Oh the autumn's sunrise

The Impossible Community....

After about two weeks of eating, sleeping and following the Singaporean elections, there is now a huge empty hole in my life. The hole is bigger as a result of the results themselves, but the people have spoken and 70 per cent of the population of Singapore want the PAP to be in power. It is how democracy works. In many ways Singapore is like a pure experiment. You'd think that a country which more or less came from a mostly equal beginnings - save for the very few which escaped after the British left - that the ideals of equality would be cherished. This means that we all moved along together - that there would be no superrich or very poor. There isn't the abject poverty in Singapore which you see in other countries, of course there isn't, but there is growing class of superrich and this is very worrying.

Anyway, back to the pure experiment. You would think that people who came from the same base line, more or less, had Ministers who gave up salaries for the benefit of their fellow men, people who gave up their civil liberties for the promise of a better future - you would think that they would have something to say about the superrich and the growing income gap. It would turn out they had nothing to say about this. Nothing. 70 per cent of then said - well, it is ok - just as long as we can get by, that is ok.

It does not matter that life is more of a struggle than it should be - we don't care. As long as we get those basics, that's ok.

The pure experiment has spoken. It says something about the human race.

On the other side of the equation is the Labour Party in the UK. They have just elected Jeremy Corbyn who his whole life has fought for something better. I love the way he has told PR to go feck themselves. I worked in PR for a very long time and i found it unbearable. It was a superficial and pointless industry. The only useful thing which i learned from it was to write press releases and sell them. Apart from that, everything else was pure nonsense. It is the industry of illusion. Trying to make something into another thing which it is not. As a result i can see through the illusion immediately having worked in PR. It astounds me that people cannot.

And this is where the Singaporean and Labour elections converge - they converge on what is REAL. What is real and what is just a load of bollocks. What is needed and what is just self-perpetuating bullshit. More and more the world is waking up to what is real - what is real is living within our limits - living with the planet and others who need this planet. Living within community and its flaws. Living so that you feel you are alive - creative, have agency, able to aspire to something which nourishes you, but not at the expense of others. Living a life which is the opposite of neurosis. So that as you get older you get healthier and as you get healthier you are able to with wisdom contribute to the world around you. In other words, it needs to be a virtuous cycle.

This is what people are doing when they say they want Jeremy Corbyn to be Labour leader - they want to be like Jeremy Corbyn - who rides a bike, has a work life balance, who is about being himself, who is a triumph of substance over style. I look at him and know he is the real deal. I hope he is able to stay the real deal with no compromising - i have come to an age in my life when i understand that it is important not to compromise...

Anyway, one of the things which really tore me to pieces in Singapore was the lack of being able to life that which is real. For many many reasons - the relentless belief in consumerism and the attendant advertising which accompanied it. There was no escape in Singapore from the constant exhortation to be something which you were not - just be anything, but not you. Have different coloured hair, have different skin, travel somewhere else - usually Taiwan - buy another gadget, be thinner, stop going bald, wear clothes you can't afford, eat things which are not good for you - it just went on and on and on. If you were not neurotic by the time you had entered the shopping centre, you certainly were by the time you left it. And the quiet spaces in Singapore, the untouched silences were getting fewer and fewer and fewer.

In a conversation with a friend i broke down and cried saying that i have no home. It is awful having this SG50 thing where i as a Singaporean i am constantly being told this is home. It is not home i said - it could never have been my home - i had to either leave or to lose myself - i was forced to make a choice - self actualisation or THIS - and i had to choose - so i choose - myself and i gave up the idea of having a home.

Because my values were not the values of the neoliberal capitalist consumer i had to leave because there was literally nowhere for me in Singapore. And it would appear that the continued march towards the eradication of anywhere i could call home will continue indefinitely - well at least for the next five years.

I have no idea where i am going with this - just jumbled thoughts ... So i sit here, looking into autumn's garden. I live in Belfast. The Assembly has gone into meltdown again. But life goes on you know. There is less chaos in Belfast now than anytime in its recent past. It is clear how little government people really need. They need their garbage to be collected and they need their food to be bought and they need their schools to be open - but really... there isn't any awful lot of government beyond that.

I love the mid September sunrise - the last few days before we descend into winter-tilted darkness. The light seems more golden, the birdsong more thoughtful, melancholic... the flowers wistful as they make their goodbyes, the sky already absentminded as it heads towards the starry frost... i love this time of the year too.

So life goes on, as it always will. I am doing the Norse myths with the children. I tell the proper Norse myths - having done a load of research on the topic, i decided to go for the Kevin Crossley Holland stories because they were the most accurate. And of course these things come back to you in way which you cannot predict. One day, in class, a colleague sent in a poster from Norway illustrating Ygssdrasill and the many realms it encompassed. The children lept up from their seats to have a good look at the poster and began naming the different characters on it - that is Mimir, that is the Sun and the wolves, that is Odin, i did not expect Thor to look like that, that is the dragon, that is the squirrel... what i am discovering from teaching is that children have a real need for the authentic - things must be real for them - they need to check and make sure that there is a reality in their surroundings - what they are told is not a load of bollocks... there is a congruence in their lives. It enables them to discover what is true. It enables them to orientate themselves toward the direction of - themselves. That is what is so desperately needed now - people who understand who they are and what they need to do.

I was reading this... and it really struck a cord with me...

"To paraphrase Bakunin, liberty without solidarity is privilege and injustice, while solidarity without liberty is slavery and despotism. It is to defend the thesis that it is to the degree that these values are synthesised in the free community that both injustice and despotism can be avoided."

We could be so much better than we are today.... because we must.