It is not always possible to take away someone’s legitimate pain…but it is always possible to give that pain meaning.
I have had friendships that were as deeply part of my life as my marriage. They have lasted years and then foundered.
On a bad day when work is not going well or for some other reason I am in a low state all these relationships that failed to survive crises and transition leave me feeling diminished and ashamed as if there as something I should have done better to avoid this situation.
Every friendship has its own story, some are meant to be profound and some are only meant to be fleeting.
The ones that cause me the most pain when they fail are those that were based on a commitment to truth.
What I mean by this can be explained in a story.
I remember a group of women friends I had who were always supportive of their fellow women friends when they were let down by men.
One day we were confronted by a situation where a woman friend was faced with her partner ending a relationship because she wanted to marry and he didn’t.
Suddenly the man became demonized as if he had been caught cheating on her.
Actually they had simply reached a point in their relationship where they both wanted different things and although it was painful it was legitimate for the man to be able to say no to what my friend wanted.
I remember feeling very uncomfortable being part of this women against men conversation but needing to go and think about why.
I then realized we were speaking about this man as if with a template that had been cut to fit any situation regardless of its subtle reality.
The situation needed specific diagnosis and we had become instead general in our response.
We had become tribal.
She is ours, you have made her unhappy and we are against you.
As a group of women we were very interested in the poetry and writing of Adrienne Rich.
She is a person who has written a lot about a longing for truth in her relation to herself and to those she calls friends.
The possibilities that exist between two people or among a group of people are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting things in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.
When relationships are determined by manipulation, by the need for control, they may possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but they cease to be interesting. They are repetitious; the shock of human possibility has ceased to reverberate through them.
When someone tells me a piece of truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can also flood me with a cold, sea-sharp wash of relief. Often such truths come by accident, or from strangers. It isn’t that to have an honourable relationship with you, I have to understand everthing, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.
Adrienne Rich.
Women and Honour, Notes on Lying (in Lies, Secrets and Silence)
These words were very much part of our lives as a group of friends. Faced with the conflict that arose between us because I wouldn’t demonize a man who hadn’t done anything wrong most of those friendships foundered in my life.
There were those who were for the friend and against the man and that was the only viable position for staying in the group.
I was too young at the time to be able to describe what had gone wrong.
Now I am older I can understand.
This situation contained the possibility of putting into practice our ideals as described by Adrienne Rich.
We could have comforted our friend and not demonized the man who had sensibly ended something where both parties wanted different things.
It would have been possible to be a good friend to the woman with the broken heart and to be fair to the man who couldn’t give her what she wanted.
I now know how to express this and describe what was happening.
At the time lack of life experience meant I just had an uncomfortable feeling in my tummy and so we parted ways.
Some friendships survived that particular drama at that time.
They survived because we were able to speak about what had happened and put right the demonizing of the young man.
What was set up between us then was the beginning of a biography of depth.
We had all had an experience of trust that we could go wrong and then talk about it and redeem the situation.
The ones who wouldn’t talk about the situation where they had taken part in bullying someone out of an unthinking tribal sympathy wouldn’t speak together because they couldn’t bear to loose face, to be wrong , to have behaved in a way that merited remorse and truth and reconciliation.
Those friendships fell by the way and the others lived on to meet new challenges as we all grew older.
The grief and diminishment I felt at my failed friendships comes about from thinking I have not managed to do enough to save the friendship.
I begin to see more and more clearly I cannot save a friendship unless both parties are prepared to be united by wanting to find out what is actually happening, the truth of the situation, rather than a kind of group consciousness that fails to have empathy and interest in everyone’s experience even those who are not part of our group.
Friendships come and friendships go. WhIt is not always possible to take away someone’s legitimate pain…but it is always possible to give that pain meaning.
I have had friendships that were as deeply part of my life as my marriage. They have lasted years and then foundered.
On a bad day when work is not going well or for some other reason I am in a low state all these relationships that failed to survive crises and transition leave me feeling diminished and ashamed as if there as something I should have done better to avoid this situation.
Every friendship has its own story, some are meant to be profound and some are only meant to be fleeting.
The ones that cause me the most pain when they fail are those that were based on a commitment to truth.
What I mean by this can be explained in a story.
I remember a group of women friends I had who were always supportive of their fellow women friends when they were let down by men.
One day we were confronted by a situation where a woman friend was faced with her partner ending a relationship because she wanted to marry and he didn’t.
Suddenly the man became demonized as if he had been caught cheating on her.
Actually they had simply reached a point in their relationship where they both wanted different things and although it was painful it was legitimate for the man to be able to say no to what my friend wanted.
I remember feeling very uncomfortable being part of this women against men conversation but needing to go and think about why.
I then realized we were speaking about this man as if with a template that had been cut to fit any situation regardless of its subtle reality.
The situation needed specific diagnosis and we had become instead general in our response.
We had become tribal.
She is ours, you have made her unhappy and we are against you.
As a group of women we were very interested in the poetry and writing of Adrienne Rich.
She is a person who has written a lot about a longing for truth in her relation to herself and to those she calls friends.
These words were very much part of our lives as a group of friends. Faced with the conflict that arose between us because I wouldn’t demonize a man who hadn’t done anything wrong most of those friendships foundered in my life.
There were those who were for the friend and against the man and that was the only viable position for staying in the group.
I was too young at the time to be able to describe what had gone wrong.
Now I am older I can understand.
This situation contained the possibility of putting into practice our ideals as described by Adrienne Rich.
We could have comforted our friend and not demonized the man who had sensibly ended something where both parties wanted different things.
It would have been possible to be a good friend to the woman with the broken heart and to be fair to the man who couldn’t give her what she wanted.
I now know how to express this and describe what was happening.
At the time lack of life experience meant I just had an uncomfortable feeling in my tummy and so we parted ways.
Some friendships survived that particular drama at that time.
They survived because we were able to speak about what had happened and put right the demonizing of the young man.
What was set up between us then was the beginning of a biography of depth.
We had all had an experience of trust that we could go wrong and then talk about it and redeem the situation.
The ones who wouldn’t talk about the situation where they had taken part in bullying someone out of an unthinking tribal sympathy wouldn’t speak together because they couldn’t bear to loose face, to be wrong , to have behaved in a way that merited remorse and truth and reconciliation.
Those friendships fell by the way and the others lived on to meet new challenges as we all grew older.
The grief and diminishment I felt at my failed friendships comes about from thinking I have not managed to do enough to save the friendship.
I begin to see more and more clearly I cannot save a friendship unless both parties are prepared to be united by wanting to find out what is actually happening, the truth of the situation, rather than a kind of group consciousness that fails to have empathy and interest in everyone’s experience even those who are not part of our group.
Friendships come and friendships go. When they are lost because of this dynamic, just understanding what happened give me some peace of mind.
en they are lost because of this dynamic, just understanding what happened give me some peace of mind.
The Hospital for lost friendships
I’m on the website of the Social Sculpture Research Unit – see
http://www.social-sculpture.org/news.htm
Power and Love
Adam Kahane’s book, Power and Love, defines power as the need for each person to realize their potential and love as the need to harmonize. His book describes the need to become literate in generate love and generate power.
Preparing a lecture about the German artist Paula Modersohn, Becker I found a picture of the dilemma in a person’s life. Paula was married to an artist whose previous wife had died, leaving behind a daughter. Paula married Otto Modersohn and cared for the family as well as pursuing her work as a painter. She left him to go to Paris more than once in order to learn. After six years of marriage. She finally decided to leave him once and for all.
The first picture is a painting of Paula in Paris painted on her sixth wedding anniversary.
She is naked, and she has just left her husband.
She paints herself expecting a child.
She reveals herself to herself and prepares for the birth of herself as an artist.
The second picture is a photograph of Paula and her daughter Mathilde.
The struggle between her husband and herself was resolved and she returned home confident that he would support her wish to become something. Their reconciliation led to the conception of a child. A few days after the birth of her daughter she rose from her bed to dress. She put flowers in her hair.
As she came to sit down she died of an embolism.
The third picture is a self portrait that she painted in the year of her death.
It is like a grave painting with the artist and her serene gaze looking into liminal space.
When she was young Paula had said that she knew she would not have a very long life but that a festival isn’t any less wonderful for being shorter. She wanted to have painted decent pictures , to have loved and to have had a child.
After her death her husband Otto and the poet Rilke went to her studio where they found four hundred paintings and hundreds of drawings.
Here are the words of the letter she sent her mother before on embarking on her last trip to Paris and the words Rudolf Steiner wrote about women in The Philosophy of Freedom.
Because I am going to be something worthwhile…I can not see how great or small it will be but it will be something self – contained. This steadfast rushing towards my goal is the finest thing in life. There is nothing else like it. If I sometimes appear to not be giving much love then I ask you to remember that I am myself rushing forward the whole time, resting only occasionally so that I can once again rush towards the goal. My energies are being concentrated on this one thing. I do not know whether it may be called egoism. Whatever the case, it is the noblest kind of egoism. I lay your head in my lap from which I came, and thank you for my life.
Your child, Paula.
A letter to her mother on preparing to leave her husband to work in Paris.
It is impossible to understand a human being completely if one takes the concept of genus as the basis of one’s judgment. The tendency to judge according to the genus is at its most stubborn where we are concerned with differences of sex. Almost invariably man sees in woman, and woman in man, too much of the general character of the other sex and too little of what is individual. In practical life this does less harm to men than to women. The social position of women is for the most part such an unworthy one because in so many respects it is determined not as it should be by the particular characteristics of the individual woman, but by the general picture one has of woman’s natural tasks and needs. A man’s activity in life is governed by his individual capacities and inclinations, whereas a woman’s is supposed to be determined solely by the mere fact that she is a woman. She is supposed to be a slave to what is generic, to womanhood in general. As long as men continue to debate whether a woman is suited to this or that profession “according to her natural disposition”, the so-called woman’s question cannot advance beyond its most elementary stage. What a woman, within her natural limitations, wants to become had better be left to the woman herself to decide. If it is true that women are suited only to that profession which is theirs at present, then they will hardly have it in them to attain any other. But they must be allowed to decide for themselves what is in accordance with their nature. To all who fear an upheaval of our social structure through accepting women as individuals and not as females, we must reply that a social structure in which the status of one half of humanity is unworthy of a human being is itself in great need of improvement.
From The Philosophy of Freedom, Part II: The Reality of Freedom, CHAPTER FOURTEEN, Individuality and Genus.
Vulnerability and the Art of being Human
Finding Your Spiritual and Artistic Family
Lecture held in Edinburgh, November 2010
The Peckham Experiment
Doing an exercise from my Social Sculpture creative strategies work called , Hidden Ignored Denied, what comes up is the unspoken pain of many people’s lives because they are not doing what they want to do at work. As a person engaged in artistic work the experience of meeting blocked artists over and over again in the most unlikely places has taught me not to make assumptions about what people really are despite what they are calling themselves.
Recently I spoke with a man who was working with people engaged in trying to help the parents and children who had had to be referred to children’s services in the state of Victoria, Australia. Many devoted and committed people were working in this field and feeling utterly miserable because the forms of the institutions were what Joseph Beuys called ‘senile’ – in other words they didn’t help the various professions involved to achieve their purpose. Working with Reos Partners, they had begun to address this problem and to meet to create new forms where they were more able to work effectively.
I have met people in every profession and none who are suffering from knowing that something isn’t working and feeling helpless because they do not know how to address that problem. Not enjoying their work and knowing that it is even worse than useless, they suffer from a continual unnamed misery and anxiety.
Enter distraction! Television , comfort eating , the Internet, shopping, keeping busy otherwise I will stop and think…. My interest in creativity is to do with this problem. Creativity isn’t tied to product…pictures , songs , plays….it is tied to being near one’s core, one’s well spring and remembering what one lives for. It is tied to being able to manifest one’s potential.
Even more amazing the writer and artist Suzi Gablik says that we are discovering something as huge as was discovered during the Renaissance. The birth of reason and the beginning of the search for the meaning of what it means to be a free individual can potentially liberate us from being prey to outer authorities and superstition. However the interdependence of human beings and the cultivation of empathy both for each other and for nature means that we must be not only free but responsibly free. What Gablik states in her book, The Re- Enchantment of Art, is that in terms of being free we actually have discovered that our freedom doesn’t make us happy unless it is used in the service of something greater than ourselves. Therefore all this pain about unfulfilled working lives is the sign , the thing I want to attend to, because it is the messenger of someone wanting more.If that pain is beheld and given space perhaps it will lead to the naming of what is hidden, ignored and denied and in naming it will be possible to reimagine new forms. Then individuals may be enabled to use their potential to help and transform rather than just earn their living, only to go home at the end of the day knowing that at best it made no difference that they went to work, or even worse, that it caused actual harm.
The Peckham Experiment and its agenda to study health discovered this…not that we need more medicine but that health has a lot to do with doing something one finds worthwhile and meaningful – see the quotation below:
Axolotls are dull, stupid animals. They look like enormous tadpoles, six inches long. People used to keep them in tanks in their sitting rooms. There the axolotls blundered about, not looking, not caring, not even wondering.
Yet because they grew up, had children and grew old, people said, `Well, that’s how axolotls are and always will be.’
Salamanders are quite different. They are lively lizards, who love sun and light. They see clearly where they are going, and run wherever they please, relishing life.
One day a scientist discovered that if an axolotl is given the right food and right kind of help, it changes and turns into what it was always meant to be — a SALAMANDER!
Being Me and Also Us Lessons from the Peckham Experiment Alison Stallibrass
Creativity workshop in Oxford
Emily Wilkinson has posted information about the forthcoming workshop Oxford here.
The key is in what we don’t talk about
I just heard someone say on Radio 4 that if we want to understand a particular culture it is more important to look at what it doesn’t speak of than what it does speak of. I tried to list what isn’t spoken of in our culture. I suspect that most people hate their work and don’t think it does much to help anyone. That many people have dreams but don’t feel they are able to realize them because they wont pay.That many people feel a low-grade anxiety about the state of the world but feel powerless to initiate change or do something that would help. We are grateful for institutions like the National Health and free education but we feel uncomfortable with these services but would hardly dare mention that they need redesigning in case we would be seen as endangering the sacred institutions.
The Peckham Experiment.
The Peckham Experiment lasted a few brief years before the second world war and few brief years after it was over.It was the attempt by a small group of doctors to study health rather than sickness.The community around the centre were interviewed about the time they had been involved there.It was the most meaningful time of their lives resonating on for years later.The centre consisted of many facilities including a gym , a pool, gardens , opportunities to dance or to just meet.It included the possibilities to go away in the summer working on the land and was dedicated to allowing the people using the centre to find out how they wanted to use it thereby cultivating enlightened individualism. The model was shown to the powers that be as the way forward regarding the nations health.It was not accepted as such because the ideas for the national health were already very much on-line and it would have been a huge amount of work to scrap that plan and look at this new one.What was lost was the concentration on small local communities taking responsibility for their own health with the support of health professionals.What was also lost was an opportunity for community building and for the real experience of joy and support that gave people….look at
Being Me and Also Us, Lessons from the Peckham Experiment,Alison Stallibrass.Perhaps these ideas have a chance now.
Wonderful quotation
The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed…”
Søren Kierkegaard
Lost Chances?
I have just read a review by Susie Gablik called Lost Chances of a book called Eaarth by Bill McKibben in Resurgence. The extra ‘a’ in Eaarth is for ‘awful’. The book is about how we have missed our chance to steer away from the rocks regarding the effects of climate change. Gablik says, ‘ I won’t deny it; these days I pretty much inhabit the archetype of the apocalypse. . . . . the only thing that surprises me is that more folks don’t live there — that others can still manage not to be preoccupied or obsessed with the drastic meltdown of society, the economy, and the accelerating prospects of environmental cataclysm. ‘
A while ago Lord David Ramsbotham gave a public lecture about the situation of the British prison system. He had been inspector of prisons and had written an excellent book on the subject called Prisongate. Someone in the audience asked him what he felt about the Labour government’s foreign policy. We had just gone to war with Iraq. Lord Ramsbotham said he couldn’t comment on this because as far as he could see the government has no policy about anything. He went on to say that he thought the House of Commons was a bankrupt institution filled with people with no values and interested only in career politics. I asked him about this statement during a short interview he gave me a couple of months after this event. He described the MPs in the House of Commons sitting in debates writing their Christmas cards and texting. He suggested that this was because people didn’t come into politics having experienced life and therefore with aspirations to do something for the world. They simply wanted a career and could almost join any party or be asked to put through any policy.
Is there any hope that in the places where people have power we can ever expect wisdom and love for all living things and for the earth which sustains us?
