Author: zenpolitics

Landscape and history, places and people, home and friends and family – the world out there rather than on screen is my focus. I’m interested in where we’ve been, and how it might help us make some sense of where we are now and where we're headed.

Germany: Memories of a Nation – review

And now, by way of a total contrast, a review, of the British Museum’s Germany: Memories of a Nation exhibition. Why, in a zenpolitics blog? I’ve no easy answer, let’s just say this is the real world.

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A people, a language, a territory, latterly a nation. Princes, electors, bishops, prince… an empire, a republic. Boundaries which shift with the tide of history. The best and very worst of religion. Cataclysmic wars, extreme suffering brought upon itself, and yet achievements which help define man’s highest and greatest capabilities. How to tell this story?

This is an exhibition built around a number of objects, as you’d expect, linked as it is to Neil MacGregor’s BBC Radio 4 series, and so many of them have a meaning and a resonance and story to tell. It can’t be a history of Germany, and as it rightly explains and explores, Germany is a loose construct, only a nation from the 19th century, but there’s a sense of identity if not nationhood long before then. I loved the Dürer engravings, Melancolia supreme now as it was for Vasari, as it was for William Blake. Goethe is rightly celebrated, referencing his encyclopaedic interests alongside the famous Tischbein portrait. Nearby is one of the original Gutenberg bibles, next to which I rested awhile, in awe of an adventure in print which truly changed the world.

As a reminder of another darker side, there’s the gate to Buchenwald, with Jedem Das Seine, to each his own, above; it’s illuminated from behind, and it’s as if you could pass through, even become one of the 50,000 plus who died there, an extermination of minorities, not on the level of Auschwitz, but chilling just because any and all unwanted minorities were sacrificed there – ‘worked to death’ is one phrase.

And yet, this is also the country of Schinkel’s marvellous Gothic cathedral, an early 19th century painting, bright sky back-illuminated, calling up the medieval soul of Germany. Nearby are the four Riemenschneider evangelists, early 16th century, with a rough almost peasant depth of expression. Almost contemporaneous with Martin Luther: his original bible, in two volumes, is there for us to ponder – a translation which introduced the vernacular into a German language which Luther intended everyone should understand.

Five centuries later Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer seek out the soul of Germany in painting, not language, this time post-war, post-Holocaust. Kiefer’s Margarete, evokes a Paul Celan’s Holocaust poem. [Rilke’s words, “For /beauty/ is nothing but the beginning of /terror/, which we are still just able to endure,” are quoted by Sue Hubbard in an article – not connected with the exhibition – on Kiefer’s series of straw paintings, of which Margarete is the culmination.]

This is an exhibition that opens doors, opens up ideas, sets you planning an itinerary, to see Hans Sachs’ and Durer’s Nuremburg, the Fugger banking city of Augsburg, even Friedrichstrasse station in Berlin: there’s a model of the station, designed it seems to allow surveillance by the Stasi.

A poignant statue of an angel, Der Schwebende, emerging like a ship’s figurehead, designed by Ernst Barlach as a war memorial for Güstrow cathedral, in what became East Germany, tells its own story. First installed in 1927, destroyed by the Nazis, it was recast and re-installed in the 1980s. It seemed at the time that the two halves of Germany would be there for the foreseeable, if not forever.

And yet, I mentioned opening doors… at the very end there’s a door which flaps open, and it takes you back to the beginning, to the first room, to a film of crowds pouring through from East to West Berlin in November 1989 – you’re beneath the film, almost a part of it, you come full circle.

 

 

Content (George Herbert)

I’ve an old edition of George Herbert’s poems. It belonged to a great-aunt and she marked this poem – was it seventy or eighty years ago? So this is a mark of remembrance, as well as a poem for today….

It’s a cold and frosty morning, just one day of the old year left beyond today, when the winter has imposed its frozen quiet on the landscape, and you would wish to be at peace within as the world is without. George Herbert’s poem, Content, is one for this morning. The muttering thoughts are there, and maybe they won’t go away. For bed, read chair as we look out on a wintry land, or we may take a well-wrapped walk passing hoar-frosted hedgerows, en route to no destination. We till our own ground, follow our own path, no longer do we  ‘importune’ our friends, or ourselves.

Peace mutt’ring thoughts, and do not grudge to keep
    Within the walls of your own breast:
Who cannot on his own bed sweetly sleep,
   Can on anothers hardly rest.

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Then cease discoursing soul, till thine own ground,
   Do not thy self or friends importune.
He that by seeking hath himself once found,
   Hath ever found a happie fortune.

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The world is rubbish
		
	
	

		
On a feedback programme on Radio 4 last Friday afternoon, a youngish (31?) man arguing against changes to the Today programme, commented ‘I know that the world is rubbish’. That was his argument against change. If the world is rubbish, the radio must reflect this. We don’t want radio programmes which give us too benign a view of the world.


Endlessly focusing on a world we cannot influence, and on the violence in the world, overlooks all the remarkable unsung actions of our day-to-day lives. Don’t change the Today programme too much, but we could indeed do with less of the repetition, less misery, reinforcing the sense we may have that the world is a terrible place.


We do need to look on the world in a different way, not hiding, but taking in a bigger picture – a less jaundiced view  – of human behaviour. And thinking about it, getting away from the news, Radio 4 isn’t too bad at that!

	


	


			
				


			

			
Is this zen politics?
		
	
	

		
How does zen politics connect to the way we engage with the world, the way we operate as individuals in society, to politics and (Jonathan Rowson’s sphere – see my last blog) to policy?


As a starting-point, let’s take a Zen monk, Norman Fischer, quoted by Rowson, arguing that spiritual practice is ‘useless, absolutely useless’. You can do lots of good things for self, family and friends, but spiritual practice won’t help you address any of these concerns.


Elsewhere Rowson quotes Steven Asma in the RSA magazine: ‘If care is indeed a limited resource, then it cannot stretch indefinitely to cover the massive domain of strangers’.


Fischer’s experience is opposite to mine. And I don’t think it’s Zen. As for Asma, Rowson suggests he hasn’t heard of the metta sutta (a core practice in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism), which involves expanding that sense of loving kindness we keep for ourselves and our family and community and extending it to the wider world – and then the whole world.


Extending loving kindness… someone today said to me yesterday how difficult that was. I disagree. We simply, and constantly, need to focus less on our selfish preoccupations, and more on the needs of others. It is a remarkable and simple corrective, and tunes into a fundamental part of each of us. Violence and confrontation are seen for what they are, at best an aberration and at worse and outright evil.


Care and compassion need not be, are not, limited resources. Care can be infinite, where we attach the same value to others as we do to ourselves. So we need less a sense of something beyond, more something a natural extension of ourselves, and the excitement and the mystery comes from realizing simply how wonderful and powerful that might be.


How do we get there? One suggestion…


By reflecting on the world and taking in all sides of an issue or argument, and by practising mindfulness. In Rowson’s words: ‘Over time, mindfulness helps behaviour to become significantly less reactive, and much more in people’s conscious control.’ If you don’t believe him, or me – try it.


I hesitate these days mentioning mindfulness. It’s out there – a therapy, an accepted business practice or fad, depending on your outlook. Whereas I see it a part of the very fabric of life, essential to understanding how best to live our lives, a corrective against a partial or overly-personal view of the world, and all the negativity and false emotions that go with that view.


If you’re with me this far, you may argue that while it’s wonderful having the right attitudes, how do we translate them into practical action, how can we make (encourage our politicians make) better public policy, how can we as members of society engage with policy and both criticize and help enact it as appropriate? And how can we ensure we have a popular press that takes part in that process, allows debate and argument, and by its own engagement and actions encourages readers to be likewise engaged.


Not easy of course, and that’s not easy even on this beautiful Sunday morning. and cannot be achieved by preaching from pulpits, by politicians or by headline and leader writers. It has to come from within us, and that is both easy, with self-knowledge, and appallingly difficult, in our current climate, where we rush to judgement and prefer to follow the herd.


 

	


	


			
				


			

			
What’s in a word?
		
	
	

		
This blog is very much about bringing an extra personal, insightful approach to life and to politics, avoiding bias, propaganda, partiality, ideology, personal attacks. And recognizing all the time that we have to understand and connect to the other side’s point of view. Only when we can inhabit that other side, and understand its motivations, can we express a proper judgement. Of course we don’t and we can’t slow down the process of living too much while we deliberate, but we can develop an instinctive mindset.


Mindfulness and Zen, and other aspects of Buddhism, are part of the mix, but mindfulness in the sense of an ancient wisdom, not picked up as a temporary fad, soon to be discarded as all fads are.


Finding the right words, the right language is a problem. Mindfulness now has two aspects, modern, and therapeutic, and ancient (how about ‘classical’, sounds better). Spirituality is another much-used word, and much abused – mention ‘spirituality’ and people see another word for religion and if so minded they focus on all the divisiveness they associate with religion, rather than it’s capacity to bring people together. So any attempt to bring a broader perspective to human engagement is stifled.


I am talking about a broader perspective – another dimension, another way of approaching life and politics. Even for me spirituality suggests a state of mind that we bring from the outside to bear on the real world, when what I’m arguing is that an open-minded and, if you want, shared-minded approach is something that comes naturally to us. We simply have to recognize it in ourselves, and run with it.


So what word could we use instead of the ‘s’ word? ‘Wisdom’ suggests a meaning beyond the ordinary and day-to-day. Jonathan Rowson (RSA Social Brain blog) refers to people engaging with society and being ‘motivated by their ideals and their feelings and their vision of being part of something bigger than themselves’. That suggests wisdom, and a deeper meaning , but ‘feelings’ and ‘vision’ are soft words. So too ‘something bigger than themselves’.


And the trouble with wisdom is that in the West it readily attaches to the wisdom tradition, with its esoteric associations, whereas the wisdom I’m talking about focuses on understanding human nature, and our potential if we look beyond short-term cravings, misplaced energy and easy satisfaction


Insight is likewise a powerful word. Like mindfulness it has a strong Buddhist association – vipassana or ‘insight’ meditation. But it also has its casual, quotidian meaning, localised rather than universal, and that’s hard to shake.


So we may be stuck with spirituality. But we need to be careful to play down religious connections and focus on intrinsic meaning rather than external religious validation.

	


	


			
				


			

			
Reasons to be cheerful
		
	
	

		
Two reasons to be cheerful:


1] Finding a poem which distills meaning in a moment, which stops the onward rush of events, and holds you still. You return to the fray a little bit calmer, and a little bit wiser.


2] Walking… I recently returned from four days on the South West Coast Path. Walking on a perfect early September morning down from Zennor to the coast and then with rapt concentration climbing and scrambling, gazing back across the headlands or out to sea, watching and listening for seals, a curlew calling, the early morning clarity, the play of light on water, and at that early stage of the day the complete absence of other people. Just me and a granite fastness on one side and the sea wide-stretching on the other. The mind didn’t wander or reflect on a world beyond, it stayed with the rough ground and the old stones and the bright sky and the big sea.

	


	


			
				


			

			
Reasons not be cheerful
		
	
	

		
Two reasons not to be cheerful.


1] To quote a friend of mine: ‘Jihadism, Western consumerism, youth unemployment, the debt burden, stagnating incomes, the growing wealth divide: they’re all somehow linked, and no-one seems to have convincing answers.’


Now there’s a challenge…


2] Immigrants are crossing in their tens of thousands from Africa. Boko Haram terrorises northern Nigeria spreading jihad and seeking to set up its own ‘caliphate’. Neither would have been possible had Gaddafi retained his hold on Libya. And without the French and British bombing campaign he’d have done so. Better to have left him in power? But what of Benghazi? It rose in rebellion against Gaddafi – and how bloody would have been its punishment?  What if war had followed when the Russians sent tanks into Hungary in 1956, or into Prague in 1968? The latter was the Prague Spring. And in 2010 we had the Arab Spring…


Intervention has its place. In Sierra Leone and Kosovo there was a simple humanitarian imperative. Maybe also in the case of Benghazi – but that illustrates how risky any intervention can be. Libya is now a failed state and we’re living with the – sometimes terrifying – unintended consequences.

	


	


			
				


			

			
Vodka is the solution
		
	
	

		
There’s a short passage in the novel ‘The Hundred-Year-Old Man’ I rather like:


‘Allan interrupted the two brothers by saying that he had been out and about in the world and if’ there was one thing he had learned it was that the very biggest and apparently most impossible conflicts on earth were based on the dialogue: “You are stupid, no, it’s you who are stupid, no, it’s you who are stupid.” The solution, said Allan, was often to down a bottle of vodka together and then look ahead.’


Quite where this takes us I’m not sure!


Maybe simply listening rather than vodka is the answer to all that shouting, all that posturing.


 

	


	


			
				


			

			
The Warburg Institute under threat
		
	
	

		
I read that London University is trying to charge the Warburg an impossible rent for its property in Woburn Square.  And the university back in June launched a legal action to challenge a  deed of trust signed back in 1944 when it undertook to ‘maintain the Library [the Institute’s library] in perpetuity.’


As the THES put it, ‘The future of a “unique and extraordinary” library saved from Nazi Germany lies in the balance …’


How this will be resolved we will know this autumn.


I studied at the Warburg under Ernst Gombrich over forty years ago. And I notice Yale are re-publishing Gombrich’s ‘Shadows: The Depiction of Shadows in Western Art’ this autumn.  It is a most wonderful title, and idea. What can we learn from shadows in art, how do shadows in art and in life change the way we experience things…


But there is of course an irony here.


Should the Warburg be forced to close or relocate to some cheap and gloomy cellar, or be broken up, that would cast the longest shadow of all. It just needs one collector wiser than his peers to put his money into an endowment, and the Warburg, ‘dedicated to the intellectual and artistic legacies of Greece and Rome’ on which our civilsation rests, would be saved.


And if such a wise person is not to be found? If the university has its way?


[Ref: Martin Kemp’s article in the RA Magazine.]

	


	


			
				


			

			
Are high prices good for art?
		
	
	

		
There’s a debate in the current Royal Academy  magazine that asks the question, ‘Are high prices good for art?’


One side of the argument: ‘Art is hip, art is hot… art is embedded in the national consciousness.’ There are far more art-connected jobs. Whether the art is ‘good’ or not will be for future generations to judge.


And the counter-argument: collectors of contemporary art ’mostly don’t have good taste’. We have a kind of art which reflects the taste of those who buy it. Also, art is an investment, and bought in the belief that it will hold its value, so there’s a vested interest in not talking it down. That will be for future generations.


I love the buzz around the Tate Modern. Art is not only hot – it’s cool. There are extraordinary levels of invention. Often they’re scooting up backwaters: the public vote with their feet and move quickly through, hardly comprehending. Who has the patience for video art slowly revealing itself? Not many by the numbers you see sitting in those darkened rooms.


That’s the real world of art. There’s one hell of a buzz out there. And someone out there will be passionate about video art. But when a Saatchi picks them up, or an unknown Arab potentate, no longer. It might as well be that latest Ferrari, the most expensive car ever, which is pre-sold and never seen. Spin-offs and copies sell to the rest of us for extraordinary prices. Remember the prices of the various bits of Damian Hurst merchandise which someone thought we might buy when we exited the Tate Modern exhibition? Would anyone be so daft as to fork out tens of thousands of pounds? Maybe.


It’s a schizophrenic world out there. Yes, money feeds back in and elevates the status of art. And yet it taints it terribly.


It’s only another form of patronage of course. Painters and craftsmen and architects achieved sublime beauty in the name of religion. Do we or do we not rejoice in the creativity married so closely to the opulence at Versailles? How democratic should art be? (There’s a nice diversionary tack!!) Artists want to be discovered, want to win a public, create a market, and they will produce inevitably more of the same if that sells well. The William Blakes of this world who wilfully defy all conventions, they are the rarity.


In the end where would we be without all this money that floods and distorts and devalues? And where would we be without all that noise and all that buzz which matches up against silence? Art and all the buzz of art exists in a sacred space. But remember also – silence is the ultimate sacred space.