Philanthropomorphism

I am so angry currently that its difficult to tease out the various strands of anger from the almost overwhelming dreads of rage in which I am entangled. I'm angry because people I teach with don't know what the word philanthropic means. You'd think the anthro in the middle of it would kind of give it away - suggest it had something to do with people...but apparently I'm some special extra-smart person who knows the roots of words and what they mean and other lesser mortals - who spend all day teaching children - don't. In fact one of these teacher people - who has been working all year on designing a philanthropic project - spent an hour patronising me today about just how clever I must be to know the meaning of a word that she didn't understand; despite being in charge of the project about it. But she didn't need to wait for me to send my numerous, initially witty, but increasingly irritated emails - to realise her error - she could have just googled it; or asked someone - but no, instead, several people, all of whom let us remember, are in charge of the education of the young, just brazenly went on organising a project they didn't understand and didn't know the meaning of. So my school has a philanthropic project which is to help out an animal shelter. Do you see the obvious problem here? Because the people who educate the children don't... I've been asked what I have against animals - the answer is nothing - I like my cat very much - but its a cat, not a person. I've been asked if I don't see what an important cause raising awareness about battery hens is - the answer is no, I don't think its that important - not while there are refugees being turned away from our shores; people locked up in detention centres; people starving and lacking health care and adequate shelter in our supposedly first world nation - need I go on? There are a number of problems here and they are related. The first is that somehow the meanings of things don't matter - that close enough is good enough - that sure it might say philanthropic but what it really means is some sort of charity. So aside from the fact that I think charity of all kinds is deeply problematic both because of its patronising and neo-colonial nature but also because it takes away from the state the responsibility it has to look after all members of society - I also think words matter. Call things by their right names is one of the most basic ideas of marxism - I want things called by their right names and if I am supposed to do a philanthropic project; then it damn well better be about people. The second is about the relationship between humans and animals. Anthropomorphism - and just in case any of my educator colleagues are reading this and having a little trouble with the definitions of big words that are hard to pronounce - that means seeing and treating animals as if they have human characteristics - is a deeply problematic way of viewing the world. By their very nature animals do not have rights - they can't possibly as they have no obligations in our society. Does that mean people should treat them cruelly? - No - the way we treat lesser, vulnerable creatures is a sign of the extent of our own humanity. But that's our perogitive as humans. Today's prosletysing 'launch' of the philanthropomorphic project included the deeply enlightening information that through selective breeding humans have transformed wild animals into the domesticated species we see on farms today. I was left wondering what the point of this lesson was - would the people who run the shelter our philanthropomorphic project is helping prefer it if we hadn't domesticated dogs, sheep, cattle, chickens, goats, or pigs? Should we perhaps let these animals return to their "natural" (and what is that anyway?) state; while we see a massive drop in food yields, protein becomes impossible to buy except for the most wealthy (its already out of the diet of a huge part of the world's population because of the in-built inequalities these animal activists haven't even begun to notice) and we all revert to some sort of hunter gather existence. And what about the poor, oppressed and modified by humans grains? Should we perhaps get rid of those too - after all 10,000 years of human "interference" has made the grain we eat unrecognisable compared to the wild grains that started it all. Because that's where the argument that somehow humans were morally wrong to domesticate and selectively breed animals ends - it ends with a rejection of 10,000 years of development. Domestication meant that people settled in one place; that towns and cities were possible; that writing developed; that humans ourselves changed to be what we are. There's no turning that clock back. The third problen is less concrete and less to do with the silly project. Its the idea that principle's don't matter as much as doing what everyone else is doing. I got what amounts to peer pressure today to support the stupid project. I was told I wasn't being collegial - that in effect I was a bad workmate because I happen to have a different opinion. In the end its the thing that makes me the most angry. People who are too stupid to know the meaning of words or bother to look them up when they realise they don't know - make me angry. People who think animals are more important or as important as humans make me angry. People who want to live in some kind of idealised natural past or who see humans as some sort of blight on the planet make me angry - its the ultimate in self-hate really and I think we should discourage self-hate in young people. But what makes me angriest is people assuming that they can talk me out of my principles. If I say I am not going to do something because I disagree - this means that I have thought about it, considered the options, weighed the consequences and made a decision. It means this because I am a responsible adult and if I make a public pronouncement - its because I am absolutely sure of what I am saying. When other adults then question me - all it makes me think is that they clearly don't go through this process of thinking before they make a public pronouncement - to assume I can be convinced otherwise is to assume I have not fully considered my action. That's insulting. But it also suggests that they don't interrogate their own decisions before announcing them - and that's worrying. This whole process also makes me realise that lots of the people that I teach with - people who look after young people and guide them in the world - don't understand what it means to have a principle. My understanding of the world - my principles - are central to who I am - in a socratic sense - I am my principles. To deny them is to deny myself. Hardly a week goes by when I don't think about Bolt's Thomas Moore in a Man for All Seasons - the extraordinary image of him opening his fingers so that like water, his soul - his principles - drip through. Like Moore, I'm not prepared to allow my principles to dribble away between my fingers. It doesn't just make me angry - it makes me frightened - that other people think that's alright.

In a tank in an art gallery is a very large shark. Ok if you look closely it is shedding skin round its edges. But its still a very large shark. Complete with open mouth and a lot of flesh-shredding teeth. It's Damien Hirst. The cunt is not a lot older than me. And an awful lot richer. Its named for a line in an essay he wrote that he particularly liked - the Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Yes Damien, you are very fucking clever. Because its true, I can't imagine not being alive. And I don't want to. Though I tried to as I stood in front of Mr Hisrt's cunty big fucking shark. In fact the security guard at the Tate Modern told me it was best were I to stand right in front of its open jaws. Jaws indeed. Very amusing pop culture reference Mr Security Guard - you have a career in stand-up just waiting for you. But yes, I'll give it to the uppity cunt, it is very hard to imagine oneself dead. Though his exhibition helped. A dove, bursting into flight, in a cube of preserving fluid; butterflies - caterpiller, chyrisilis, insect - all in a brightly lit indoor room; then their fragile little wings turned into stained glass mandallas. Yep - after all that horror and god knows how many extinguished cigarettes, I wasn't having too much trouble picturing death. Which I think might be his point. Death is all too close, too much of the time. And those mandallas are lovely, really lovely - till you see the thousands of little lives that have made them. Mr Hirst made me smile. And when I reflect on it; that's a little disturbing. Because his art is about the fragility of existence; about the beauty inside the ugliness. No, the beauty of the ugliness.

I don't watch much TV...

...in fact I don't watch a lot that isn't pure text. But in the last week I've watched three things that have made me nearly cry.

The first is predictable...I watched Agora for the first time, and given how long I have been in love with Hypatia and her ellipses...it is unsurprising that the film was effective. Of course it wasn't her overly romanticised death that made me want to weep. It was the burning of Library of Alexandria. Did the Christians really burn all the knowledge of the Classical world; in one huge conflagration? The 4th Century sources are not clear on the matter. But their lack of passion as they describe the various sackings should not be any great indicator of how large or small the disaster was - the deaths of Luxembourg and Liebknecht takes only a few lines in the German sections report to the Comintern - and in its time it was an event of similar significance...

Burning books makes me want to cry. Monotheistic bigotry makes me want to cry. The horror of the loss of all that wisdom and poetry; the plays, the poems, the astronomy, the mathematics..that makes me want to cry. What the film's director failed in was making me want to cry for Hypatia and the dreadful human pain of her death. Hypatia; pagan, philosopher, mathematician, teacher; was intransigent. Pursued by a suitor, the story goes, she threw him rags stained with her menstrual blood and told him that this was woman, if he loved this then he loved corruption. Harsh but direct. Needless to say, she never married. But she was brilliant and she was torn to pieces by the Christians, on the steps of their church for not being the passive vessel they thought woman should be. That makes me want to weep. Agora's soft, romantic cop-out does not.

And that's because real, human pain is not pretty.

The second thing this week, that made me want to cry was Chris Lilley's Angry Boys. And its not the moment you expect. Its Daniel, distraught, face-down on his bed, weeping because his mother is going to re-marry. Chris Lilley has been able to make me feel empathy with an aggressive, homophobic, racist little boy; whose heart I felt breaking.

The third time...ah...predictable. Shane Mcgowan was singing Rainy Night in Soho. I looked at his 1988 face and thought "By God Shane, but you were the the most magnetic, absorbing, exciting man alive right then." And neither you nor I will ever be that young again.

Real. Human. Pain. Nothing like it to remind you you're alive.

If I could have the perfect Hamlet...Pt.1

So ever since I heard Simon Phillips had talked Ewen Leslie into doing Hamlet for him I've been making this list...
I've been making it because I have a very clear idea in my head what Hamlet should be like and I'm waiting for someone to get it just right. I like Zefferelli's Hamlet - Gibson is manly, tough - the solider and the courtier that Ophelia describes him as in the original text. Though I'm not sure if I buy him as the scholar too. Its hard to get right.
And by the gods I like the Royal Shakespeare Company using Dr Who...I mean David Tennant. Mr Tennant is not immediately obvious as a good choice for the role. But by the time he's gone just a little mad and had the chance to turn on his androgynous and somewhat unexpected sex appeal...I'm lapping it up...as it were.
Tennant seems to understand something about Hamlet that I would have thought was obvious. He's hot. That's why clever, sassy women like Ophelia (and his mother...) are so enamoured of him.

So my wish list; my open letter to Mr Phillips goes like this...

Dear Mr Phillips,

I am in love with Hamlet, please don't ruin him for me...
If you could just follow these simple instructions I will be forever in your debt.

1. Please, dear god, do not make Hamlet a fop. He's not a fop. And he's not a mummy's boy either. Was Oedipus a Mummy's boy? No he was not! He was a sphinx-conquering, father-killing sonofabitch. And don't you forget it. So don't you dare make Hamlet a limp-wristed motherfucker. Well. Ok. He can fuck his mother if you want, but not limpwristedly...

2. Do not, under any circimstances, give Mr Leslie a die-job or a haircut. All that floppy black hair is why we love him. And its why we will love him as Hamlet. Hamlet in sable. It makes sense. You know it does. Gibson looked odd blonde. Olivier looked VERY odd blonde and we all know Brannagh was just trying to look like Olivier. So just forget the blonde Prince of Denmark. Most Danes have dark hair anyways...

3. To be mad or not to be mad...that is the question. I want my Hamlet mad only in craft. And not in kind. I like a little extremity, a little excess. But I want someone whose noble mind has not been overthrown. Don't get me wrong. He needs to be brutal, desperate, and calculating. Send those schoolfriends to their ignomious deaths - Do it Phillips! But do it with a sure hand and cool head.

4. I loved Ophelia. And so should Hamlet. And I had better believe it when he says it. Because if I don't then I can't believe he'd put her through what he does and still love him.

Crying, over you...an atheist talks to god.

The nice man sitting next to me at the theatre on Saturday night had an odd look on his face when I mentioned I'd seen the play only a couple of weeks previously - and from almost exactly the same seat. It was that uncomfortable look people give the baglady on the tram - not wanting to offend; hoping the conversation won't continue; embarrassed either way.
It was the second time that day that I'd had looks like that. Earlier, standing in the Museum of Contemporary Art I had felt the whole room quieten around me. I was standing in front of Annie Lebovitz's extraordinary portrait of her dead friend - Susan Sontag. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation; maybe it was the overload of images - I don't know - but there were silent tears running down my cheeks and I felt no need to wipe them away.
The photo is a bizzare one. It is of Sontag's laid out corpse, broken into several individual shots, then pasted together - as if it were of a landscape. And in a way it is. The landscape of a life; a love; a journey. All captured in a photo of an old woman, grey haired, shrivelled, dead.
The portraits of the still-living Sontag are almost as moving. Naked, sprawled across a bed or lying, feet over the back of the couch. Maybe its just me but those are the shots I found the most intrinsically erotic. Sure Johnny Depp and Kate Moss in bed are pretty damn hot - but not as essentially, stomach-tighteningly sexy as the lover caught in a moment of total naturalness.
I think now that all of us are searching for that moment when we think we are indeed talking to our god. The problem is, he is not listening; he is dead. On my knees, in the rain...begging some god to listen...all I hear is the sound of drops of water on leaves; my own heart, beating, hard, in my ears.
There is no one other than ourselves to absolve us of our sins. And it is the sin of intention which is all. Abelard and Heloise were right and when I meet them both in some atheistic hell, we will embrace; brothers and sisters in a knowledge; full knowledge, of all that we commit.

In Defence of Angry Women Pt 3

The Furies are snake-haired, dog-faced and bat-winged. They are full of hyphens. An ugliness that defied their description in the ancient world – they were called Eumenides – bringers of justice – because their bronze-tipped flails were too horrible to contemplate.
They punished the most horrible of crimes – parricide and perjury.
It makes you think.
Killing your parents is right up there with lying.
Those ancient Greeks were fond of making their most fearsome monsters and deities, female. Scylla; the Gorgons: the Fates; the aforementioned Furies. They had a deep, in-built fear of the female.
Hesiod tells us that woman was made as a punishment for all human kind for the gift Prometheus made us of fire. Of course given Zeus; the constructor of said punishment; was himself a prodigious womaniser; one wonders if he was totally truthful in the whole “I'm only making her to punish those naughty mortals” story that he told his ever jealous wife Hera.
Truth is a slippery concept. I don't know if the ancients anthropomorphised Truth in the same way they did almost every other force or idea that impacts on the lives of us mortals – but if they did it would have been the nasty, slimy, long entrail of a particularly lecherous giant. Such, I think, is the nature of truth. It takes a long time to unfold; it slides through your fingers unpleasantly and if you split it open; it stinks.
As last week's post will attest I've just seen one of the great plays written about truth...Ibsen's The Wild Duck. No need to re-visit last week's fangirl slatherings here and no need to further contemplate why I might have been pondering the concerns of said play; suffice to say – its been on my mind.
This morning I read an interiew with a woman in her early 30s, Emma Forrest. She's an author and a journalist – and someone who appears to have made a career out of being a particularly self-conscious self-revealator. She takes the opportunity in the 400 or so word article to tell us first about her bulimia; then about her disastourous attraction to addicts and alcoholics; about her numerous (and I do mean a very, very large number of) failed relationships and her attraction to phyically imperfect men. I was, I suspect, not the only one, finishing my Sunday morning coffee and toast, dusting the crumbs off the sheets and thinking “Emma, love, TMI”.
She's just one of the many, may I venture too many, people making a living out of telling us just a little more than we really want to know about someone we don't.
That great philosopher of our generation; or at least my generation: Agent Mulder, thought the truth was out there. I tend to think right now, its just a little bit too out there.
Ibsen in his idealistic younger years wanted people to have truth in their relationships. He wanted people to know one another fully and intimately so they could be full and equal partners. When he's writing The Wild Duck; he's writing with a very different idea in mind.
Ibsen was fascinated by the maelstrom – the huge whirlpools in the sea off Norway – wild, unforgiving nature. I just saw Derek Jacobi's King Lear – unaccomodated man has never been so witty, so rational and therefore so moving. Let me remind you of the lines:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, and germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

I thought I had heard them so many times that I could not find them new or fresh or more truthful. Jacobi whispers them, barely audible in the tiny DONMAR theatre, barely audible to the audience at the live screening in Nova cinema. I'm having to lean forward in my seat and almost read his lips.
Its still the piece of poetry that for me sums up that moment of the full recognition of ourselves as tiny, insignificant ingrates in the eyes of the gods. Later Gloucester, in the long tradition in tragedy of the blind who finally see the truth, pronounces that damning indictment on the human condition:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport.

It is a terrible, brutal play with a terribly brutal ending. I have never wept so much for Cordelia as I wept with Jacobi's Lear and the horror of utter defeat.
Truth; the truth of our own mortality; our humble position in the turning of the orbs is confronting and it is painful. Ibsen isn't dealing with the same grand themes that Shakespeare throws about the stage in King Lear. Ibsen's tragedies are the falls of small people; people like you and me. When I watch Hjalmer in his homespun cardy or Hedvig in her school uniform; I'm no less moved than when Lear staggers on-stage crushed; yes, crushed; by the weight of his daughter's death.

Third time lucky

There's a point somewhere near the middle of Simon Stone's re-working of the Ibsen classic, The Wild Duck, when Gina (Anita Hegh) is alone on stage. The lights are blazing and the music is almost unbearably loud. Seconds earlier her husband of 16 years, Hjalmar Ekdal (Ewen Leslie) has stormed out. She is distraught, her pain almost unbearable to watch. Somewhere around there I know I whimpered and the woman sitting next to me turned to check I was ok. This is what really good theatre should do.

In the moments before, Gina and Hjalmar wrestle on stage; she pressing him into the wall, begging with her whole self, that he stay. Its intensley private; an awful, painful, uncomfortable moment of absolute physical distress. And I'm watching it all, through one-way glass, not even a metre from the now quite literal fourth wall.
There are more such moments to follow. I know my breathing matched his, as Leslie's Hjalmar shakes with rage and grief. Its so low-key, in fact so barely palpable I'm not sure if it was even visible from further away; but its horrifying to witness. This is what a really good actor can make you feel.

Its no secret that I'd pay to watch Ewen Leslie read the phonebook. And now none that I'd travel 2000 kms in less than 24 hours just to see him on stage for 90 minutes. But Stone's Wild Duck delivers much more than just putting Mr Leslie within touching distance of this particular fangirl.

This play is the answer to Ibsen's earlier work on marriage and lies - A Doll's House. Equally shocking in its time, Doll's House tells us why we have to be truthful, really truthful, in relationships and truthful also to ourselves. Much later Ibsen writes a play that argues the opposite.

This production is physically overwhelming. The intensity of the voyeurism, starring into the lives of this family as it all-too-quickly unwinds. The glass walls Stone has built around the stage don't so much create a barrier as break one down. The walls reflect the audience back at itself; we're as much a part of the play as the actors.

Sounds harrowing? It is. But its also hilariously funny. Stone has done for Ibsen in re-writing him completely; what no translator into English has previously achieved. Ibsen's theatre was realistic - naturalistic dialogue; real people; real people's lives. It deals with serious issues about love, relationships and how we negotiate our way through a series of social expectations which seem at odds with the reality of being human. But he's also really fucking funny. And so is this script.

Did middle-class Norwegians 130 years ago swear quite as prolifically and energetically as the characters Stone puts on stage? Possibly not...But then they also didn't have mobile phones, watch beached whales on their iMacs or "go down the pub" with their mates. And all these elements work in this play. Its Ibsen but not as you've ever seen him before. Funnier, sharper, more moving.

I wasn't crying by the end. But I was deeply disturbed. The mics the actors wear transmit every sound; every intake of breath; every gasp; the sound of Leslie sniffing and wiping his noise. It creates a soundscape vivid and visceral and in contrast to the empty set and pared down costuming. It means that the final offstage dialogue between Gina and Hjalmar comes to us as an overheard conversation. Its all the more affecting as a result.

I want to talk about how creepily likeable John Gaden is as the aging and lecherous Werle; the genuine affection transmitted between the two old friends when Werle and Ekdal(Anthony Phelan) meet by accident and share a joke. I want to talk about how Eloise Mignon blazes on the stage, stealing scene after scene as Hedvig; the girl at the centre of all the lies. Or Toby Schmitz using his whole large frame to bear over the other characters; his size and prescence an apt metaphor for the impact Gregers idealistic truth-telling will have.

But its Leslie that sets the set on fire for me. I have gradually been running out of adjectives; metaphors; cliches; with which to describe his performances. Last night I suddenly found the lights going up from total blackout and the man himself almost literally standing on my feet. If I gasped out loud, I apologise. You can read directors talking about his energy; the bottled chaos he channels on the stage - but that close, its almost a little too real. That glass wall around the stage suddenly makes a lot of sense.