I have experienced life from an offbeat, tragic and often dangerous arena. For years I careered through life, always frustrated, perplexed and ready to hate. I was envious of TV commercials and Situation Comedies that depicted perfectly healthy people living in perfectly healthy worlds. The Media don’t present aspects of life that is not the main-stream to the greater society. People should have the opportunity to access worlds that are not in view. I imagine there may be people reading this who will debate about how free society actually is and how every aspect of society is freely accessible to the public. However there are entertainments and TV shows, clinical in their construction, which grasp the focus of people and hooks them in for weeks, months, years. This process inhibits them focusing elsewhere. Not unlike addiction.
Also censorship exists in the form of ridiculing and demonising ideas and people that do not support the current political climate. Absolutely, deprivation occurs in many forms throughout society. However these are hidden from view due to cultural attitudes particular to a particular group. Keeping up with the Jones’s for example distracts people from addressing the many deficiencies existing within the family unit and communities. These deficiencies could be lack of shelter, food, warmth, cash, trust, thinking skills, emotional intelligence, sense of belonging, identity. I use the word deprivation in the sense of lacking opportunities that could aid growth. Gandhi reflected a similar sense of this when he said that poverty is the worst violence. In this sense poverty permeates the world over.
I have heard that the truth, like poverty, is also universal. However my experience has shown me that truth manifests in ways only pertaining to a particular group of people. I have found that the truth is different from group to group. For example I have still to meet the opposing gangs of drug dealers who share the same truth. Maybe if they did they would stop shooting each other. Politicians telling the truth about the communities they don’t even live in, is different from the truth coming from those who actually live within these communities. These groups have different beliefs, and believe differently. For example look at the two Glasgow children, one a catholic and the other one a protestant. Both of them are born in the same city a back court away from each other. Yet one child grows up believing the sky is green. The other one believing the grass is blue. Incidentally, there is a common saying among those people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction that states that religion is for those who do not want to go to Hell and spirituality is for those who have been there. My experience has indicated that being part of a religious order does not require you to be spiritual.
This incongruity applies from street gangs to governments to work environments. There is a belief among gang members of any city that if ever one member of their team is outnumbered by the members of an opposing gang, then that person should be willing to go ahead and face a beaten rather than retreat. The physical pain resulting from a beaten, or being stabbed, is no greater than the shame of being called a coward. There are safer and healthier ways to achieve prestige and raise ones esteem. How are these gang members to learn the truth that it does not have to be this way? Bereft of new ideas the prevailing ideas no matter how harsh will perpetuate.
Governments believe only any truth that will keep them in power. They have become so clever at this, that they will also let you believe anything that will keep them in power.
Middle Britain is populated by people who consider that they are well educated; fair minded and possessing a moral compass that forever points the correct direction. The truth to them is that other members of their group do not lie, bully, or have the capacity to be cruel. If evidence is presented of a middle class manager being a racist bully the social group that he/she is part of will be absolutely outraged denying this. The mind set of this group, their beliefs, and their truth is so narrow that the realities of life can’t possibly squeeze in there. Facts upset the illusory order that has become real to them.
What people believe prevails over the truth. Sophocles said that.
The truth causes chaos. I said that.
Subjective experience I have found to be linked to and shaped by small and bigger cultural influences. For example certain life events like divorce, breakup of the family unit and the erosion of significant relationships, bereavement, losing a job, mental health problems, being arrested; these could all contribute to a person to become withdrawn from the greater community and to become part of a sub-culture, all the while losing positive resources, societal, emotional and otherwise. This would more likely occur among poor people living in deprived communities than rich people living in affluent communities. It would also be more difficult for the poor person to resource the support required for their recovery and integration back into the mainstream community.
I am not citing Sociological study and research here. If anything, it is anecdotal evidence I present. It is my own subjective experience. I have spent my time living in and being part of sub-cultures. These sub-cultures have been crime, prison, addiction and homelessness. That brings me back to - Where do I start?
I would like to believe that I lived in and was part of the mainstream society. However I was brought up in a predominantly Catholic area by the River Clyde on the South Side of Glasgow that was blighted by poverty, sectarianism and ugly architecture. During this time and from an early age I felt a sense of being imprisoned. I lived in a tenement row on a short street. The road, the buildings, the weather and the water of the Clyde were grey. I felt hemmed in and felt that even the dirty brown clouds and the grey clouds conspired to press me down and force me to stay forever in this stage set of a street. I found it difficult to make contact with my surroundings. I did not feel that I came from here; that this was not my home. My family worked in the local industries; I read poetry secretly and fought square-go’s at school. By 12 years old I had been slashed in a gang fight.
As the years passed I have spent some time reflecting on this period of my life and today I view Glasgow as being squat, broad shouldered and carrying a book of poems by Edwin Morgan. The second City of the Empire wears a donkey jacket and the whisky stained brogues of the Celtic poet. It is a metropolis of playwrights and chibmen, or both, of journalists and neds, their worlds become blurred and are only partially manifested to be unpicked and separated via the television, newspapers, books and YouTube.
Maybe that’s what I am doing with this story also. Unpicking the knotted sub-cultures of my tousled life, separating strands and maybe freeing people and places to exist in their own time and place and to no longer be represented in my imagination, which is distorted by my own time. Maybe it is to let go? Perhaps there is no start? Perhaps there is only this, a representation of my own life experience being presented as a piece of art?
Art is as revolutionary as love and violence, and moves people as passionately! Art may transcend any beginnings and endings and present new ways of looking at life by the use of a portrait, a short story, poetry, graffiti, and a song. What we lose and what we find in art are similar to the losses and discoveries that are revealed to us in violence, love, cowardice and falsehoods. Losses and discoveries require bravery. What we discover about ourselves and become aware of, no matter the pain, frustration or embarrassment we experience, is more precious and relevant than what we discover about others. For the more we know ourselves the more we will know others.
George Bernard Shaw said that life isn’t about finding your self – life is about creating yourself! At a certain age in my childhood I felt that I was unfinished and abandoned. Like Art. My then feelings prompted an image of myself. I saw myself as a portrait torn and distressed, its slim wooden frame pierced and splintered by the hot lead and angry rubble that battered against it during the wars. I wearied through my childhood watchful as a ghost. Ceiling plaster white and stone dust grey cascading freely around me wherever I went. I was unable to connect with the living, and the Gods they taught me of were dead ones. Solitary sky gazing became my console. I realised that the Sun and the stars were shining because they were dying, not because they were living. Dying, without God or Man, they shone. I envied the courage of the Sun and the stars until I became conscious that we are made of the same stuff. During my last experience of withdrawals from heroin I heard a garbled whispering from deep within me. The words, mangled, sounded like ‘you do not have to live the way you are living any longer.’ This was me beginning, ever so tentatively, to recover. In the extreme pain of spasmodic withdrawals, dying, without God or Man, I began to recover...
Also censorship exists in the form of ridiculing and demonising ideas and people that do not support the current political climate. Absolutely, deprivation occurs in many forms throughout society. However these are hidden from view due to cultural attitudes particular to a particular group. Keeping up with the Jones’s for example distracts people from addressing the many deficiencies existing within the family unit and communities. These deficiencies could be lack of shelter, food, warmth, cash, trust, thinking skills, emotional intelligence, sense of belonging, identity. I use the word deprivation in the sense of lacking opportunities that could aid growth. Gandhi reflected a similar sense of this when he said that poverty is the worst violence. In this sense poverty permeates the world over.
I have heard that the truth, like poverty, is also universal. However my experience has shown me that truth manifests in ways only pertaining to a particular group of people. I have found that the truth is different from group to group. For example I have still to meet the opposing gangs of drug dealers who share the same truth. Maybe if they did they would stop shooting each other. Politicians telling the truth about the communities they don’t even live in, is different from the truth coming from those who actually live within these communities. These groups have different beliefs, and believe differently. For example look at the two Glasgow children, one a catholic and the other one a protestant. Both of them are born in the same city a back court away from each other. Yet one child grows up believing the sky is green. The other one believing the grass is blue. Incidentally, there is a common saying among those people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction that states that religion is for those who do not want to go to Hell and spirituality is for those who have been there. My experience has indicated that being part of a religious order does not require you to be spiritual.
This incongruity applies from street gangs to governments to work environments. There is a belief among gang members of any city that if ever one member of their team is outnumbered by the members of an opposing gang, then that person should be willing to go ahead and face a beaten rather than retreat. The physical pain resulting from a beaten, or being stabbed, is no greater than the shame of being called a coward. There are safer and healthier ways to achieve prestige and raise ones esteem. How are these gang members to learn the truth that it does not have to be this way? Bereft of new ideas the prevailing ideas no matter how harsh will perpetuate.
Governments believe only any truth that will keep them in power. They have become so clever at this, that they will also let you believe anything that will keep them in power.
Middle Britain is populated by people who consider that they are well educated; fair minded and possessing a moral compass that forever points the correct direction. The truth to them is that other members of their group do not lie, bully, or have the capacity to be cruel. If evidence is presented of a middle class manager being a racist bully the social group that he/she is part of will be absolutely outraged denying this. The mind set of this group, their beliefs, and their truth is so narrow that the realities of life can’t possibly squeeze in there. Facts upset the illusory order that has become real to them.
What people believe prevails over the truth. Sophocles said that.
The truth causes chaos. I said that.
Subjective experience I have found to be linked to and shaped by small and bigger cultural influences. For example certain life events like divorce, breakup of the family unit and the erosion of significant relationships, bereavement, losing a job, mental health problems, being arrested; these could all contribute to a person to become withdrawn from the greater community and to become part of a sub-culture, all the while losing positive resources, societal, emotional and otherwise. This would more likely occur among poor people living in deprived communities than rich people living in affluent communities. It would also be more difficult for the poor person to resource the support required for their recovery and integration back into the mainstream community.
I am not citing Sociological study and research here. If anything, it is anecdotal evidence I present. It is my own subjective experience. I have spent my time living in and being part of sub-cultures. These sub-cultures have been crime, prison, addiction and homelessness. That brings me back to - Where do I start?
I would like to believe that I lived in and was part of the mainstream society. However I was brought up in a predominantly Catholic area by the River Clyde on the South Side of Glasgow that was blighted by poverty, sectarianism and ugly architecture. During this time and from an early age I felt a sense of being imprisoned. I lived in a tenement row on a short street. The road, the buildings, the weather and the water of the Clyde were grey. I felt hemmed in and felt that even the dirty brown clouds and the grey clouds conspired to press me down and force me to stay forever in this stage set of a street. I found it difficult to make contact with my surroundings. I did not feel that I came from here; that this was not my home. My family worked in the local industries; I read poetry secretly and fought square-go’s at school. By 12 years old I had been slashed in a gang fight.
As the years passed I have spent some time reflecting on this period of my life and today I view Glasgow as being squat, broad shouldered and carrying a book of poems by Edwin Morgan. The second City of the Empire wears a donkey jacket and the whisky stained brogues of the Celtic poet. It is a metropolis of playwrights and chibmen, or both, of journalists and neds, their worlds become blurred and are only partially manifested to be unpicked and separated via the television, newspapers, books and YouTube.
Maybe that’s what I am doing with this story also. Unpicking the knotted sub-cultures of my tousled life, separating strands and maybe freeing people and places to exist in their own time and place and to no longer be represented in my imagination, which is distorted by my own time. Maybe it is to let go? Perhaps there is no start? Perhaps there is only this, a representation of my own life experience being presented as a piece of art?
Art is as revolutionary as love and violence, and moves people as passionately! Art may transcend any beginnings and endings and present new ways of looking at life by the use of a portrait, a short story, poetry, graffiti, and a song. What we lose and what we find in art are similar to the losses and discoveries that are revealed to us in violence, love, cowardice and falsehoods. Losses and discoveries require bravery. What we discover about ourselves and become aware of, no matter the pain, frustration or embarrassment we experience, is more precious and relevant than what we discover about others. For the more we know ourselves the more we will know others.
George Bernard Shaw said that life isn’t about finding your self – life is about creating yourself! At a certain age in my childhood I felt that I was unfinished and abandoned. Like Art. My then feelings prompted an image of myself. I saw myself as a portrait torn and distressed, its slim wooden frame pierced and splintered by the hot lead and angry rubble that battered against it during the wars. I wearied through my childhood watchful as a ghost. Ceiling plaster white and stone dust grey cascading freely around me wherever I went. I was unable to connect with the living, and the Gods they taught me of were dead ones. Solitary sky gazing became my console. I realised that the Sun and the stars were shining because they were dying, not because they were living. Dying, without God or Man, they shone. I envied the courage of the Sun and the stars until I became conscious that we are made of the same stuff. During my last experience of withdrawals from heroin I heard a garbled whispering from deep within me. The words, mangled, sounded like ‘you do not have to live the way you are living any longer.’ This was me beginning, ever so tentatively, to recover. In the extreme pain of spasmodic withdrawals, dying, without God or Man, I began to recover...
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