There’s a very well put-together back-to-back exhibition of Hilma AF Klint and Piet Mondrian at the Tate Modern. It works nicely – both artists moving from painting landscapes to abstraction; and both dallied with spirituality. Amusingly there’s a letter written exhibited from Mondrian to Rudolf Steiner, which Steiner didn’t reply to, and which transaction infuriated Mondrian.
I first came across Klint in this beautiful old book. She’s been manna for the recent gender revision of art, like that written by the art historian Katy Hessell. I do very much like the big canvases but it’s the intimate things that are, on a devotional level, far more powerful. A case in point being Klint’s “Tree of Knowledge” series. Best of all though was these watercolour studies of plants (see above). They look like regular botanical illustrations but, knowing Klint, you sense that they are freighted with so much more. Positively glowing with bhakti.
This Friday I went along to XR’s “The Big One”. I thought I’d attach myself to a faction and, because I’ve taken refuge, the natural fit was with the XR Buddhists. I joined their Telegram group and immediately found myself volunteering to help out. Our leader Joseph Mishan asked me to collect an UNFUCK THE SYSTEM banner from Main Stage at Great College Street (where later I passed Brian Eno) and bring it to the group at Little Sanctuary on the corner of Parliament Square where they were camped.
None of us could find the banner on any of the vans which streamed in loaded with awnings, stage blocks, drums, flags, sand bags, sculptures and PAs. This event is huge operation logistically and the organisation complicated. A quite important-seeming guy Jamie and a woman Poppy combed through a spreadsheet on a laptop which was flecked with raindrops trying to identify where it might be. When I started sensing I was making a nuisance of myself I beat a retreat. Joseph reassured me that it wasn’t essential.
Joseph Mishan.
Behind The Supreme Court Joseph led a couple of meditation exercises. He instructed us to partner up and share our feelings about climate change. A very sweet lady Shirley and I took turns to run over our fears and hopes. Then we bannered up and headed off in twin-file to Tufton Street.
On this walk I joined up with a lady called Liz who, travelling from Bournemouth, had dropped her dog with a friend in the west country, and spent a night with her daughter in East London. No small feat of organisation itself. There wasn’t the slightest indication that these were the entitled bourgeoisie that the movement’s critics allege. I was the only posh person I encountered. Hello me.
After a pitstop at St John’s Square our division sat peacefully in Sukhasana on the wet road outside Tufton Strett. Joseph asked me if I would be able instead to stand with my “eyes of the world” banner near the podium and so I gladly obliged.
55 Tufton Street is significant to XR because it is the home of the Global Warming Policy Foundation which we were informed seeks to undermine the scientific consensus around the climate emergency.
Joseph gave a great and succinct speech reading from the group’s DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE. I especially like how this statement uses the philosophical and scientific insight at the heart of Buddhism, the principle of Pratītyasamutpāda or “dependent origination”:
The climate emergency brings both the most terrible of possibilities and the most transformational. The possibility of mass extinction of life on this planet is forcing upon us a truth long forgotten by the so-called developed world: that all things are connected. We have lived too long in a delusion of separation, disconnected from our true selves and the astonishing grace and beauty of human and non-human animals, plants, rivers and mountains with which we share our world.
Looking right and left along Tufton Street revealed that there was a healthy-sized crowd of us.
After Joseph had finished and the XR Buddhists had had their platform, a woman (whose name I didn’t catch) took the mic and discussed the work of the GWPF and the significance of targeting them. To break up her thorough history of the group she set up a call-and-response in which she would name a person involved and the crowd would call out “Tell the Truth”.
I had a curious sensation of déjà vu when she called out “Jacob Rees-Mogg” whose room was across the street from mine at school. People would often burst into my room and throw wet loo-roll out of the window at Jacob as he walked in the alleyway between our houses holding his umbrella. Always holding an umbrella I remember, thinking of it now it must have been as much to look the part as for self-protection. Even then he was a figure of intense dislike. I thought Jacob was extremely eccentric to a bizarre degree, but I never thought to hurl anything at him. In truth I found him quite enchanting as one might do a very peculiar animal. Although I am 100% behind the science, I don’t expect Rees-Mogg thinks he is lying, so it was odd to be asking him to tell the truth…
It’s that same familiar dynamic from the culture wars of sticking pins in people, of either side of the divide shaming and belittling the other. “You’re a bad person!”, “No you!” It can only serve to harden the subject’s incorrect beliefs. It’s very easy to get caught up with it, of taking sides oneself. For instance, for many years I found myself (naively) as an apologist for David Cameron. I sincerely believed he was a reconstructed type! This was due in many respects to being worn down by the unremitting focus on Old Etonians in the media. Every time the Labour Party wheeled it out my heart would sink. What about those titans Shelley, Huxley and Orwell? And when it comes to the environment in particular which one of us is blameless? Although I appreciate the value of XR that’s why I’m probably more at peace with taking whatever personal measures seem constructive, and why in particular I feel the XR Buddhists are on the right track. Dharma innit.
After Tufton Street I wandered round the corner to the DEFRA building.
Before resuming my day as a gratefully insignificant person. Phew.
Jung is underrated as an artist. There are some fabulous illustrations in The Red Book; indeed there could be less text… There’s an interesting story of how, after his own “breakthrough” experience one of Jung’s female followers had been keenly encouraging his art. Jung heeded this for a while before, presumably judging his pictures wanting, he dismissed the attention as sycophancy and summarily devoted his energy to Analytic Psychology.
These images, the bottom four certainly from The Red Book, all depict the Cosmic Tree. In the catalogue of The Botanical Mind exhibition the curators comment of his interest in it: “The tree was a recurring motif, pictured as both supporting and connecting every aspect of the cosmos. Planted in the earth its roots reach down through the terrestrial realm toward darkness and the shadow realm, whilst its branches stretch up through the celestial, toward the star-filled heavens.”
My uncle is closely involved with the charity Being Alongside. I’ve been to a few of their conferences primarily to show support for him, but they are always interesting. Being Alongside, a Christian organisation, approach mental illness as a condition to be aided by compassionate intervention. Unlike the generation of countercultural thinkers, they don’t concern themselves with the connection between the spiritualised state and psychological problems. The countercultural position is that mental health problems manifest in equivalence to the difference between consonance and dissonance in music. In normal states of mind the volume is low, even imperceptible. At higher volumes spiritual states of mind can be equated to consonance and mental illness to dissonance.
Jonathan Aitken looking at us slightly askance.
This latest talk featured The Reverend Jonathan Aitken (prison chaplain) and Neil Fraser (Custody Manager) of HMP Pentonville. Aitken is a celebrated poster-boy for Christianity. An MP in John Major’s government he suffered disgrace in a law suit against The Guardian in which he committed perjury, and ended up spending seven months at Her Majesty’s pleasure. He was made bankrupt and was divorced to boot. His downfall and subsequent conversion to Christianity was greeted in some quarters with cynicism, but the church loves a repentant sinner, and, I dunno, he seems like a good egg.
Aitken talked about his experiences of being (briefly) the most vilified individual in the UK and about how he carved himself a niche at Belmarsh writing and reading letters for his fellow inmates. An opening act he was keen to set up his colleague at Pentonville Neil Fraser who has been instrumental in the initiative to set up and run an ADHD and Autism “Neurodiversity wing” in G-block.
Neil Fraser discussing life in G block.
This continuum between the prison and clinic is interesting for a number of reasons. One knows from reading Foucault’s “Madness and Civilisation” that all manner of people were confined in the original asylums with genuinely mentally ill people being in the minority:
“From the creation of the Hôpital Général, from the opening, in Germany and in England, of the first houses of correction, and until the end of the eighteenth century, the age of reason confined. It confined the debauched, spendthrift fathers, prodigal sons, blasphemers, men who ‘see to undo themselves,’ libertines… One-tenth of all the arrests made in Paris for the Hôpital Général concern ‘the insane,’ ‘demented’ men, individuals of ‘wandering mind,’ and ‘persons who have become completely mad.’ Between these and the others, no sign of a differentiation.”
Fraser, who is described by Aitken as a very tough correctional officer, could perhaps be viewed in the same light as the earliest asylum doctors who, as Foucault elaborates, worked their miraculous therapy by policing ethical behaviour amongst their charges:
“In the time of Pinel and Tuke, this power had nothing extraordinary about it; it was explained and demonstrated in the efficacity, simply of moral behaviour…
I pointed out to Fraser that it was an extremely stressful position they had found themselves in and asked him whether they had received any therapeutic training or support. To my surprise he opened up and explained very movingly that, starved of funds, he and his colleagues have received practically no help at all. The profession is apparently dogged with staff barely coping with the pressure.
The results on the intervention in the Neurodiversity wing have been really startling. Simple measures like knocking on cell doors and waiting a minute outside (by which approach prisoners on the spectrum are not overwhelmed by an incoming herd of officers) or the use of a support dog called Dobby (the weekly appearance of whom is a highlight) have contributed to a radically different atmosphere. Prisoners interviewed in an internally-circulated video which has apparently gone viral in the service finds them sincerely expressing gratitude. Outcomes on release seem set to be more positive.
So great the way the parks department create these homes for insects in the tree undergrowth. It’s a lot easier than lugging all that timber away – and that’s not to criticise the strategy. The light touch innit.
There’s some colourful graffiti in the shelter beside the wood.
