually a very, very interesting process for me.

But these enclosing dynamics, as I think of them, arising from the 'elimination' of uncertainty, for me they can be identified in two particular ways. One is in the dominance of discourses of resource production and management, and another is in the privileging of sight and sound in the discourses of our analysis.

In terms of discourses of resource production and management, just think of the ones that we use. 'Heritage' is a property metaphor. 'Property', that's a property metaphor too. 'Data', 'that which is given'. 'Information'. 'Knowledge'. 'Capital'. 'Resources'. Tradition as a resource. Etc. etc. etc. Most of the words that we use at the core of our work are resource metaphors.

Discourses of sight and sound tend to be privileged in what we do. We tend to talk a lot about aesthetics. We tend to privilege text, again, the privileging of sight and sound. We tend to do a lot of surveillance work - that's what we do, we monitor people, we go, we record, we monitor. And there tends to be a lot of emphasis on spectacle, on performance.

One of the consequences of the elimination of uncertainty as an ethic, or of discourses of resource production and management, or of the privileging of sight and sound, tends to be a profound depoliticisation of what we do, and of how we think about what we do, and of how we think about the possibilities of what we do. Primarily because what we're left with, and this is what the orthodoxies of most fields are left with, is that our understandings of power are reduced to the idea of power as control, or power as intervention, but power as some form of resource production or management.

Also what tends to happen, particularly with regard to the privileging of sight and sound, is that there tends to be an emphasis on descriptive analysis, analysis that simply describes what's going on, without really explaining how a situation happens to be the way it is and not some other way, and particularly without allowing for any participatory analysis, in terms of how might we be participating in the dynamics that we analyse?, or how might we be participating in the dynamics that we seek to critique?

And I think, for me, where I've turned to in terms of the issue of gentleness is ... what I'm interested in doing is not identifying what gentleness is, or what gentleness looks like. What I'm interested in looking at is the way in which the elimination of uncertainty as an ethic can draw us away from the possibilities of relationship.

If we only think of power as control then those who seek to control have power and those who do not seek to control are powerless. Those who seek to be gentle are powerless and are in fact irrelevant to politics.

What I'm interested in is the way in which the gentle people that I've worked with, the gentle people that I've admired and loved, in line with work in eco-feminism, in line with work in certain aspects of gentle anarchism, in line with aspects of certain buddhist and quasi-buddhist approaches to thinking about politics, these people are living deeply powerful lives. These people are living lives that we can learn from. And I think we are in a deeply privileged position. We get to talk to people as a job. We get to talk to people that we can learn from about what it means to be human.

And when I think about the archives that we have ... When I go to a zoo it makes me sad, but I still keep going to zoos because I keep thinking that it's a good thing to go to a zoo. But every time I go to a zoo I go with hope and aspiration and I come back feeling very sad. Archives increasingly make me quite sad, because for me they're records of missed opportunities. They're records of missed opportunities for understanding what it means to be human.

We've had a chance a chance to talk to so many wise people, historically speaking as folklorists, and we have so little wisdom in the archives. We have lots of stories and songs, but in terms of what it means to be human, the emotional intelligence, the emotional wisdom, the emotional university that has been there, we don't have access to that, because we weren't listening well enough, and I think that's one of the opportunities that we have now, is to really privilege those aspects in our work and to not think of ourselves merely as archivists. I think archives are important, if we ground them in the social responsibility of reimagining the power of small emotions, reimagining that folkloristics is actually in a very privileged position. You have eco-feminism, you have activism, you have all these things, but we're the ethnographers. We're the ones who get to actually sit down and spend time to work out what do people think are helpful ways to make sense of being human. We can ground our work. We can substantiate our work. And for me that's very much at the heart of the gentleness project.

I'm just going to stop there and open it up to the conversation.

Comment/Micheál Briody: First, Seamus Ennis's comment that he was done with Colm O Caodhain. Yes, I've come across other comments like that, and there's one interesting aspect in Delargy's diaries when he's finished his East Clare collection, it's in the bag, it's done with and over, but that's partly due to the rushed nature of the collecting. When Delargy first started learning collecting he spent two years working with Sean Conaill without collecting anything, just listening to him. He wasn't ever able to do that with anyone else, just because he had his mission and he liked to collect so much. There was a much more humane approach originally before it became this sort of production stage, I would call it mass production folklore. That's one thing. You get that a lot, and in Estonia in the 50s and 60s you get a lot of folklorists talking about 'emptying' an area, sending out a team of collectors to 'empty' it, and again you get that in Delargy's report, emptying an area. It's very much there. But, yeah, I think though, Delargy, to give him credit, he often said that the only experts on the folktales were the narrators, you know, and unfortunately he didn't follow that through entirely because one thing he never got around to was sending out a questionnaire on storytelling. He intended sending out a questionnaire about storytelling but he never got around to it. There was a great deal of information collected, nonetheless, from many storytellers about the tradition and all of that, so he did ... sometimes it was just lip service, but he always sort of humbly said they were the experts. Now maybe there was pretence involved to some extent but I think myself there was a gentle nature in him. I think there wouldn't be the big collection without that, but it somehow got left aside because of the ambition of making a very large collection and then also of saving it, even if you might say emptying it, but, you know, in many cases if he hadn't emptied it, despite what you say about archives being places like museums or zoos that are not so pleasant, if we hadn't it you might be standing up here and saying, you know, why don't we have archives, and zoos, and museums, so we can't really have it both ways. But there is that absence of gentle approach, maybe.

A: Well I think what you're saying is really, really important, in that most of us, pretty much all of us are in this field because we care about people, you know? And I think Delargy and Ennis and all of these collectors were doing what they did because they cared, they really cared. Perhaps they cared too much in some ways. And I think that for me is part of the challenge, that we get drawn in because we like spending time with people, we like talking to people, we value that aspect of what we do perhaps more highly than we value anything else. We value what we learn from these people as human beings. We value spending time with them. We don't necessarily talk or write about those aspects of our work, instead we privilege the collecting aspect, but I think what we can learn from the likes of that experience that Delargy had where he goes from spending lots of time to spending very little time with people, is to become more aware and more discerning of the influence of institutional imperatives on the work that we do, and to clarify for ourselves what is actually important to us? Regardless of what the institutional imperatives are, what's important to us as human beings, each for ourselves, and as we go in and do our work how can that be reflected in the work that we actually do?

Comment/Regina Bendix: It's very nice that you're able to talk like that. I would like to suggest context as a very important component of evaluating where our predecessors were. I mean that sort of sadness or frustration that you report about your students thinking about the nationalist paradigm of the nineteenth century, I have been helped a lot in doing historical work to recognise that they were also caught in whatever political or academic forces there are, and so the sadness or frustration is not as productive as recognising where individuals are caught. I think the connection between yours and the previous paper is very powerful as a recognition of allowing ourselves, in doing research, to recognise our body, our mind, our emotions. But the link that's missing there is acknowledging that you're not just researching or spending time with people, you're also sitting in this highly institutional, regimented professional life. You're little episode with Joshua Fishman, here you found a human who wanted you to talk 'unprofessionally', so to speak, and I think we have not done enough legwork in our own professional worlds, because our own professional worlds are the realm that is unexamined, are the realm which we slide into, and we appropriate its mores, and its pressures. And because we have not done enough of that kind of deconstruction work you feel isolated when you feel the way you do, maybe also the way Janika feels, when you dare to come out and speak that way and act that way, the pressures around you ... there are not enough of us who do this, you know? And as a result you get 'fringed' unless you participate also in the deconstruction of the professional life.

A: As I do, and that's why for me pedagogy and radical pedagogy is actually very much at the heart of trying to challenge the institutional structures and the institutional values in the places in which I work. I align myself with social ecologists across the world more than anything else, and there is a growing community of people out there, even within university structures, that are doing work like this, that are privileging the human. And I don't have to be an academic. If I get too frustrated within the university structures, I will leave and do something else. I can always do something else. I will continue writing and I will continue researching. At the moment I find the university structure in which I find myself does facilitate the work that I want to do, and I hope that continues.

Comment/Valdimar Hafstein: Thank you for your talk which I found thought-provoking in many ways. The elimination of uncertainty you spoke about as an ethic and as a social prgram related to such things to coercion and violence and domination. I found myself being somewhat uncomfortable with this and think perhaps you're not giving the elimination of uncertainty its due. There is another way of understanding the elimination of uncertainty, and that's to do with such things as social security and the welfare society, in fact the elimination of uncertainty as an ethic, as a political and social programme has been the programme with the most powerful movement in western societies in the 20th century. The labour movement, it's political arm, the elimination of uncertainty has been its programme to create a more decent and just society. And I think that it perhaps another aspect of the elimination of uncertainty that is underacknowledged in the way that you present it.

A: For me, looking at movements like the labour movement, for example, discourses of the elimination of uncertainty do pervade most political movements, although I think it's important to make a distinction between the provision of stability and the elimination of uncertainty. Because the elimination of uncertainty can never happen, as far as I'm concerned. It's a discursive claim, it's a claim that people make about what happens. In terms of the welfare state and those sorts of political achievements, in a sense, that's about the provision of stability, the reduction of uncertainty in often crisis situations, and the reduction of uncertainty or the provision of stability for me are quite different from the elimination of uncertainty, which is a discursive claim about the way the world is, a declaration that this is reality and what is and must be in terms of how we think about reality. So I think what you're talking about are very helpful in many respects, but I would also suggest that in those political movements, if you look where people are claiming the *elimination* of uncertainty rather than the reduction of uncertainty, you are likely to find very unhelpful dynamics around those aspects of what they do.

Comment/Kristin Kuutma: I would think there is still some hope in the human enounter with the folklorist and the people that they meet because very often there is quite a long interaction and very often the people that folklorists talk to they kind of are indoctrinated into this process of creating wisdom, so they are inside this process. This is a different kind of wisdom, but they know what the folklorists might know, or if the interaction is long enough the folklorist has explained what he or she is looking for so the person talking to the folklorist gets a certain status from being inside this process and producing the knowledge for the folklorist, as they take it down, record it. So there is another side to it as well, whether we ask them what they personally think about things, but I'd say there is a positive side to it as well.

A: I think there's a positive side to any two people being in the same room together even if they're hating each other. In thinking about this, I am thinking from a deeply hopeful perspective, and for me hope works better when it's here, rather than when it's somewhere that you're aiming for. I think the mere recognition and acknowledgement of people's lives, particularly people who have experienced what might be described as marginalization or have felt as if they are in situations of oppression or felt like nobody listens to them any more, that nobody cares about what they care about, these people that we live with and work with, I think it's very, very important that the mere acknowledgement that they exist and that somebody wants to listen to them is a very positive thing. I don't think it's enough. I think that any status that might be accrued from that for them is a very small gift, as far as I'm concerned. I think we can be far more respectful, even in that. I do wonder ... at the moment one of my big questions is, is it more respectful for me to visit people and not record anything they say? It's a very serious question for me. I think of Delargy and his two year visit. Maybe we can be professional friendly people in a true sense, with the powerful character of friendship and relationship that we can bring with ourselves. But there are a lot of interesting things going on there.

Comment/Diarmuid Ó Giolláin: Do you think you can make distinctions between different disciplinary traditions there. It seems to me, for example, that at least the stereotypical folklorist in the last couple of generations as someone who goes in search of particular genres, say, and who perhaps in a sense scratches the surface, and on the other hand the anthropologist who tries to delve deeper, seeking social structures and so on. Often with the folklorist there's a sort of exaggerated pietas to the tradition, with the anthropologist ... there have been a couple of cases in Ireland where the anthropologist was the one that caused the most problems. I'm thinking about that highly respected book by Nancy Scheper-Hughes called Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics. I mean, can you elaborate on that perhaps?

A: I wasn't going to say, highly respected by whom? I know some people that don't highly respect it. For me it's a question of what's more important, the disciplinary boundaries, methods, narratives, or making use of the privileged positions we have to make sense of what it means to be human. For me, the second is more important. I am in a privileged position, I am a professional thinker, I get paid to teach, which is the most wonderful opportunity that anyone can have on a daily basis, and I get to research what I want to research, which is not what everybody gets to do, particularly in the current research environment. But I have a chance to try and make sense of my own experience in a way that I think can help me towards more helpful relationship, in the sense of what's going on. This for me involves both a critique of unhelpful dynamics in the world, or in my experience, and a reconstructive approach to relationship. And wherever I can find disciplinary help in terms of peopled, heartfilled, respectful ways of thinking, whether in anthropology or in social ecology or in folkloristics, wherever I can find them, I'll try and use them, and see to what extent they work or do not work depending on the epistemological grounding that they come from. But at the end of the day I do regard myself as being in a privileged, institutional position at the moment, which facilitates the kind of work that I want to do and wherever I can find it, in whatever discipline I can find helpful support for that, I'll go there and I'll look to that. I'm more interested in inviting the idea that we can think about what we do and say, okay, we've got where we are, we're in a position, we're professional thinkers, how can we act most helpfully in the world as human beings, while still doing what's important to us, while still doing things we care about?

Comment/DOG: It's not a romantic search for community?

A: No, not at all. Because that leads us back to eliminating uncertainty through the utopian imagined community. It's about being more discerning of the conflict and community opportunities that are available to us at any particular time, being aware that at all times there are the traps of romantic communalism, the traps of arrogant academicism, etc etc. And being aware, am I trying to eliminate uncertainty here?

Statement from buddhist monks

This is a buddhist postscript to a previous statement which can be found at: http://www.bpf.org:80/html/whats_now/2007/burma_peace.html

Since releasing our initial statement, several people have contacted BPFwithquestions and concern about acts of violence that occurred earlier inSeptember in Burma, when a group of monks from Pakokku's central Mahavithutarama monastery locked 20 government officials inside the compoundand set fire to four vehicles. The monks released the government officials later that same day, unharmed.

From all indications, this act was in response to an incident the daybefore,when two Burmese military platoons attempted to disperse the monks (who had been marching peacefully) by firing warning shots into the air and physically assaulting people. One bystander said, "They fired about 10 or 15 bulletsbefore they started to drag away the monks and beat up bystanders with bamboo sticks" (Source: The Democratic Voice of Burma)

The Buddhist Peace Fellowship does not support aggression or violence. Buddhist teachings guide us to an understanding that actions which aremotivated by hatred or confusion will only lead to more suffering. Yet we do understand how suffering can lead to such actions. Social change movements are vast and complex, especially when thousands of people are involved and emotions are high. They do not happen in a vacuum, in an atmosphere of pure nonviolence.

Another layer of complexity is added when the situation takesplace in another country and culture and those of us on the outside cannot possibly have full understanding of the context.

Whatever acts of violence have occurred on the part of a small group of monksmust be understood in the context of the past 20 years of repression, structural violence, and systemic human rights violations by the military junta of Myanmar.

The vast majority of the monks and nuns in Burma are responding courageouslyand holding strongly to the practice of nonviolence in this protest. We continue to stand with them and call for the Myanmar government to meet with the monks and together to find nonviolent solutions which will benefit all the people of Burma.

Burma

Dear friends,

After decades of brutal dictatorship, the people of Burma are rising--and they need our help.Today over 100,000 people are on the streets of Rangoon, more around the country. When protesters last marched in 1988, the military massacred thousands.

But this time it can be different--if only the world stands with the marchers. The United Nations summit starts today in New York. Let's raise an emergency global campaign, demanding they press the Burmese generals to negotiate rather than crush the demonstrators.

We'll deliver it to Security Council members--particularly China's Hu Jintao, until now the military junta's protector--and to media at the UN this week.

Sign our emergency petition supporting the peaceful protests in Burma--click here, then spread the word:http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/e.php?cl=20029997&signup=1

For decades the Burmese dictatorship fought off pressure--imprisoning elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and democracy activists, wiping out thousands of villages in the provinces, bringing miseries from forced labour to refugee camps. One-third of children under 5 now suffer malnutrition; millions are down to one meal a day.

But last Tuesday Buddhist monks and nuns, overwhelmingly respected in Burma, began marching and chanting prayers. The protests spread--now they're growing by tens of thousands every day, as ordinary people, even celebrities and comedians join in. They've broken the chains of fear and given hope to 52 million Burmese.

However, this hope is hanging by a thread. While hesitating to attack the respected monks, the regime is reported to be organising violence. Demonstrators have already been beaten, shots have been fired.

This is one of those moments where the world can make the difference: standing shoulder to shoulder with the Burmese people, helping to shine a dissolving light on tyranny. Let's call on powers at the UN--in particular, China (next year's Olympics host)--to warn the generals that violence will have the gravest consequences, and the time has come for change.

People power is rising through the streets of Burma today. Let the demonstrators know the world is with them. Click here to sign the petition, then tell everyone you know:http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/e.php?cl=20029997&signup=1

In hope,

Paul, Pascal, Graziela, Ricken and the whole Avaaz team

PS: The government has just threatened the monks--here's an Associated Press article:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iy-MfhLN9Q7MwtQ1VlrvexLjr2dA

And we've just heard this from the international Burma Campaign: the military has reportedly ordered a battalion of soldiers to shave their heads, pose as monks and operate as agents provocateurs. This might be the first first step towards a bloody crackdown.

See http://www.uscampaignforburma.org/ for more background.

"Don't go into the light!"

I've been reading Derrick Jensen's book Endgame: Resistance. His A Language Older Than Words is one of my favourite books. I have yet to finish the current one, but the first few pages suggest to me that Derrick's thoughtful engagement with the dynamics of violence on our planet has led him, at least in his language and thinking, to double back into those same dynamics, to dance with the people whose vision of the world he seeks to challenge, to some extent. I'm sure he would disagree with this, but his stereotypes of undualistic approaches to violence (which he characterises as still being dualistic, demonstrating that he doesn't really get the point) are too glib to be convincing, for me. I'll probably write more on this as I read further.

passing through

... just a few thoughts before getting back to teaching as of tomorrow ...

I've been thinking about the idea that 'gentleness moves'. It's related to the thought that sometimes intentions are overrated. Maybe it's a better idea to just listen and respond to situations as they arise? Direction happens the more I listen to myself and to what's going on, and the less I seek a preconceived direction, at least so it seems to me. Movement is a key aspect of any process, and I think it may be enough to trust in the movement that any situation will bring to you and with you. Provided that you don't approach the situation with the view that it is somehow not sufficient for you. Sufficiency works as a principle in my experience. Another one that a friend told me recently that keeps her sane is 'there is benefit in everything'. That's been a helpful one of late.

I recently had a wonderful time in London, perhaps one of the most amazing weeks of my life. I had the privilege of hanging out with Dadi Janki of the Brahma Kumaris. She sort of adopted me, which was so humbling, and I think I have a new buddy. She's a bit cheeky, in a great way, perhaps in that way that you can only be if you're in your nineties :) I also got to make some great new friends that I will carry with me for a long time. I hope to meet them all again soon.

My aspiration to have a house in the hills has fallen through. Turns out that the house that I chose is to all intents and purposes unmortgageable. Seems that banks are a little less romantic than I am. Ah well. I can take stock and maybe try again for something else in a bit.

My writing is going okay. I've realised that if I were to write a thousand words a day then I would have my 30,000 word book finished in a month. I won't manage that, but I should manage it a few times a week. Here's hoping I get a manuscript together before Christmas.

I think I've talked about it before here, but it seems that I am most aware of an absence of gentleness when I am surprised by my own behaviour. I was a bit snotty with someone in a shop the other day, and I was very embarrassed about it afterwards. Yes, it was one of the more stressful weeks of this year so far for me, but that's an explanation, not an excuse. It shouldn't take me being less than nice to someone for me to realise that I'm stressed and for me to do something about it.

I resolve to take better care of myself during this academic year, to eat less sugar (guaranteed no-no), and to exercise regularly. I will also make an effort to meditate once a day in some form if I can remember (I am not the most disciplined of people).

I'm also going to see if I can arrange a gentleness workshop in Derry somewhere in the next couple of weeks.

I'm tired. I'm not sure if I'm ready for the new term, but I'll have to be.

"If I hadn't done it they would have died."

21 September 2007 08:15

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2979874.ece

Tunisian fishermen face 15 years' jail in Italy for saving migrants from rough seas
By Peter Pophamin, Rome
Published: 20 September 2007

Seven Tunisian fishermen go on trial in Sicily today for the crime of rescuing 44 migrants from certain death in the sea. They are accused of aiding and abetting illegal immigration. If convicted, they face between one and 15 years in jail.

The men were arrested on 8 August after bringing the migrants ashore in Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost island. They were remanded in custody and remained in jail until 10 September, when five were released on bail and the two officers of the boat were put under house arrest.

On the morning of 7 August, Abdelkarim Bayoudh and his crew had dropped anchor on a shelf 30 miles south of the island of Lampedusa. They had just turned in for a few hours' sleep when they were woken by screams for help.

Coming out on deck they saw a rubber boat crammed with people wallowing in the rough sea, taking in water and on the point of sinking. Among them were two children and 11 women – two of them pregnant and one elderly and badly ill. In the crush to get aboard the fishing boat, two of the migrants went in the water. Two of the Tunisian crew dived in and rescued them.

Captain Bayoudh then headed for the nearest harbour. Their home port of Monastir was 90 miles away, Lampedusa only 30 miles. The best destination was obvious. Yet on arrival in Lampedusa, the seven Tunisians were arrested and thrown in jail. Experts say the charge of aiding illegal immigration is absurd.

The work of the criminals that run the migration racket finishes at the dock in Libya, where nearly all the crossings originate.

The true object of the trial, it is suspected, is to dissuade fishermen from doing their duty. If so, it is likely to be successful. The fact that the fishermen have spent more than a month in custody sends a clear message to others like them.

Laura Boldrini, of the UN High Commission for Refugees, contrasts the behaviour of the Tunisians with that of other, unnamed fishermen reported to her who recently beat migrants attempting to get into their boat with sticks, forcing them into the water where several drowned. No action was taken against them. "We only know the tip of the iceberg of what happens in the Mediterranean," she said. "We must rely on fishermen to rescue people in trouble – or at the very least alert the maritime authorities."

Crossing to Europe by boat is an increasingly desperate gamble. The man put in charge of the boat may never have seen the sea before. Boats are getting smaller and flimsier by the year, and may not even be equipped with enough fuel for the passage. Migrants can become the prey of pirates, or they may simply capsize and disappear.

A website called Fortress Europe, which monitors deaths and disappearances at Europe's borders, says that 491 people vanished in the Canale de Sicilia this year, up to 1 September. Of those, 103 are definitely dead; the other 388 are the ones that nobody saw disappear. The figure is the highest since Fortress Europe began counting in 1994, and already nearly 200 more than all of last year.

Until recently there was good reason to believe that if boats in trouble managed to attract the attention of passing fishermen, they stood a good chance of being rescued. But now the odds on that are worsening.

The attitude shift was signaled by Malta, which is struggling with an immigrant problem. In 2005, a boat packed with 200 migrants was reported by the Maltese military five miles off the island of Gozo. They were instructed to "monitor the boat and keep a distance away from them". Thirty of the migrants drowned before the rest were rescued by Italians. Earlier this year, too, the Italians came to the rescue when the Maltese refused to accept 27 migrants who had been clinging to tuna nets for three days.

But now it seems Italy has begun taking a similar hard line. Once they had taken the 44 migrants on board, the Tunisians radioed Lampedusa – but when they were 12 miles out, at the limit of Italian territorial waters, a Coast Guard vessel approached and told them to turn back.
Tana de Zulueta, a Green Party MP who interviewed the captain of the boat, said: "It seems the Italian Interior Ministry had issued a new instruction that day saying don't bring people in."

The Tunisian captain said he ignored the order because of the children and pregnant women on board, and the fact that, ravenously hungry, they had already eaten and drunk everything on the ship.

"I'm happy about what I did," he told Ms de Zulueta. "If I hadn't done it they would have died."

On this path ...

"On this path, it is only the first step that counts." (M. Vianney, 1864)

Hanging out with the Brahma Kumaris

I'm sitting in the Global Co-operation House of the Brahma Kumaris intentional community in Crickelwood, in London, getting ready to give a talk this afternoon. It's a fascinating place full of wonderful people who are dedicating their lives to peace and kindness.

Someone I know compared the BKs to the Hare Krishnas, but I get the sense that it's quite different. Someone else suggested that there was little persuasive-doctrinal about what they do, in the sense that no one is seeking to convince you of anything, which is pretty much what I've found. There's a lot of talk about God here, which I'm not into, but it has been a very loving experience.

Some of the trappings might suggest something cult-like (the white clothing, the adoration of spiritual leaders), but it seems like it's all very much above board and sincere to the extent that I can make it out. I haven't noticed any of the subtle manipulative techniques that I have encountered in the likes of Elan Vital/Divine Light Mission.

I have been looked after wonderfully, and I am deeply impressed by the gentle dynamics of this community. I hope to have more communication with the people I have met here in the future.

I have been billed as an expert on Celtic Spirituality, which is actually not the case, so I will have to ease into my talk gently. What I intend to do is to offer a critical take on a lot of the stuff that is being sold as 'Celtic' Spirituality, and I'm not sure that's what a lot of people will be here for.

I'm particularly interested in the ways that the feminized characteristics of 'Celtic' spirituality (natural, creative, unhierarchical, anarchic, emotional, and so on) draw heavily on the racial stereotyping of 'Celticness' from the 19th century whereby the 'Celts' were feminized in a way that conveniently rendered them unsuitable for political participation, 'unpolitical' in the most disempowering way (much as women have regularly been rendered irrational and domestic in the face of a rational, public political sphere). Might it not be a little unhelpful to be using unsubstantiable categories along with the specific meanings that were designed to keep people under the thumb?

I'll also be making a plea for people to look closer to home for political (and spiritual?) inspiration, rather than running off to follow the example of people who left very little idea at all about how they thought about anything. Basically, to quote Spinal Tap, we don't know who they were or what they did.

I'll also be talking a bit about a politics of gentleness, and it will be interesting, because I haven't really spoken to an audience before that explicitly espouses gentleness as a way of life. I will also be sharing a stage with Dadi Janki who is recognised by many as a Spiritual Leader, so it's a little humbling to say the least. I suppose I can only speak from where I'm at and see how it goes.

Black children left out of Irish schools

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK, Associated Press Writer

DUBLIN, Ireland

Almost all the children who could not find elementary school places in a Dublin suburb this year were black, the government said Monday, highlighting Ireland's problems integrating its increasingly diverse population.

The children will attend a new, all-black school, a prospect that educators called disheartening.

About 90 children could not find school places in the north Dublin suburb of Balbriggan , a town of more than 10,000 people with two elementary schools. Local educators called a meeting over the weekend for parents struggling to find places and said they were shocked to see only black children.

"That overwhelmed me. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I just find it extremely concerning," said Gerard Kelly, principal of a school with a mixture of black and white students in the nearby town of Swords.

The parents at Saturday's meeting in a Balbriggan hotel said they had tried to get their children into local schools but were told that all places had to be reserved by February.

Almost all of the children are Irish-born and thus Irish citizens, under a law that existed until 2004.

Some parents questioned why white families who had moved this year into the town had managed to overcome the registration deadlines to get their children into schools.

Some also complained that Ireland's school system was discriminating against them on the basis of religion. About 98 percent of schools are run by the Roman Catholic Church, and the law permits them to discriminate on the basis of whether a prospective student has a certificate confirming they were baptized into the faith. Some of the African applicants were Muslim, members of evangelical Protestant denominations or of no religious creed.

Education Minister Mary Hanafin said the problems reflected bad planning amid rapid population growth, not racist attitudes at existing schools. She vowed to get the new school, which will take students aged 4-12, integrated with white students as soon as possible.

"I would not like to see a situation developing where it is an all-black school, so it's something to keep an eye on for next year's enrollments, " Hanafin said.

Kelly said some parents, both locals and immigrants, "felt forced or coerced to have their child baptised to get a place in their local Catholic school."

More than 25,000 Africans have settled in Ireland since the mid-1990s. Most arrived as asylum seekers, and many took advantage of Ireland's law — unique in Europe — of granting citizenship to parents of any Irish-born child. Voters toughened that law in a 2004 referendum.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2903556.ece

http://www.independent.co.uk

Attend

In English it can mean to listen, and to be present, and to care for, and to serve, and likely other things as well ...

Spiritual eugenics?

I've written quite a bit in criticism of the idea of the 'global evolution of consciousness' on this blog over the last year.

I think it comes down to a basic thing for me. If we were all part of a global evolution of consciousness, then would people who kill themselves be simply 'collateral damage'? What about people who can't work their way out of addictive routines or depressive cycles? Would they simply not be getting with the program? Are they not quite part of the proper trajectory of the human race?

That doesn't work for me. It feels a little too close to spiritual eugenics.

rambles

I'm on my travels at the moment, driving around Scotland and England in my car, tenting and sofa-ing and bedrooming, hanging out with good friends, making new ones, dancing in kitchens at one in the morning with martini cocktails in hand, learning to play the cardgame s'head, finding out the my sister was right (cheap tents with only one layer let in the rain), learning that my Spanish isn't half as rusty as I thought it was and that I wish to spend a lot more time in sunny Spain including doing the Camino de Santiago, possibly in stages, discovering that hay bales don't make me sneeze, encountering a verse of a song that I never knew about, mourning the loss of an admired colleague, celebrating the marriage of my sister and her now husband, writing (bits of) songs again, beginning to read John McGahern short stories and realising that I should have done that long ago because his writing really works for me, thinking about how a genuinely loving heart can get swamped by circumstances, looking forward to what will be a pretty zany few days with two of my mates, aiming to spend a magical few days in London, hoping that silences dissolve into smiles, and still writing, still writing.

and from John McGahern ...

"Nearly all good writing is suggestion and all bad writing is statement".