Happily Ever After

..Happily ever after.

That’s the story, but in this case,
The wolf wins,
Jack the Giant Killer falls

No youngest son outsmarts the shadows;
in this case the most that can be said
of those left
of those eager to believe
of the listeners at the doors of faith,
yes the most that can be said is
And they lived…

I wrote this for my son Theo when he died, nineteen years ago. The (for me) unfortunate concurrence of National Happiness Day and National Storytelling Day on his birthday prompt me to post it. Not every story has a happy ending.

Not many people have seen it, and I hope the few new people who do now aren’t upset by it. It stands, I guess, as a remembrance that Happiness is not (or should not be) a smug thing but a springboard for compassionate action, and that for millions of people their lives are far worse than mine, and for millions the sadness of losing a child is a painful reality. And as it is this afternoon I have chopped logs and chased away the shadows, and am typing tentatively as I watch a kestrel on the top of a tree in our garden, I rejoice in my family and my dear friends, but…

Western Roots of Compassion

Not much more than a retweet, really.

I was chuffed to be asked for a contribution to the blog #365daysofcompassion and responded with this piece. The idea that compassion is a new phenomenon is the West is a bit silly, and i wanted to turn a rather random spotlight on a few authors and ideas. There is much more to say, of course – so much so that I can’t help thinking that there is a richer seam here than might first appear, books and books of stuff. I would have liked to explore St Ambrose more, or look at the world of Julian of Norwich, not just her writings, and then maybe looked at the charitable orders of the period immediately prior to and post the Reformation. Or gone beyond my own Catholic point of view to look at the Salvation Army, the Friends (Quakers) such as Elizabeth Fry or Christian Socialists such as the McMillan sisters – or to look at movements and people in different ways?

As Philip Sheldrake puts it,

The pages of Christian history are strewn with marginalized people and traditions as well as forgotten or disparaged ideas.

and looking at a range of compassionate practices in detail would require a meticulous exploration of people we sometimes overlook, from Beguines and Eudists to Leprosaria. Some of the institutions have changed in purpose or patronage and some of this has been in response to changes of understanding in what suffering is and where it can be alleviated. The biggest thing I think I’d want to add, therefore, is something about how our realisation of suffering changes and has changed since the writers I explored in the 365Days blog, and how a critical appraisal of the “history of compassion” needs to take this into account.

I said in my 365Days post that “compassion… appears in all sorts of different guises.” As we become aware of the pressure or demands on that compassion, perhaps we do need to look back more, to find some sense or strength – or simply answers to problems – to create the kind of opposition to the looming clouds of intolerance we seem to be facing in uncertain times. This cannot be something that a positive overview such as my 365Days blog can achieve, and Sheldrake concludes this section in Spirituality and History by noting that

…cataclysmic events such as the Holocaust have caused much heart-searching about Christian history and have heightened our consciousness of its ambiguity…It seems that we can no longer avoid the need to approach even our cherished spiritual traditions and their history in a much more critical fashion.

That this dehumanisation also occurred in the Middle Ages (and earlier) is not the issue here: it’s how our hearing and seeing now brings about a different response.

Or can do. We are faced on one hand with compassion fatigue, on another by the celebritisation of charity – and on a grimmer side by holocaust denial, or the outpouring of hatred when an enemy is seen suffering. Slower communication means less frenetic communication, perhaps?

Sauron’s Mission Statement

O Felix Culpa, O happy fault. (Here at 6’14” in English and here at 5’49” in the original Latin). Lent is here, the Easter celebrations (from which this quotation comes) will soon be here. And I’m thinking about Evil, or more specifically what fantasy writers envisage their real big baddies are after. I don’t find it straightforward.

In one of the best recent meditations on good and evil – maybe the Best, and certainly the funniest – Good Omens, Adam, the child who is supposed to be the AntiChrist is entertained with this rhyme:

Oh the grand old Duke of York
He had Ten Thousand Men
He Marched them Up to the Top of the Hill
And Crushed all the nations of the world and brought them under the rule of Satan our master.

This comedy underlies one of the principal themes of the book, in which the mundane and the transcendent meet in drily witty distjuncture and/or a poignant juxtaposition of ideas.

And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

O Felix Culpa. This is a comic-book version – a satire, really – of the Bosch-like vision of Hell: at heart Pratchett and Gaiman are looking at an anthropology of good and evil, not a grand theodicy, and Adam, the boy at the centre of Armageddon escapes the wrath of God, the disapproval of his demonic progenitor and the very real discipline of his earthly father to and go and play, “half angel, half devil, all human…” with an apple or two he has scrumped on the way.

And in this satire of the Apocalypse, Hell is seen not only as painted in C16th horror, but as an antiquated and bullying bureaucracy; Heaven is imperious and out of touch, The downright nastiness of a Medieval Inferno is offset by an inability to manage modern technology; rank on rank the hosts of Heaven don’t really know what God plans are for Armageddon. These failures of evil occur elsewhere: the Big Bad (were)Wolf in Grandma’s bed is fooled by Red Riding Hood needing a poo, and his descendants, such as Catherine Storr’s Stupid Wolf, or Wile E Coyote have similar problems.If we were to apply to other narratives the same comic mismatches, we might find Sauron losing his keys or Voldemort not managing a bus timetable.

Very often Bad does not triumph, it seems, because it is inefficient. This inefficiency allows Good to triumph and Evil to defeat itself. Maybe the best look at the ineffectual evil sidekick for me are Pain and Panic, whose plain idiocy is a thorn in the flesh for Disney’s marvellously impatient Hades in Hercules. However, although minor characters in Rowling’s battle for domination are allowed comic inefficiency, and the mean squabbles of orcs allows Tolkien a sideways swipe at something that falls short of Evil, a dull, malicious nastiness, there are in the big baddies of fantasy depictions of evil that go beyond the silly, the clumsy, the mean. What stirs in Earthsea, the intrusive Dark in Susan Cooper’s sequence: these are not to be discounted as minor threats. It therefore becomes important to ask: what are they evil for? Why are these presences evil?

What these great Lords of Darkness are hoping to gain is not always clear. If we suppose Sauron gains the One Ring, and the new Age that is ushered in is his dominance, the destruction of all beauty, the enslaving of the free peoples, then what? And why?

Sauron is given a backstory in the Silmarillion in the Lucifer-like fall of his master Melkor, Morgoth, the dark Enemy of the World, so that

…he rose like a shadow of Morgoth and a ghost of his malice, and walked behind him on the same ruinous path down into the void.

but this is still insufficient. Malice might be at the heart of the dominating and destructive works of Sauron and Melkor, and a part of their destruction, but at the start we are not really sure what they intend but destruction.

At one level, they are evil the way they are evil in order to provide the foil the good guys need: that there is a personal element to Voldemort’s hatred of Harry Potter is one of the strengths of the series; the growing malaise in Earthsea likewise gives the books their unique flavour. At another level it can be argued that these evils reflect a societal understanding of what evil does, and in many cases there is either an explicit description of how that evil has come about in the story or in a further text (such as the Silmarrillion): a Fall, of sorts, and a touchstone for what the author/audience might see as evil.

But how do they make sense of their existence? What, to turn to my title, are their aims and mission? What is their spirituality? In a moment of clarity, does Sauron at some point think “today was a day well spent”? What are Sauron, or Voldemort, or Cooper’s Riders left with if they triumph? It seems to me they have (only) Milton’s vision of

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

That comes to all; but torture without end

Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed

With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d…

Perhaps that Nash-Tolkien vision from the World War (think Menin Road or Wire as images of destruction, both linked here in the IWM) is simply of a grim, spreading, malicious destruction. The malice of the orcs, the cruel, sniping pettiness of Rowling’s OfSTED-like Dolores Umbrage are part of the bigger project as they pick apart anything good or beautiful.

The overall project, the destruction of human endeavours to be complete, at one, seeking peace and truth is what Sauron and Cooper’s Dark (and maybe Voldemort) are trying for. To see this vision we might compare Nash’s Ypres Salient at Night with Tolkien’s account of the triumph of evil in the Fifth Battle:

Great was the triumph of Morgoth, and his design was accomplished in a manner after his own heart: for Men took the lives of Men and betrayed the Eldar, and fear and hatred were aroused among those that should have been united against him.

In other words, for Tolkien’s personification of evil, the engendering of destructive hatred is the end…

For Rowling? Apart from his vendetta against Harry Potter we only seem to have Voldemort’s desire for power: the struggle to frighten, to subjugate, to use those who admire and fear that power to bring more people under his rule. Is there a weakness in the narrative here – or is the threat of this fear, the menace that comes with his followers enough? Sauron brings about strife and disunity; Voldemort seeks power and uses fear to recreate the world to his own ends. That leaves me with Cooper’s Dark and LeGuin’s failing powers. I think they are a subtler depiction of evil and will have to wait for another day.

Persisting Fairy Tales

Once (of course) upon a time, there lived three disciplines, and they lived in a cottage in the woods or possibly on separate parts of a campus. The Big one was called Anthropology, the Middle-sized one was called Folklore and the Teeny-tiny one was called Children’s Literature…

And one day Alan Garner and a whole load of other people threw open to all of them (rather more than three!) the question

Where are your stories?

That question, which he asks in story-form as well as lectures, might be seen as being as disruptive as the breaking-and-entering “delinquent little tot” Goldilocks’ intrusion into the bears’ cottage. In Boneland – not Children’s Literature, I know – Garner asks his storytelling ancestor this massive question about the roles of story and culture. The Man says he “dreams in Ludcruck…the cave of the world” and in response to the question about stories, begins with an origin tale about Crane. The Man’s stories (which are, after all, Garner’s stories) continue to ring true for the human newcomers to what we now might call the Peak District, and so his dancing and singing are not in vain: the stories are handed on. Garner talks about this relationship of place and story passionately, eloquently. They become origin stories, spirit stories, and mix with concerns through the ages to give Garner his alfar and his Morrigan. This kind of reconstruction and continuity gives a lot of power to the way Garner (and Townsend and Rowling and Pullman and Lewis….) themselves tell stories, drawing some of their authority (if that’s the word) from storytelling of past times. If there is continuity here it is because folklore scholarship has enabled a sort of continuity of sources. Leafield’s Cure-all Water, its Black Dog, all the Black Dogs maybe, and the standing stones at Rollright and elsewhere are examined by writers such as Katherine Briggs and Neil Phillip and often re-presented by Briggs, Lively, Rowling et al. One form of continuity.

We see another in the engaged and detailed work exploring landscape and language in Rob Macfarlane’s Landmarks which, as he writes of Richard Jeffries, is

fascinated by the strange braidings of the human and the natural.

Here, language is seen to contain elements of older land use, beliefs and practices. Sparrow-beaks explain fossilised sharks teeth and a tuft of grass looking like a bull’s forehead is bull-pated in Northamptonshire.

I have written before about folk tales that explain places, and how these “fairy” tales do provide a sort of continuity, although I think that possibly the syncretism of European story and British folk tales brings its own obscurity: Garner is on his own ground by Seven Firs and Goldenstone, but he is not suggesting that le Petit Chaperon Rouge lived in Congleton.

Where we get into trickier areas is when folklore is pulled into service elsewhere. Gargoyles and grotesques become evidence of a continuing belief in goblins; stories of boggarts become somehow real. I have looked behind me in darkening woods, been impatient to leave a lonely valley, and must acknowledge the pull of this argument, just as Garner steps (nimbly) between his own writing and rural practices and traditions in discussing the roots of his great novel Thursbitch. This talk is chilling, enlightening, inspirational – so that Big Bad Wolves, the Green Knight, Garner’s vision of story and space walking together pepper this blog: turn but a stone and start a þurs.

But can this is universalised? I suppose my problem comes down to how much is understood but not spoken and certainly not (until recently) written. Can we see a Jack-in-The-Green and know for certainty this is the same as the carving on that roof boss, and that this is a continuing belief? Can we really link Star Carr and Abbots Bromley? Did my great-grandma know quite who she might be warding off by crossing the fire-irons at night?

I would love to see those links clearly. We have tantalising hints, shadows, half-stories (Katherine Briggs’ doctoral work documenting the continuing traditions in literature in folklore across the Interregnum is fascinating) that might lead us in all sorts of directions, and Garner’s defence of place and story should not be overlooked. Rob Macfarlane’s “strange braidings” go between town and country but also between present and past, and how far back they link and join we can speculate – but we cannot know. Briggs puts it well when she comments on the recurring concerns in Arthurian stories:

A remarkable thing about the Arthurian stories is the way in which primitive themes reappear amongst the most sophisticated embroideries. It seems as if the matter of Britain had a magnetic quality which attracted every type of myth towards it

This “magnetic quality,” it seems to me, is a good image of how Children’s Literature, especially when it explores themes that themselves arise from traditional tales, draws to itself fears and triumphs from former times. Piers Torday’s There May be A Castle is a good example, where quests and knights and woods and danger are explored: Abi Elphinstone, too, works magic here. Perhaps our best bet is to see that similar concerns – fears of the outside as well as celebrating its joys, the worrying menace of wolfish men, women placed outside the Christian context by their (sometimes useful) cunning, half-seen wanderers in a twilight wood – continue to be represented in cult and place and story.

Apologies for the weak ending here: I think what it means for me is that, studying Children’s Literature I have to pay due attention to Anthropology and Folklore as fundamental to my understanding of so many works I want to study. You can see it clear as day in Garner’s Elidor or Weirdstone – but what about other books – younger children’s books, for example – I am trying to look at, where the outdoors is a challenging place?

From accepting to celebrating imperfection

In the run up to my birthday (yesterday) I found myself thinking about the Japanese craft of mending a bowl by joining the shards together with golden lacquer. I even went to the Ashmolean to see if I could find some examples (I didn’t find any). The Book of Life, part of the School of Life, explains it like this:

It means, literally, ‘to join with gold’. In Zen aesthetics, the broken pieces of an accidentally-smashed pot should be carefully picked up, reassembled and then glued together with lacquer inflected with a very luxuriant gold powder. There should be no attempt to disguise the damage, the point is to render the fault-lines beautiful and strong. The precious veins of gold are there to emphasise that breaks have a philosophically-rich merit all of their own.

and here is the full text, an essay on their rich and carefully thought-through website. I’m not sure what to make of the organisation, but I passed their shop/centre in Marchmont Street last weekend before my final visit to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition at the British Library, which I blogged about before.

Plenty of people have explored the psychological metaphor before me.

Gold-Joining, Kintsugi. Too easy to go back to my crises of the spring and summer (and the Christmas that has just gone) and say “There! Broken – but at least I shine with gold!” Being broken is not like that. Whether a sudden crisis, or a dam-burst of emotional turmoil, or a long, limping condition, the brokenness of mental ill-health does not always shine with gold: but it invites a painstaking mending that will not hide but will (eventually) accept and celebrate. That painstaking is core, and for me it also invites two related things: silence and compassion. They are not easy, and I know I am really not good at these two things that, joined together, are transformational. Here I am, for example, blogging when the house is quiet and I could be sat still.

Cyprian Smith, whose book on Meister Eckhart has yet to be surpassed, writes in his book The Path of Life that silence

…takes us into the depths, the depths of our own minds….There is no spiritual progress without that descent into the darkness.

But (to some extent) the descent into darkness, the pains-taking of spirituality, is not taken alone. That descent into darkness is partly the acceptance of our weakness, but the mending is informed and mitigated by the communal aspects of our lives. Cyprian goes on to talk of the silence of the carefully swept room, lifeless and suffocating, and some of that comes from not listening to our compassionate selves – or to others (in person, in written form, whatever) who extend a genuine compassion to us. Feel (y)our own weakness, be confronted by it, stare at it; acknowledge and accept; be compassionate and know it is who you are, who makes you the lovely person you can be. It is in this compassion that we move to add the gold to the mend.

To extend the metaphor with which kintsugi is heavy, it is not the pot that mends itself.

Mindfulness

To talk about Mindfulness I want to start with Thich Nhat Hahn. Here he is working – except he says it isn’t work – on calligraphy that conveys his central messages. As he says:

Breathe and enjoy the Kingdom of God in the here and now. Breathe and enjoy this wonderful moment.

I’ll stop there and do just that before I continue.

In preparing a class on spirituality for the Education Studies students at Brookes, I have a number of choices about how to approach mindfulness.

In terms of resources, there is the possibility of using words from Thich Nhat Hanh himself and the wonderful music and Nature graphics in the Great Bell Chant. There have been times when turning the lights back on after showing those 7 mins to students has felt really quite a disruption to a sense of quiet: it is (for me and for some of them) a moving little bit of film.

The universal dharma door
is already open.
The sound of the rising tide
is heard clearly…

(3 mins ff)

and I will probably need to weave these in with this cute and thought-provoking footage from a school in Ireland.

But here I find myself in a bit of a quandary. There seems to me to be something of a divergence of expectations here. Quite what does Mindfulness (or spirituality in general) do in schools? Let’s look at what the children say, speaking of their jars full of sequins and other glittery materials that exemplify their minds – shaken and busy with ideas and feelings:

“Your jar is like your heart and there’s loads of stuff inside it….”

“Your mind is so busy it can’t think of a load of things…”

“…and then when you leave it to settle you take a deep breath and then it all goes to the bottom.”

Lovely stuff, and drawing on a similar story from Thich Nhat Hanh about watching apple juice settle. I would hope that the children are the better in some way from practising this.

The clip goes on, however, to present the children’s acts of kindness and what they are thankful for. They are personal, domestic things – making breakfast, giving mum some peace, feeding the dog; being thankful for food, presents, a warm house. So with one short clip (we have to admit it is short, edited, &c.) we move from mindfulness through kindness and gratitude.

These are interesting values and practices for schools to promote. The way they are presented is that mindfulness makes you think more clearly, acts of kindness earn the approbation of adults, and we can be grateful for what adults provide. Of course, the converse might be things we want to avoid – chaotic thinking from ungrateful, unkind children (or adults), but is this really mindfulness, or a new, maybe more accessible and acceptable catechism? Christian children all must be/Mild obedient, good as He, as the Christmas hymn goes. This is less than the commodification of spirituality that many are wary of, but it could be its schoolification.

So in terms of practice, how might we look at Mindfulness in schools? I think we might take a lesson from Forest Schools. An initiative is seen and adopted faithfully by some, with minor alterations by others, and a dilution takes place until a school calls the weekly visit to the pond at the end of the school field by a name that might also be used by a wide-ranging, risk-taking experience some miles from the classroom. Similarly, a teacher might be a committed follower of the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, or they might be involved in some kind of sitting mediation themselves, or following a course of guidance on mindful meditation. I suppose That Candle Thing sits somewhere around this marker – and the original project for that was a largely improvised activity. Or they might have read a book on the subject, or seen a bit of mindfulness practice as part of their Initial Teacher Education or some CPD and think that this is something they might spread more widely. I find I am thinking “Think Raisins:” the quick introduction to mindfulness many have experienced as CPD in schools where people contemplate a raisin. Is this enough to think about how one might adapt a practice to school life?

I’m not arguing for regulation and accreditation but for a recognition of foundational ideas and texts. Here – although Buddhist meditation can’t really have a foundation text from the 1970s (can it?) – I would want to refer back to The Miracle of Mindfulness. Not all books on mindfulness will acknowledge the source, something I find a bit disturbing, but here are some of the things Thich Nhat Hanh has to say, first about what mindfulness does and then what we do about or with it.

I like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality.

People usually consider walking on water or on thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or on thin air, but to walk on earth.

and then, more practically

Your breath should be light, even and flowing, like a thin stream of water running through the sand. Your breath should be very quiet, so quiet that the person sitting next to you cannot hear it… To master our breath is to be in control of our bodies and minds… Each time we find ourselves dispersed an find it difficult to gain control of ourselves by different means, the method of watching the breath should always be used.

And of course there’s much more.

Is this what the children are doing? Should their eyes be open or shut? Does it matter and if so why? Do the foundation texts need to be in play? And is this spirituality? Well, it will depend (cop-out phrase coming) on what we mean by spirituality. Is it about making sense of self and our relationship with others, in ways that Ursula King or Andrew Wright might recognise? Is it about transcendence, devotion? What are its links to communities of faith?

Some mindfulness practices – sitting quiet, listening to your breathing, trying to just be rather than plan dinner or think great thoughts, or fight feelings of inadequacy (yes, this is me, in meditation) – can be seen as practices arising from spiritual traditions in East and West. In that sense they are part of spirituality. They differ from some (largely Western) attempts to define spirituality in that they do seem, in their purest forms, to lack a goal. Sitting to sit, washing the dishes to wash the dishes: someone who sits in meditation may find clearer water in which to view their past and present (and maybe their future), but they are chasing a bird to put salt on its tail if they think meditation will automatically give that. Sometimes when I sit it’s like sitting on a block of ice, and I am desperate to finish, or I spend all my time chasing what I should have said, how I might have looked. I certainly am not “better” when I get up. It is not Penicillin or Novocaine.

Martin Laird’s books are a good way to see some synergy between the goal-orientated or biography-centred definitions of, say, Wright or King and the goalless sitting of Zen. His (Christian, monastic) perspective looks at the therapeutic outcomes of silence in which arises an awareness of our own psychological states:

The specific focus of this book [Into the Silent Land] will be on the practical struggles many of use face when we try to be silent – the inner chaos going on in our heads, like some wild cocktail party of which we find ourselves the embarrassed host. Often, however, we are not even aware of how utterly dominating this inner noise is until we try to enter through the doorway of silence.

Just sitting, for me, needs my eyes to be open: to sit where I am and see things come and go, rather than plunge myself into the interior cinema of deadlines or wishful thinking or regrets. I’ve written about this before when reflecting on birdsong in the morning. It also needs me to see the things that worry me as the “weather on the mountain:” not me, just the stuff that swirls about me (this is another image from Martin Laird).

Back to the classroom – both the compulsory-age children’s rooms and the HE classroom I’m preparing for. Although it’s a lot to ask, I think I would expect spirituality in an educational context to encompass three or more aspects:

Awareness of self and others
Compassionate attitudes
Practices that encourage these two.

Compassion and spirituality are sometimes artificially linked: Christian warrior monks, for example, in the twelfth century had compassion for some and not others, and coupled this with intense religious practice from Cistercian roots and combat to the death. Similar attitudes might be seen in religious groups today. Nevertheless, in general, spirituality is linked often to the awareness of others we might describe as compassion. It’s a tall order to “get schools” to do this work, but it has been represented in OfSTED guidance and in local curriculum materials. It is there in germ in the aims and objectives of Oxford Brookes and other Higher Education organisations – although I have critiqued this before. Compassionate attitudes, spirituality, real vision and purpose: they might be enunciated but not embodied. Children are wild, students are on their ‘phones, teachers and lecturers are overworked or grumpy, systems prop up systems rather than support users. It is, as I say, a tall order.

If a bit of quiet sitting does form competent, reflective, self-aware compassionate students (and staff???), I’m happy. If a lot of quiet sitting is needed, well, maybe schools and Universities need to think this through and ask what the role of education is. If sitting quiet and sparkly jars help, then fine, whether they have the backing of a training group or no. If, however, sitting and the rest is tokenistic and without wider ripples into school, then I don’t see the point.

So while my class for the Values and Religion in Schools module will have mention of mindfulness, will look at the SACRE on spirituality, and at thinkers like Wright, and Eaude, will mention outdoors and wellbeing and read some Thich Nhat Hanh, I do not see piecemeal adoption of spiritual practices as a cure-all, any more than I think a bit of woodland exploration will save the world. But it’s a start.

Wolf Moon

I missed the superbloodwolfmoon thing this week: cloud hid it in Oxford, although lots of amazing pictures emerged around the place. I tried, in compensation, to write a blog post linking back to my earlier explorations of Wolves and Red Riding Hood (my “Jack Zipes schitck” as someone described it) and the stuff I mull over a lot around outdoors and storytelling and wolves, and maybe (although this is where I stumbled and tripped) on the Black Dog of depression, nipping my heels nearly all this Christmas.

However, the death of Mary Oliver prompted me to buy a collection of her poems and comment on them. Social Media had all sorts going on – as is the way, some friendly and some not-so-friendly – but with today’s cold weather in England, I thought I would cite one of her bleaker pieces as apt for the weather and the moon:

Wolf Moon

Now in the season
of hungry mice,
cold rabbits
lean owls
hunkering with their lamp-eyes
in the leafless lanes
in the needled dark;
now is the season
when the kittle fox
comes to town
in the blue valley
or early morning;
now is the season
of iron rivers,
bloody crossings,
flaring winds,
birds frozen
in their tent of weeds,
their music spent
and blown like smoke
to the blue of the sky;
now is the season
of the hunter Death;
with his belt of knives,
his black snowshoes,
he means to cleanse
the earth of fat;
his gray shadows
are out and running – under
the moon, the pines,
down snow-filled trails they carry
the red whips of their music,
their footfalls quick as hammers,
from cabin to cabin,
from bed to bed,
from dreamer to dreamer.

Superb, and as bleak as the landscape and weather she is writing about. It’s over ten years since I began to explore children’s literature as means to look at the outdoors, and literature continues to be a lens I use to look at how we react to landscape. My brother, I note (as I type), is in the snow at the Cat and Fiddle – close to Thursbitch in the snow. I think of Jack Turner, and the car off the road we saw in the fog by there: worlds collide.

In Wolf Moon Oliver picks up the themes of Death and cold – “his belt of knives,” “his gray shadows” – in an almost Grendel (ettin or þurs)-like way; this is a Big Thing to terrify, with the wolves’ howling as the “red whips of their music” disturb the night. Because it is (perhaps) a simple point to make, but I feel it needs making: Mary Oliver is a good poet, not always writing comfortable nature poetry about childhood or inspirational lines about

I was thinking
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods

and her sharp eye and the writing that comes from it is able to look at the aspects of nature that humanity finds inimical – and has, in some ways dedicated a lot of its evolutionary history to conquering. She is able to write about the “roaring flamboyance” of the sea and the “hallowed lime” of owl pellets: the memento mori we can gain outdoors that I mentioned in my earlier post.

The response of literature to the winter is itself interesting, and writers such as J R R Tolkien (think Caradhras the cruel) and Kenneth Grahame give vivid pictures of its dangers: although snow in The Wind in the Willows is softening, almost redemptive, the creepiness of Mole’s wintry experiences in the Wild Wood are very expressive “Then the faces began…Then the whistling began…Then the pattering began.” The winter wood; the dark wood; the wild wood as evening closes in. More modern writers have given us some great examples of snowy landscapes and confronting death: Philip Pullman works the theme extremely well in Northern Lights; Michelle Paver is terrifying in her adult book Dark Matter but also richly descrtiptive as Torak battles the limits of human (and animal) endurance in the snow, and (again for adults – I wonder if this is significant) Garner deals with death and loss in the ice in Boneland, a death that stalks both strands of the book in different ways.

It seems to me that the immediate reaction is to see “outdoors” as somewhere positive, just in the same way as Mary Oliver is seen as uplifting – but we take on these broad judgments without thinking at our peril: literature does well to remind us that the outdoors is not always friendly, as sudden blizzards by Cat’s Tor can show.

Hope you’re OK, Mark.

Passport to a Rant

I find myself really torn by the recent DfE initiative around enriching children’s childhoods. I love the idea of children being outside; I am unhappy when schools are elbowed into making sure children do this, that or the other outside the school day. We are told – and it already seems a bit defensive to highlight this in the web page that launches it – that the initiative is “backed by the Scouts, Girlguiding and National Trust.” This is part of the introduction from the webpage:

The list of activities is intended to support parents and schools in introducing children to a wide variety of experiences and fulfilling activities like flying a kite, learning something new about the local area or putting on a performance.

The list of activities was inspired by the Education Secretary’s visit to St Werburgh’s Primary School, in Bristol, where every child is encouraged to take part in a list of tasks and experiences, with key achievements for each school year to tick off. The list will be sent to schools in January for teachers to adapt to meet the needs of their pupils and local communities, helping young people to build their personal skills and qualities during the school day and at home.

And here is the draft passport, downloadable and by and large unobjectionable as a set of things to do. Already some of my impatience at yet another thing for schools to do is partly mitigated: this is to “support parents and schools,” not just to be a tick list for schools, and it is adaptable, so that (to some extent – see below) issues of physical or economic challenge can be got round (I am choosing that awful phrase on purpose). Ah but look carefully at that last sentence.

The list will be sent to schools in January for teachers to adapt to meet the needs of their pupils and local communities, helping young people to build their personal skills and qualities during the school day and at home.

It will be for teachers to do this: schools are (yet again) seen as the managers of the deficit home life or at best the recorders and by extension legislators of parental attitudes and activities. The organisation Every Child Should (that title raises my hackles, but let that pass) take the line that “particularly with the demise of universal youth work provision and Surestart” schools are now the “only remaining point of universal access.” In other words because of all the cuts, teachers: work harder! Schools stump up the funds! This is where my – and their – disquiet is worth hearing:

Great to introduce a bucket list for 11 year old but is this just another thing for schools to be held to account for? Austerity. Little extras. And yep – these are all significant issues and to pretend a passport can fix these challenges is at best foolish and at worse insulting.

While they then do suggest a passport is an effective model, they do so with a set of very worthwhile pro viso warnings about affordability, inclusivity and partnership. Let me propose a couple of scenarios here to illustrate where the passport model might not be a good way forward:

In case one mum is a teacher and dad is an office worker. They have two primary age children. Hard working (remember the “hard-working families” guff from a few years back?) but if they feel to some extent time poor they are not at a critical point. They build snowpeople [sic] when they can, read books, play on IPads, go camping.

In case two, again a “hard-working family” with two primary age children, and with dad on nights, mum works in a local supermarket: they box-and-cox childcare as best they can. This is much more like real time poverty, but there is still time for a kick-about in the park, and swimming club on Wednesdays, most weeks: and sometimes a bit of belt-tightenng to afford it.

Family one are already doing this stuff, and the school are being asked to do what? Manage these things? Supervise them? Require parents to record them? I recall the Oxford Reading Spree conversation about teachers keeping children in to “do reading” if the Home-School Reading Record was not showing reading at home: are we now looking at compulsory After-School Guiding if the record is not kept up to date? Family two likewise might be able to take on suggestions about starry nights or planning a meal, but really do not need school breathing down their necks any more: there is already enough pressure around finding the approved shoes for school, doing the increasingly involved homework (“make an Egyptian irrigation system”), find the money for trips… My point here really is to ask what does this passport have to do with them?

When the NCB endorses the passport their Chief Executive writes

We welcome this effort to immerse children and young people in activities that can build their confidence, develop their curiosity and support their growth beyond academic attainment…

But none of the endorsements seem to see the relevance of this element of control on the lives of these families. Let’s face it: as proposed by the National Trust (whose suggestions for “Things to do” form the basis of the Passport) these activities are interesting, free from immediate curriculum constraints (until we get to writing about it in class: note the SoS for Education seeing the “relevance to the curriculum”), and might encourage a bit more engagement with world beyond the immediate, technology dominated life of today. They are a bit culturally biased, a bit lacking in context, a bit wistful for a childhood past (I love the adventure into Ladybird Land with “post a letter” – although “play in the garden while Daddy reads the paper” was strangely absent), but we are reminded this is adaptable. The parasites are already creating forms for you to use. When Action for Children suggest more face-to-face time in their Build Sound Minds campaign (and God knows we need to think about families’ mental health), I worry the resource creators are already licking their lips at some kind of target-driven initiative that makes quality parent-child time into a Couch to FiveK plan. Yes, that’ll work, I’m sure.

And now let me suggest case three: mum is full-time at home, not out of choice but because the needs of their child suggest she may be called upon when these additional needs are felt to be beyond the capabilities of the school; the out-of-school activities they need, as she once explained to me, to include “our own parking place at the local hospital.” This passport better be adaptable – and not just in terms of “work arounds” for this family, but in ways that are genuinely inclusive. Or is this child’s teacher actually going to have to say “We’ll let you off the tree climbing, of course…”

It would be easy to go along a scale in terms of severity of need and still not stray from families I have worked with: the child looked after all week by Granny; a family for whom the mother being outside the home was culturally a challenge (a challenge they were meeting); the single parent for whom a lie-in felt like a necessity and who didn’t know how to cook (one of the TAs taught her to save money by mashing potatoes rather than buy microwavable stuff)… and we aren’t yet in the serious crisis cases.

I am all in favour of schools – and families – going beyond academic attainment. I spent a large amount of time on my two modules on Outdoor Learning last semester talking about how the curriculum is much more than a syllabus; learning is more than being filled with facts… We sat outside in the autumn sun; we lit a fire, found a badger sett… And out of work – well, after work, and along the road from the Harcourt Hill campus, at least – I IMG_9750-1 have sat in a local copse with a couple of mates and a beer… And this is all without mentioning my passion for exploring children’s literature and how it can represent the magic of being outdoors.

I am not (as Margaret Hodge once described me and some colleagues when we asked for developmental elements in the Foundation Stage documents) a “joyless do-gooder” who wants to deprive working class children of the opportunities I gave my own children. But I am not convinced – yet – of the passport as proposed from on high as not just another bit of target creep: codification and a plea for schools to work harder.

In the end, I guess, my rant comes down to one thing:

How joyless to see the stars at night so you can tick them off!

Compassion, Charity, Grace and a Hug

I have a big book on my lap. Well, it’s no Codex Amiatinus and actually claims to be concise. At 1840+ pages the Encyclopedia of Theology: a Concise Sacramentum Mundi might be full of “major articles on theology, biblical science and related topics from the (six volume) Sacramentum Mundi,” but concise it isn’t.

It’s also interesting to see what words it homes in on and what it does not. The apparent gaps and highlights show us, in part, how language changes and how with it (before it, after it) beliefs and attitudes. So I turn to the contents. A is for Afterlife, Agnosticism, Angels… M is for Magisterium, Man, Mariology… and it finishes with W: World and Worship. Compassion, I note, is missing, as is Love (if you’re wanting to know, Sex, Celibacy and Marriage all have sections). But Charity is there. Reading Charity is interesting for what it says about language, as I mentioned (“Men feel bound to love others in proportion to their ‘social proximity'” reads as stickily old-fashioned) and its dryness is something of a challenge: “Love of the neighbour determines the basic structure of the moral act;” “The ‘transcendental depth’ of man in the encounter with the ‘other’ always points beyond itself, at least implicitly, to God…” It is clear the author (Waldemar Molinski) is talking about an active love of a real other person, but the vision seems to lack all sorts of attributes, not least everyday attention and affection. There is no coffee here, there are no hugs: love with no humanity. In some ways that was, of course, the brief: this is an encyclopedia, after all.

Looking beyond Christian theology there are sources with more immediate appeal – even ones mentioned in this blog: vulnerability with Mike Armiger; Geoff Taggart’s compassionate pedagogy; and then Dennis Tirsch whom I quote in this blog post on sacredness:

A good relationship is a sacred space that can safely contain how we think and feel, along with our potentially painful histories + the whole of who we are.

In calling for a recognition of the sacredness of a good relationship we are actually closer (in thought if not in language) to the Charity article than it at first appears: recognising the reality of the other person is at the heart of Christian living. But Tirsch, I think, and my atheist and agnostic and Buddhist friends would not see Christian morality (when shaped like this) as having a sufficient language in itself. This is partly because Molinski is thinking in terms of individuals: this man [sic] and his neighbour, and their several relationships with God. Some of the appeal of Buddhist writing comes from its refusal to compartmentalise. Thich Nhat Hahn writes of working for peace in Vietnam during the War:

We were able to understand the suffering of both sides, the Communists and the anti-Communists. We tried to be open to both, to understand this side and to understand that side, to be one with them. That is why we did not take a side, even though the whole world took sides.

Being Peace

Thich Nhat Hahn sees us as trying to solve problems when things go wrong for a child, rather than blaming the child. This may be part of the issue (aka bitter arguments and name-calling) around discourses of behaviour in schools: I don’t know. I do know that at home and at work it can be very hard and that I’m not very good at it in either place: I am too needy of other people’s approval and affection, too jealous of my own misplaced sense of equilibrium.

Perhaps in a search for Compassion in the Encyclopedia I should be looking more at Grace, the active giving “which divinizes the essence, powers and activity of man.” A gift of freedom in the deepest sense. As Thomas Merton warns:

…We only have as much as we give. But we are called upon to give as much as we have, and more; as much as we are. ..Love alone can teach us to penetrate the hidden goodness of the things we know.

No Man is an Island

Back, then, to sacredness, to self-giving and realising a huge Oneness, what Thich Nhat Hahn calls “the presence of the entire universe in ourselves.” Back to meditation. Following the breath and hoping that this will free us from what Martin Laird calls “inner chatter,” from preconceptions and old pains.

***

Wonderful. But here I am blogging when I should be marking, wondering how useful it would be to mark an essay with the feedback “seeing and loving are one” (Thich Nhat Hahn again) or “We humble ourselves, crying for his mercy and grace” (Julian of Norwich). Of course it would not be what was needed: the compassionate act is to help the student understand what is working in their assignment , and where they might look next for ideas or for techniques to make their work better. Writing “Look at your sentence structure” becomes a more compassionate act than suggesting that “the rays of the sun and of the moon touch the earth, and yet the earth does not contaminate the light” (St Augustine, if you’re interested).

This is a reductio ad absurdum, I know, but it does highlight a problem I struggled with as Programme Lead at Brookes and continue to struggle with as I talk to people who are still there: how to be compassionate in a system that is not compassionate. Not wicked, not prone to abuse, just that greyest of things: not compassionate: on Twitter tonight (17.12.18) I mentioned how

Lots of teams… can…find it easier to rely on a “just get on with it” culture where student needs are met by frontline staff but those staff are not themselves given regular help.

I am beginning to think that the uncaring or even the cruel system or the oppressive system might be easier to be compassionate in. I’m not advocating we should move to this, just that “compassionate as an act of defiance” is maybe easier to see or to see opportunities for than it is to see compassion or a need to exercise it in a system that talks about caring but actually cares very little: where the see-saw of the task and the group means that management-speak is about staff experience but where the systems leave little room for genuine compassion-focussed practice. This isn’t to say that Higher Education (or any educational project) should give itself over to the needs of the team (though a hug is nice, sometimes) because teaching needs to happen, budgets need to be balanced, buildings tidied… – but that compassionate practice cannot be an add-on, and cannot be the hobby of a few.

However (and I’ll end here) this comes at a price, a real price that institutions, I think, have to step up to. The Twitter conversation this evening centred on a lovely animation from @KellyCanuckTO in which she asks, really, who looks after the people who do the looking after? To provide this support in busy working lives takes time, takes people with time themselves, and skills and insight – and who are willing (because this is what Grace does) to risk being hurt, to risk that second asking of “Are you all right?” – and the time to sit and listen when there is an answer that needs an ear.

“George took his lantern”

John Masefield ‘s The Box of Delights is a fantasy published in the 1930’s which draws on the hopes and fears of people after the first war, and set in the English landscape. We meet not only characters from the earlier work The Midnight Folk but the story deepens as the protagonist, Kay, battles forces of witchcraft intent on destroying the traditional English Christmas by ruining the thousandth midnight Christmas celebrations at the Cathedral. The Box of Delights is a sequel that in many ways surpasses the nightmarish first book (pace Rob Maslen, who praises the Midnight Folk here) and its narrative strength means it has also made a radio play, a classic BBC TV adaptation and more recently a well received stage representation. All this is summed up very neatly here in the Guardian, and explored by Jake Hayes with his usual depth and perspicacity in his Tygertale blog for this Advent, and it is the language when we come to the denouement that I find striking – I’m coming to this.

Throughout it is Kay’s relationship with Cole Hawlings that sustains the narrative. Cole is a travelling Punch and Judy Showman, but so much more than just an itinerant busker: like his successor, Susan Cooper’s Merriman Lyon, he is at the centre of a struggle against evil, represented (as in the previous book) by the murderously wicked Abner Brown. As with Merriman, we are allowed to see only snatches of the battles the adults are fighting; there are more than symbolic “wolves running,” allies we do not always recognise, dangers for the adults as well as for the children… But there is an important set of differences: while Merriman/Merlin openly entrusts the Matter of a New Britain to the children in Cooper’s Silver on the Tree, Cole Hawlings, having helped Kay restore the rightful place of Midnight Mass in the embattled Cathedral, is still looking back: the nostalgia for Old England is strong in the final pages of The Box of Delights as, speeding towards the Cathedral, we hear the bells start up in all the little churches, and meet the monastic community of the Cathedral’s past. And while we are flying along in Herne the Hunter’s unicorn-pulled sleigh, to move the recently freed Bishop and Dean and choir (&c., &c.) from some kind of sub-Trollope or All-Gas-and-Gaiters imagery, we have a Christmas hymn in a folk idiom, which Masefield calls a carol: here is the text. What surprised me on my first reading as a child, and still surprises me, is that Masefield gives the singing of it to the ambiguous dating-from-Pagan-times Cole Hawlings.

[Incidentally, the first time I heard this song, Móirín Na hEaglaise, sung by Nóirín Ní Riain, I thought of this carol, with the higher sections or answering melody being used in verses 4 and 7. I have tried it, although unsuccessfully: it may need something more robust, where maybe the last line of each verse is the “chorus after each stanza” Masefield notes].

The carol is a remarkable piece. I’d like to look at a few details to see what they tell us about The Box of Delights:

Let’s start, like Masefield, with George. His very name seems to set the lyric in England, maybe even rural England, and it occurs in four of the verses. He is the figure of compassion, a carefulness that twice calls him to the byre (a beautifully localising word: again we are in rural England), where he first lets in a poor couple and then comes back because of the trouble and sees the Christ Child and then the kings.

Lantern, byre, hay, stable – even inn and snow – put the Nativity in the same landscape as The Box of Delights. The “-a” at the end of the shorter lines moves this further into the folk-song idiom, although what is and isn’t a folk song (a bit like what is and isn’t a carol) is disputable. Perhaps the most truly rural – or maybe best attempt – at a “country tone” is the line George heard a trouble in the beasts. It sounds like my Father in Law. It is snowy and dark, George has a lantern to go to the stable/byre – and England receives its revelation.

And there within the manger bars
A little child new born-a,
All bright below a cross of stars
And in his brow a thorn-a.

The Mother, the Child, tenderness – but never too far from the cross and the Pieta: we are in Durer’s bleak theology, with those cross-like structures present in the nativity scene in his Madonna on a Grassy Bank. George’s vision is mystical; we are with Durer, with Chesterton and Gill, in seeing a Gloria in Profundis, although what Masefield presents is a transcendent Child, a submarine vision of humanity divinised not “the height of the fall of God.”

What happens next is interesting from the point of view of a rural poem. The visitors are not shepherds but Kings. I am unsure whether to read anything into two great kings and Melchoir but will assume we needed Melchoir for scansion and rhyme. They bring Eucharistic gifts, too – and at a practical level welcome ones for the poor Family – bread and wine. The ecclesiastical imagery is extended with the mention of robes. We have, by now, a crib scene – but where are the shepherds?

They – and we – are there in the person of George. The plain people of England (to misappropriate a phrase from Myles nagCopaleen) kneel down with the farm worker in homage of

that dear Babe today
That bears the Cross and Crown-a.

In looking back to a rural, more innocent time, we are at the heart of the nostalgia project that occupied so much thinking in the post-War period; we are also in that hankering for a countryside of freedom and adventure and risk that is at the heart of Masefield’s two books, and which informs Lewis, Garner and Cooper — and… and …

And when Cole Hawlings – the theologian Ramon Lull – the pagan countryman and the lost medieval mystic – sings of this past time when George knelt down and prayed-a we are invited to a personal piety that is itself nostalgic, a recreation after The War to End Wars, of a pious peasantry, a dedicated episcopacy and (and here we are into a whole new set of thoughts about the villains in this story) the defeat of corrupt and self-serving greed. Not a bad wish for Christmas in the inter-war period; not a bad wish for this Christmas, either, but I am mindful of how Masefield’s vision played out in the following years: Masefield knows it is a “nice dream,” as Kay admits at the end of the book.