The truth can hurt

We all need a nemesis in our lives, someone something to contend with, to conflict our thoughts and beliefs, to disrupt our surety.
I have been reading Philip Roth's auto biography in which he writes the first half from the position of himself seen through his own rose-tinted spectacles and then, in the second part of the book he criticises the picture he has created by asking questions of the underlaying factors that brought into being the man so carefully constructed from the fiction which we all carry about regarding ourselves.
The imaginative construct (analysis from another or the other point of view) is so revealing. As  a process we could all benefit from it.
Our imagination taints everything. We construct a reason-based story about our lives of why we did what we did. We give it our best shot to define our movements. We construct an alibi to rid ourselves of the unpleasant fact of being at times, unpleasant.
Riding the wave of creative fiction we make our lives palatable, not just to others but more importantly, to ourselves.   It's not a question of highlighting the missed opportunities but of a deceit as to why we did what we did, (or didn't do), especially the issue of our interaction with people. We constructed walls to keep them out rather than doors to let them in. We were not whole-heartedly open, a defence against being hurt by ridicule from those not mature enough to begin this  trail of self examination, asking the question of others "was I really that bad"?
Roth is unerringly determined to find answers, not so much to change who he is but to put the record straight. 
It would do all of us some good to look into our own persona, before we depart and become, merely a memory

Lotto Fever

It's after 8.00pm and the results are out. Will I have won the 60 million pounds or has it gone elsewhere. With odds at 50 million to 1 is it worth the effort of checking, it's all too silly to even think that Lady Luck would shine on your patch. 
Luck that concept by which thousands, millions of people throughout their lives place such emphasis. The gambler who try's to double his opportunity by increasing his stake to negate the previous failure. The person who wildly assumes that because someone must win then the involvement in the game brings them closer to winning. 
Perceptions are at the root of our failure to confront the fact that at 50 million to 1 your chance of kissing a frog which then turns into a princess is only slighter more unlikely. Of course being the frog yourself and finding the princesses flocking to your side after winning 60 million is a far better bet.
This fantasising of immediate riches and the mental games we play, spending and giving the money, sets in perspective the values we have and how money distorts value. 
Of course to be able to give someone who is battling sufficient to dig them out of their financial hole is a tremendous idea especially since we know people who are maimed by the weight of debt given the pressure of interest on interest on interest, and can never emerge into the daylight. It's interesting that one of the main tenets of Islam is the ban on charging or receiving interest, perhaps it was an antidote to the Middle Eastern market place and the business of the Jewish money lenders.
The queues in Tesco's and Sainsbury's to buy a Lottery ticket at £2 each were long, as the punters began to panic in the lead up to the draw. 50 million to 1 wasn't in their mindset since they must have reasoned that this ticket they were buying, not the one the chap in front had just bought, was the winner. It's not a question of optimism perhaps more a question of pessimism. Pessimism with the way their empty lives are running without a huge wad of notes to back up what ever they do, lives which have become so devalued that we need 60 million to make good.

Fact from fiction

Writing is both imaginary as well as factual. Writing is about yourself but much of it is based on the fiction of storytelling which is a disconnect from the real life story but still relies on the real life component, you, to tell it and you tell it with the real life you so mixed in with the fiction such that it's difficult to tell where the one starts and the other leaves off.
A good story has to grow with a life of its own, the moment of your writing, the creation of a character and their story as it unfurls is what makes it real and the biographical aspect which is the source of the ingredients you add to the dish is not the finished product by any means.
Creativity is to walk the walk with your character, to envisage how their day and the issues that arise in it can seem real.  They have an ingredient which everyone recognises as real and possible. The genius of a writer is to create a complex "who done it" without it being a crime story, simply a life story as it unfurls with the scrapes and escapes which we all get into and which makes our lives hopefully rich and liveable. 
To believe the story you have to believe in the character and to believe in the character they have to have a component that most people can relate to. 
Your knowledge is based on the people in your own life, they with all their warts and disfigurement,  they contain the texture of what you know about real people, not the idealised person you might wish to imagine they were. 
If I were to write a story about Swansea and set it amongst the wet, tiered, bleak housing which makes up parts of the town and add the unrelenting grey wet sky which presses down on the spirit each day as the wind loosens the refuse bags of their rubbish, strewing the paper and discarded bits of flotsam which make up our lives, onto the street further depressing the landscape. Its then that I can introduce the first of my fictional/factional characters, perhaps as they step out of the door, up the steps to wrestle with the gate which still needs fixing. The character begins to walk and eventually talk, first to themselves and then to someone they know standing on the corner, sheltering from the rain. Both conversations are rich in opportunity. The internal one relates to what happened last night when you were out in the town and here lies the crux of the story the second is based on the reality of carrying on, regardless of the great secret which burdens the teller.
And so a story unfolds carrying the reader with its plausibility and the potentially unspoken crisis. There is one in all of us and we want to read about others which are similar but oblique to our own, comforted to know we are not alone.
There can be only so many story lines but the writers tapestry is emblazoned by the craftsman-ship of the weave and the colour which make it stand out.
I have to emphasise that I have never tried to write fiction although perhaps my imagination and a wide pallet of experience from across the world would provide the seed corn for a story or two.
My guru has become Philip Roth and his fund of personal experience. Growing up as a Jew and assimilating his objective persona with the subjective baggage of his tribe. His tussle with who he was to become through the indoctrination of his upbringing and the realisation that not every-thing could be contained in it. His intellectual journey is too engrossing to feel limited by his birthright and whilst it provided a yardstick it was not the whole measure of the man.

The big question (Europe) and BREXIT

This is the year of the great debate "should we stay in the European Union".

The referendum which may take place as soon as June is probably as momentous a political decision as any we are asked to make.

Is there an inevitability about coming out. Loosening our bond with the EU because of its proclaimed aim of eventual Federalisation and the concomitant loss of National Identity and the inability to control ones own destiny. 

Is the EU not much more than the result of Globalisation and the control of everything passing to the financiers.

We have had the case for European Unity which in the 50s and the 60s meant a consolidation of values, values which in the past had been used as a reason for going to war. Inevitably the daily discourse between nations and having a conduit to funnel those discussions, (the EU),  meant that we see we had more in common with each other and that the jingoism which national leaders and their parliaments used to whip up a fabricated cause, was not in anyone's interest other than a small coterie of industrialists who saw money to be made.

Is the EU democratic ? It elects members to sit in its parliament but the organisation  seems to be governed by committees of bureaucrats who formulate the rules and then pass the new already formulated provisions through a complicated collective majority voting system which bypasses the national preference. In some ways the electorate are one further step away from democratic accountability (if there ever was such a thing) since in electing their own national parliament, a large percentage of voters falling on the wrong side of their preference, they have little or no say in the decisions which are handed down by the EU.   These decisions which in a National Parliament can be overturned by electing the Opposition at the next General Election, and who may see fit to abolish the law are powerless in the collective called the European Union.

The one thing I will say is that the blend of political opinion across the spectre of Europe has to my mind a wider, more humanitarian, society orientated taste than the class driven individualistic system we have in this country. There are many regulations which the man in the street benefits from which emanate from European legislation and which would never have reached the statute book left to the special interest groups which make up our parliament in Westminster. 

Would there be a loss of entry into the European market place. Would any losses be made up in the world wide markets which are beginning to flourish. This is unanswerable other than to say it's in our own hands. We can wrest back the industrial and design skills which we were once proud of.  We can reapply the finance which currently is used in the financial casino to investment in manufacturing, directed as a national priority. We are not a Polynesian Island and we do have the educational structors to provide the know how so long as the investment is there.

Of course we would face the tariff barriers which non EU countries face when selling into Europe and depending on the product these can be substantial. Of course we sell more to Europe than Europe buys from us so the disadvantage might be compensated for and of course, we would be free to look for markets elsewhere which currently we can not do without being constrained by the limits that are imposed on us by having to follow the EU rules and regulations.

Of course here we get to the pith of the matter since matters such as 'Health and Safety', 'Standards of Production', even 'Wages and Conditions' generally are the subject of EU Law and we are obliged to ensure our workforce and and workplace meet the standards won over the decades since our joining. One of the obstacles to the Global Monoliths treating everything in terms of the bottom line (the profit) and ignoring the human misery which comes from unregulated labour arrangements, (an example is the rise of China and cheap sweatshop manufacturing) has been the strength of the European belief in a balanced economy where the society is considered and not misused. The neocon Free Marketeers are queuing up for an opportunity to scrap the standards which protect us and for Market Forces to be free to find their level.

The world used to be our market place and perhaps because we have relinquished much of the productive capital and know how we are not in a fit position to tender our goods and services. Perhaps the cold douche of reality will stimulate this Island into putting things right or perhaps more likely it will put out the fires for ever and we can become a Theme Park and compete with Disney

Is Europe secure and definable any more. Europe has found difficulty in harmonising the countries who are members and this has led to financial strain which is still unresolved. 

Greece as an example is a financial basket case which predominantly Germany won't sanction the necessary restructuring to allow it to become viable again. A bankruptcy court would sever its previous debt and constrain its spending power but Germany, for political or ideological reasons says no and there is no arguing with the Bundesbank. There are other nations Spain, Italy, Ireland  in a similar position. Would we want to be under the thumb of Frau Merkel ?

 I know we don't have any battleships to remind her of our voice but to have a voice at all, is something.

Is the dream of the free movement of labour too much of a danger now with the huge influx of people from the Middle East with their cultural and religious differences that overtime produce immense strains on the indigenous (if still recognisable) population. Do our political class still make decisions based on labour quotas as has Mrs Merkel in the hope that the good nature of the local population will assimilate and, more to the point be assimilated by the new comers.

Will the social construct of a multiracial society stand the weight of time or will we all be at each other's throats, not as in the past, nation on nation but person to person, within the national state?

Going back to the beginning

 So much men pin their hearts upon !

When all is said and done we are a funny lot, planning and scheming, hoping, gambling with our time trying to make reason with our disappointments and not a little surprised when thing go right.

From morning till night we follow well trodden paths, rituals of behaviour, finding peace in the routine as if the repetitive act is an acknowledgement that we are on course to get through another day. 

Where did the joy of discovery go, when did the thrill of another relationship no matter how brief made us feel alive, when we're the uplands places to find and conquer, to tick off, an attainment to add to our ever growing experience.
We give in to conformity, uniformity, and the deformity of ourselves in so many ways in this passage through the one and only life we have.
Some, many are contented with the scraps they have managed to pick up. A little battered and bruised  but on the whole satisfied to have come through it with a commemoration, he/she was a good person who did no harm.
Is that enough ?  Would it be better that he was a terror who lived his/her life on the edge, always looking for new ways to experiment and find what it was that we were born for.
Now there is a question. We're we born to achieve or simply exist. We're we born to question or we're we born to accept our lot with the rest. Was there a reason for us being alive, a deep fundamental reason for doing what we did when we did it or we're we like the herd, just following the one ahead.
Society is constructed it didn't just come into being. It depended on our birth, we are expected to fill the role provided and therefore, within a narrow constricted space we were cajoled into mimicking others, like animals in a circus repeating the same tricks.
As we become less useful we are allowed off the treadmill to look around for the last time at the world and our place in it. We see ourselves, sometimes for the first time without the garment of work or provider, a garment which we had gathered around ourselves for all these years as if in a play, the cloak pronouncing who we were and what was expected of us. Shorn of the part, without the character to play we have to reinvent ourselves, in a sense go back to the beginning when without clothes we were what we were.

Osmosis

Life. Your own life. That mixture of hopes and dreams mixed up in events. 

The orthodoxy that one grows by osmosis, the assimilation of ideas and experiences which form your character and temper your mind to believe certain things  has a pleasing, almost Darwinian ring to it
Where you are born and to whom you are born is immensely important in this process of development but it casts you for a part you may not wished to play.

The surroundings and the feedback from those surroundings may have a positive or a negative effect. It may contort you into a struggle which is still being fought and for which there is probably no satisfactory answer. Square pegs into round holes comes to mind and a life spent trying to justify the fit. 

When you were very young and unharmed by opinion, your life had as many paths and many opportunities. Given the right tools you could have achieved almost anything. 

Place a violin in the hands of a three year old or set the child on an exercise regime to run under 10sec for the 100m and one can achieve a series of goals that would mark that person out for a measure of success in life. 

Let life unfurl in a laissez faire, non-interventionist role and the outcome is like roulette, a game of chance.
Is it then, in early childhood where we are failed, often by high minded experts and their attitude towards discipline which is kept off the agenda for fear of breaking little Jimmies the 'spirit'. 

This thing called "spirit" some would describe as an "effervescence" having no real meaning, other than the  romanticised concept of what a child's early years should be like. 

We see this spirit or at least one aspect of it, in the consequence of the refusal to 'dictate to a child a course of action you know is for the best'. The tantrum which many ill disciplined children display is the result of not providing guidelines, what is acceptable and non acceptable, and it could be argued the greater the guiding hand the better adjusted the child.

Are we nothing more than a fiction a story which could have been so much better told if the plot had been worked out beforehand.

One of the successes of the Jewish nation is the understanding that success comes through training and repartition. The rules that decide your path in a good Jewish household are tied up in religious dogma but the results rarely fail. The boy or girl is not free to experiment willy nilly, they have a responsibility to the tribe which is larger and more precious than to themselves alone. It is this 'hand holding' and 'guidance' which prevents the child getting lost in its own world. The spirit is not destroyed but moulded to a greater objective and the secret of success both as an individual and as a nation is the acceptance of objectives which lie outside ones own private experience or control.

Looking into the future

Well it's the start of a New Year and things just go rolling on. 

Time of course pays no reference to our quirk of placing so much importance on events which we note by the passage of time.

Birthdays, holidays, festivals, all are either looked forward to, or remembered, hopefully with pleasure as signposts during the year. Nostalgia plays its part, that sentimental yearning for a time gone by or a person missing in your life, made more acute by the festivities around you.

It's hard to gatherer ones resources and continue to plough on when there seems such little value in doing so but we do, through the routine we have suckered ourselves with, the breakfast ritual, the early morning walk, the call on the shop to pick up the newspaper and the milk. 

Without the drive of employment and the crack of the whip to guide you forward we become a bit rudderless in this the first stage of the new year and it's now that we are most vulnerable. Living in the Northern Hemisphere it's winter and the weather is at its least attractive, our spirits kept low by the dark and the rain. I often turn this on its head by marvelling how fortunate I am to have a secure roof over my head where I am warm and well fed. Looking out of the window as the rain beats against glass I feel like the pig who built his house of brick and was secure from the Wolf no matter what was going on outside. This sense of security is a foundation on which to build ones spirits and it becomes the linch pin for everything we do throughout the year. 

As we venture out we have the return journey to look forward to, the key in the door and the familiarity of a cup of hot tea. I was going to say,  and a tasty bacon sandwich but I will get into trouble from my Vegan friends.

Life goes on. Some are lucky to be choosing a summer cruise and a year full of events. They are the resourceful ones who look forward to, as much the planning, as the actual business of setting off. The brochures depict the places in bright technicolor and the Copywriter is an expert at creating  a scene to wet the appetite. 

Even a trip down to see old Jim has its anticipatory value although one must beware that Jim is, unlike yourself, getting old, maybe a little senile and the conversation drys up in the first half hour. The real unfortunates are the ones who haven't the resources to travel but then even here there is often a stoic understanding that within a small radius one has more than enough and for many who do get up and go somewhere, when asked, are sorely tried to describe much more than the hotel they stayed in !!

So we are where we are, treating each day as an opportunity to do something different, or better, as an opportunity to be at peace with oneself and just chill !!!

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