Do I remember the Sixties?

Last night my wife and I went to a Julie Felix concert at the Courtyard Theatre in Hereford. This dynamic 71-year old with jet black hair and two guitars took me back fifty years. My mind marinated in memories of the 60s. I know they say if you can remember the 60s you were never there, but I have memories of the 60s and I was there – make of that what you wish.

My sensibility, which was quarried from the family landscape shaped by my sister’s death before I was born and rough-hewn by the second World war and its aftermath, was later chiselled and polished to some degree by the culture of the 60s. Its particular sense of the value of the individual and the importance of community found expression in the protest song. I resonated not only to that art form but also to the whole folk music tradition – English traditional, American blue-grass and acoustic blues most specially.

Julie Felix sprayed a mist of iconic names and sounds over the audience – Tom Paxton, James Taylor, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Woodie Guthrie, Joan Baez and above all Bob Dylan to name but a few. In the first half of the concert she swept through a nostalgic but still living panorama that started for me with Long Black Veil and ended with a superb rendering, a mind-rending one in fact, of Dylan’s Masters of War. In the second half she responded to requests from the audience which included Blowing in the Wind. It became more of a sing-along, not my favourite activity as I can’t carry a tune more than ten seconds without dropping it,  and the spell began to break.

I have strewn a couple of YouTube videos across this post for the benefit of those who weren’t there and don’t share the intensity of my ruminations. None of the recent ones that I could find do justice to the Julie Felix of last night so I’ve ignored them and chosen instead one or two that are steeped in that heady perfume of hope, love and compassion mixed with anger that inspired so much of what went on in those days.

I was fighting to stay in the present as my own particular memories crowded in, triggered by almost every word she sang and almost every note she played.

Most vividly I remembered the upper room of the Starting Gate, Wood Green, where a friend of mine and I ran a folk club for a few years. Many who played there have probably been long forgotten, certainly by me until last night. There was Jackson C. Frank, whose life tragically went downhill after the brilliance of his first album, or Jesse Fuller, the exuberant one-man band who had us all tapping our feet much to the irritation of the regulars below. Oh and Diz Disley.

Who?

In the mid-sixties, he had fallen from the heights of being a passable Django Reinhardt imitator to scraping a living as a George Formby sound-alike on the guitar. I bumped into him again a few years later when his career was having a very respectable resurrection linked to tours with Stéphane Grappelli.

At the time I got to know him, he was living in a bedsit at the back of the same house as me and, as I walked off to work in the morning, I used to see his battered old gold Cadillac, formerly owned by Paul Getty he said, parked in the street outside. Four of us shared a manic non-stop drive to Budapest in the Cadillac, fuelled by Proplus for Go-plus on Diz’s part as he fended off sleep driving through the night. When we arrived in Budapest our decrepit symbol of capitalism broke down on a bridge over the Danube. We pushed it to safety and expensive repairs much to the amusement of the passers-by.

The guests I will always remember best from those days running the club were Bert Jansch and John Renbourne. They played separately – their appearances were pre-Pentangle.

It was the first Bert Jansch appearance in particular that took us completely by surprise. The first time he played at our club was just after his debut LP came out and before he raised his fee to £45, a month’s wages for me in those days. We turned up on the night, with a biscuit tin for a till as usual, to see a queue all down the side of the pub, round the corner and heading up the hill to Ally Pally – sorry, Alexandra Palace.

We were authorised to have 50 people in our long but narrow room upstairs. After a quick word with the landlord, who clearly saw a huge escalation in beer sales on the way (this was long before I had even heard of the Bahá’í Faith so I had no scruples about increasing the profits of the breweries at that time), we tripled the limit and kept counting them in. Even so there were a few sad people left to drown their disappointment downstairs to the delight of the landlord.

Our takings were more than enough to cover his subsequently increased fee so we booked him again about a year later. I still feel though that Renbourne, with his softer voice and superb guitar playing, was the more enjoyable guest.

Of course, the giant that overshadowed them all, and wrote many of the songs that Julie Felix sang last night, was Bob Dylan. I was chatting to the lady sitting on my right-hand side in the theatre. We both agreed that the crucial test of taste in those days was whether you were a Beatles, Stones or Dylan fan at heart. We disagreed about the final outcome though. She was a Stones fan: I am an unreconstructed Dylan devotee to this day.

What a night! Thank you, Julie, for the memories.

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What’s so special about the 23rd of May?

Room in the House of the Báb

On the 22nd May the world will again start to be circled in celebration. About two hours after sunset, when the new day starts for us, Bahá’ís everywhere will come together to share prayers, readings and music in memory of a very special event. What’s it all about?

In this ordinary room pictured on the left, 166 years ago, an important meeting took place. It began a process that is still unfolding to this day.  For Bahá’ís this meeting has a very special meaning, the full significance of which would not be immediately obvious  to all those attending a typical Holy Day Celebration. This is a brief attempt to unpack its key significance in the words of the central figures of the Faith.

The Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith opened his description of the event with these words:

May 23, 1844, signalizes the commencement of the most turbulent period of the Heroic Age of the Bahá’í Era, . . . . . No more than a span of nine short years marks the duration of this most spectacular, this most tragic, this most eventful period of the first Bahá’í century. . . . .

He continued:

The opening scene of the initial act of this great drama was laid in the upper chamber of the modest residence of the son of a mercer of Shiraz, in an obscure corner of that city. The time was the hour before sunset, on the 22nd day of May, 1844. The participants were the Báb, a twenty-five year old siyyid, of pure and holy lineage, and the young Mulla Husayn, the first to believe in Him. Their meeting immediately before that interview seemed to be purely fortuitous. The interview itself was protracted till the hour of dawn.

He quoted the words of Mulla Husayn:

“This Revelation,” Mulla Husayn has . . .  testified, “so suddenly and impetuously thrust upon me, came as a thunderbolt which, for a time, seemed to have benumbed my faculties. I was blinded by its dazzling splendor and overwhelmed by its crushing force. Excitement, joy, awe, and wonder stirred the depths of my soul. .  . . . .

And concludes:

With this historic Declaration the dawn of an Age that signalizes the consummation of all ages had broken.

Shoghi Effendi: God Passes By, Pages: 3-8

(For a more detailed sense of what happened see this link.)

`Abdu'l-Bahá in America

`Abdu’l-Bahá, in His visit to America in 1912, spoke briefly of the day itself:

It is a blessed day and the dawn of manifestation, for the appearance of the Báb was the early light of the true morn, whereas the manifestation of the Blessed Beauty, Bahá’u'lláh, was the shining forth of the sun. . . . On this day in 1844 the Báb was sent forth heralding and proclaiming the Kingdom of God, announcing the glad tidings of the coming of Bahá’u'lláh and withstanding the opposition of the whole Persian nation.

He then gave a brief outline of the events that followed, detailing the ensuing persecution which was severe and persists, of course, until today in Iran:

Some of the Persians followed Him. For this they suffered the most grievous difficulties and severe ordeals. They withstood the tests with wonderful power and sublime heroism. Thousands were cast into prison, punished, persecuted and martyred. Their homes were pillaged and destroyed, their possessions confiscated. They sacrificed their lives most willingly and remained unshaken in their faith to the very end.

The Báb was subjected to bitter persecution in Shiraz, where He first proclaimed His mission and message. A period of famine afflicted that region, and the Báb journeyed to Isfahan. There the learned men rose against Him in great hostility. He was arrested and sent to Tabriz. From thence He was transferred to Maku and finally imprisoned in the strong castle of Chihriq. Afterward He was martyred in Tabriz.

He holds up the life and sacrifices of the Báb as an example:

We must follow His heavenly example; we must be self-sacrificing and aglow with the fire of the love of God. We must partake of the bounty and grace of the Lord, for the Báb has admonished us to arise in service to the Cause of God, to be absolutely severed from all else save God during the day of the Blessed Perfection, Bahá’u'lláh, to be completely attracted by the love of Bahá’u'lláh, to love all humanity for His sake, to be lenient and merciful to all for Him and to upbuild the oneness of the world of humanity. Therefore, this day, 23 May, is the anniversary of a blessed event.

`Abdu’l-Bahá: Promulgation of Universal Peace, Pages: 138-139

So, there are implications in these events, remote though they seem to most of us in both time and place,  for how we should conduct ourselves today. The Guardian unravelled some of these possibilities in the following passage.

The moment had now arrived for that undying, that world-vitalizing Spirit that was born in Shiraz, that had been rekindled in Tihran, that had been fanned into flame in Baghdad and Adrianople [i.e. the places to which Bahá'u'lláh was successively exiled], that had been carried to the West, and was now illuminating the fringes of five continents, to incarnate itself in institutions designed to canalize its outspreading energies and stimulate its growth. [My emphasis] The Age that had witnessed the birth and rise of the Faith had now closed.  . . . . .

The Formative Period, the Iron Age, of that Dispensation was now beginning, the Age in which the institutions, local, national and international, of the Faith of Bahá’u'lláh were to take shape, develop and become fully consolidated, in anticipation of the third, the last, the Golden Age destined to witness the emergence of a world-embracing Order enshrining the ultimate fruit of God’s latest Revelation to mankind, a fruit whose maturity must signalize the establishment of a world civilization and the formal inauguration of the Kingdom of the Father upon earth as promised by Jesus Christ Himself.

(God Passes By, page 324)

Even such a powerful explanation as this does not convey the full impact of this Revelation on the lives of all Bahá’ís nor explain in terms which are easy for everyone to grasp why the core of the Bahá’í vision applies to everyone, Bahá’í and non-Bahá’í alike.

Shrine of the Báb at Night

In 2001 the central body of the Faith wrote a message to all those assembled in Haifa to witness the ceremony that marked the completion of the Terraces that climb above and descend below the Shrine of the Báb. The core paragraphs for our present purpose begin by explaining what the Faith and all our activities within it are for:

Reflection on what the Bahá’í community has accomplished throws into heartbreaking perspective the suffering and deprivation engulfing the great majority of our fellow human beings. It is necessary that it should do so, because the effect is to open our minds and souls to vital implications of the mission Bahá’u’lláh has laid on us. “Know thou of a truth,” He declares, “these great oppressions that have befallen the world are preparing it for the advent of the Most Great Justice.” . . . .  In the final analysis, it is this Divine purpose that all our activities are intended to serve, and we will advance this purpose to the degree that we understand what is at stake in the efforts we are making to teach the Faith, to establish and consolidate its institutions, and to intensify the influence it is exerting in the life of society.

They make completely explicit the change in our way of thinking that is required of us:

Humanity’s crying need will not be met by a struggle among competing ambitions or by protest against one or another of the countless wrongs afflicting a desperate age. It calls, rather, for a fundamental change of consciousness, for a wholehearted embrace of Bahá’u’lláh’s teaching that the time has come when each human being on earth must learn to accept responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family. Commitment to this revolutionizing principle will increasingly empower individual believers and Bahá’í institutions alike in awakening others to the Day of God and to the latent spiritual and moral capacities that can change this world into another world. We demonstrate this commitment, Shoghi Effendi tells us, by our rectitude of conduct towards others, by the discipline of our own natures, and by our complete freedom from the prejudices that cripple collective action in the society around us and frustrate positive impulses towards change.

(From the 24 May 2001 message from the Universal House of Justice to the Believers Gathered for the Events Marking the Completion of the Projects on Mount Carmel)

So, in short, the Báb surrendered His life to show us the way. Bahá’u'lláh endured roughly 50 years of imprisonment, torture and exile as He explained to us in detail what was required. The rest is up to us.

Flowers near the Shrine

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Introversion and the Science of Sociability

I’ve had a great time posting a lot of stuff recently touting literature which argues we should re-establish a better balance between the organic mind, currently playing the role of second-rate servant in our culture, and the machine mind which is dangerously in the ascendant at the moment. Spouting wisdom from the pulpit of a blog post is easy.

What I have not made explicit in these posts are reflections about how, for a right-brain introvert such as myself, there are special challenges and difficulties in all of this, at least in terms of how a lot of people will interpret these findings and theories.

Before I start down this path in earnest, lets put the discomfort of these challenges in context. Compared to someone digging down to the gravel bed for sapphires in Madagascar, under the blazing sun on a steep slope, passing umpteen shovelfuls of sand uphill in a regular rhythm for eight hours a day for less than a pound, such troubles are not worth a mention. That kind of outrage is a wound worthy of complaining about. Every reader of this post could provide at least another ten examples of hardship and exploitation worldwide in five minutes. So, why does this tiny little scratch, an introvert’s trivial discomfort with the pressure to live a more gregarious life, count for anything in the greater scheme of things?

In many ways, of course, it doesn’t. Which is why I still might not publish this post. But, if I do publish it, I will have concluded that in some important ways it does matter.

According to Myers-Briggs introverts are out-numbered three to one. The norm is extraversion. If balance is a good thing to achieve in a society, perhaps it is not just about redressing obviously destructive imbalances such as an over-idealisation of articulate reason above  stuttering intuition, but it is also about not over-valuing easy energetic affability at the expense of a reflective quietness that is easily wearied with too much company. Both may be capable of great kindness (or great cruelty) but in very different ways and our acquired preference for an extraverted style should not blind us to the value of each style’s kind of kindness.

We also should not end mistaking superficial charm and ease in company with a deep compassionate connection with other people. At the risk of treading into areas that will confuse the point I’m trying to make, Gordon Brown’s failure to win the voters over was not entirely to do with policy – it had a lot to do with image. His was not an easy manner and that may have masked the worth of underlying principles of great value. Take this as simply a convenient illustration of my point that our culture may overvalue social graces at the expense of the substance of true grace, which is a spiritual quality: don’t let its possible party political implications sink the whole argument. The greater flaw may not be his but ours and we all need to be aware of that possibility. We may be judging others on criteria that blind us to the true nature of their worth, a form of prejudice.

Jeremy Rifkin, in his uneven but compelling book The Empathic Civilisation, puts his finger on what should be the main thing we look out for both in ourselves and in each other as well as in the kind of society we are creating by our decisions about who to vote for, who to relate to and who to help (page 156-157).

Freedom means being able to optimise the full potential of one’s life, and the fulfilled life is one of companionship, affection, and belonging, made possible by ever deeper and more meaningful personal experiences and relationships with others. One is free, then, to the extent that one has been nurtured and raised in a society that allows for empathetic opportunities.

He gives an example of what he is talking about:

Nelson Mandela is a good case study of the embodied sense of freedom. In the more than twenty-three years he was imprisoned, often in solitary confinement, he chose to befriend his jailers. He reached out to them as unique individuals with their own personal struggles. Rather than attempting to be invulnerable and stoic, he chose to be humane. His jailers began to experience him as a human being. Their preconceived biases melted away as they came to admire Mandela and finally trust him as a fellow human being whose struggles were not unlike their own.

(page 158)

Qualities such as those have little if anything to do with temperamental differences of personal style. Marti Olsen Laney makes this very clear in her book The Introvert Advantage:

[Introvert] bring important attributes to the party – the ability to focus deeply, an understanding of how change will affect everyone involved, the capacity to observer, a propensity for thinking outside the box, the strength to make unpopular decisions, and the strength to slow the world down a notch. . . . As a society we don’t see introverts accurately because we are looking at them through a lens of incorrect assumptions.

(pages 35-37)

The Myers-Briggs model of personality makes it plain that introversion can be combined with very right-brain qualities such as intuition, sensitivity to others and openness to experience. It’s a style that, when combined with them, enacts those qualities unobtrusively. Other people, the person themself even, might tend to assume they are lacking in the introvert while, at the same time, leaping to the first impression that every extravert they meet has them in spades.

In the end everyone, introvert and extravert alike, has the capacity to develop and evince the qualities Mandela had. There are many examples throughout history of people who reach out empathically across seemingly insuperable divides and my guess would be that introverts are represented amongst them exactly in proportion to their presence in the wider population. Perhaps there’s an interesting research project in there somewhere.

For Bahá’ís the greatest example of this way of being in the world is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of the Founder of our Faith and seen as its perfect exemplar. For anyone wishing to get a measure of what the Faith stands for, there is no better place to start than looking at His life. He spent most of His days in prison and in exile, with His life frequently in danger. None the less after His death, at His funeral:

On November 29, 1921, ten thousand people–Jews, Christians, and Muslims from all persuasions and denominations — gathered on Mount Carmel in the Holy Land to mourn the passing of One who was eulogized as the essence of “Virtue and Wisdom, of Knowledge and Generosity.” On that occasion, `Abdu’l-Bahá — Bahá’u'lláh’s Son and chosen successor — was described by a Jewish leader as a “living example of self-sacrifice,” by a Christian orator as One who led humanity to the “Way of Truth,” and by a prominent Muslim leader as a “pillar of peace” and the embodiment of “glory and greatness.” His funeral, according to a Western observer, brought together a great throng “sorrowing for His death, but rejoicing also for His life.”

`Abdu’l-Bahá (Star of the West, Volume 11, or Volume 7 in the printed version, page 177) spoke once of  ’the science of sociability.’ This phrase summarises the kinds of quality the lives of such people demonstrate which we should be seeking to develop in ourselves and foster and encourage in others, rather than focusing on and fretting about irrelevant aspects of personal style that obscure what really matters and confuse us about how we should be in our relationships to other people.

I must try and remember that. All the processes of socialisation in my early life pushed me towards feeling guilty about my morally neutral personal style without helping me much to see where the real issues lay. That’s why I decided to post this after all in case I was not alone in having had to reprogramme my thinking both about myself and about other people.

 

 

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Up in the Air: A Comic Take on the Machine Mind

It’s unfailingly intriguing to notice how what we read becomes a filter colouring our experience. When what we are experiencing is part of the culture which produces what we read the effect is perhaps not quite so surprising: the colour may already be in the experience.

What on earth am I blethering about?

Well, a bit late in the day, I’ve watched on DVD George Clooney’s latest romcom for the unromantic, Up in the Air.

One of the synopses reads:

Ryan Bingham’s job is to fire people from theirs. The anguish, hostility, and despair of his “clients” has left him falsely compassionate, living out of a suitcase, and loving every second of it. When his boss hires arrogant young Natalie, she develops a method of video conferencing that will allow termination without ever leaving the office – essentially threatening the existence Ryan so cherishes. Determined to show the naive girl the error of her logic, Ryan takes her on one of his cross country firing expeditions, but as she starts to realize the disheartening realities of her profession, he begins to see the downfalls to his way of life. Written by The Massie Twins

Film fanatics’ health warning – the rest of this post contains spoilers!

The film unsteadily walks a tightrope between cynicism and sentimentality just about managing not to fall off. The temptation to link its themes to my recent reading was irresisitible.

We have a comic-lite take on McGilchrist’s (see my recent review) left-brain world where human beings are ciphers at best, machines at worst, fodder for exploitation. A privileged servant of the machine-mind has his life-style threatened when someone steps in to mechanise him.  No more travel — all the glamour of that life holed below the waterline by a young upstart’s video-conferencing plan.

We watch him lecturing to dimly lit audiences about his empty philosophy of life – dump all your commitments, be a free spirit, have no ties. McGilchrist describes how the left-hemisphere, untrammelled by the right-brain’s truer take on actual felt reality, swallows its own out-of-touch propaganda, exactly as Bingham has done in the film.

In case we don’t catch on that this is really no way to live, we watch him slowly begin to question the values upon which he has built his quarantine life-style. We see the virus of a genuine connection with other people infect his sterile existence. He even ends up, at his sister’s wedding, persuading the bridegroom, who is having second thoughts, to commit what his philosophy regards as the cardinal error – he gets him to marry.

The experience of the film then becomes coloured by another book I’m reading – Jeremy Rifkin‘s The Empathic Civilisation. That I bought and am reading this massive fascinating 600 page book is entirely the fault of my good friend, Barney. If he had not recommended it I would never have heard of it and you would not now be having it inflicted on you. So, you know who is really to blame.

Rifkin’s basic thesis is:

Much of our daily interaction with our fellow human beings is empathic because that is the core of our nature. Empathy is the very means by which we create social life and advance civilisation.

(Page 16)

 

There is a darker side to civilisation which he also explores which corresponds in some ways to what McGilchrist analyses so compellingly (page 26): ‘the human inclination to continually transcend our sense of isolation’ results in our ‘seeking the companionship of others in ever more complex energy-consuming social arrangements.’ Discovering that we could meet our material needs better by herding cattle led to the realisation that herding people had the same effect. The hunger for ever more resources that complexity brings in its wake threatens the very complexity it seeks to nurture.

Bingham’s clumsily managed epiphany at the wedding enacts the empathic core  of his nature that he has always denied. Thankfully, the film does not completely lose its integrity here and Bingham does not find a new connected empathic way of life in the cling-free arms of his jet-setting companion, Alex. When he calls on her unexpectedly, after abandoning the platform in a fit of schmaltz during one his lectures, he find she is married with two children.

His nemesis, the upstart with the video-conferencing idea, has quit her job and her idea has died with her departure. His long-haul way of life is reinstated and we see him in the end standing in an airport staring at a departure screen, a sadder and a wiser man trapped in his own connection-free zone.

How else am I to read this but as a tragicomic parable of disconnected left-brain man denying the essence of his own empathic nature?

“It’s just a romcom with a twist, for heaven’s sake!’ I hear you snap.

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