With Creative Devotion The Truly Profane Becomes Sacred

Whatever You Do With Devotion Is Sacred

Devote yourself to whatever, artistic or other, project and you imbue it with the sacred. The spirits attend. The muse shows up. Bali dancers, in Elizabeth Gilbert’s recounting of a tale, told to her by her teacher, in her latest book Big Magic – Creative Living Beyond Fear - adapted their dancing to suit the ideas of high-minded Western visitors who could only see the sacred as separate from profane. They left their sacred dances in the temples, danced - newly adapted forms considered a more suitable representation - in beach bars until they grew into such beautiful and sacred forms that they, in turn, transformed and re-invigorated the original temple dances and the dance goes on.

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/elizabeth-gilbert-big-magic1.jpg

    

Create With Devotion

       Gilbert’s book demonstrates the importance of showing up: the value of making an act of devotion and giving attention to some inkling of a possibility -  devoting yourself to fanning the development of the spark of an idea or impulse. 

Intention

      That notice of intention becomes the intent that signals the muse or spirit. It is their invitation to attend. Your act of devotion, by demonstrating intention to embark on a creative project, however frail its promise, is the starting point for artistic endeavour and true creativity.

For more on creativity and Elizabeth Gilbert see the link above and her inspiring TED talks.

https://www.ted.com/speakers/elizabeth_gilbert

People Power

     A photo shared on social media; beds offered in homes.  Bob Geldof’s offer to do the same thing on radio. Politicians catch the change in mood, change their own attitude, and act in accord.

     A thousand or more people elect to disregard false promise when their train journey doesn’t take them over the border. One man, with a megaphone, entreats his fellow desperate not to submit but to get to their feet and walk - and continues until they join him one by one. 

     The walking thousand – this time on a busy motorway - continue in hope and then the buses come, take them to a destination of hope.

     In the early 1980’s I attended a Conference in Amsterdam, titled The Spirit of Peace. The Assistant Secretary General of the UN told the assembly that people work for years to get to the top of organisations where they believe they will have power to change things. When they get there they realise they are relatively powerless, come to realise the real power is back where they came from.

    The world depends on us.

‘Cleared of wrongdoing.’ Expedient scapegoating? What Values does Ireland Want to Uphold - Leadership Questions posed by Micheal Martin and Enda Kenny.

What do the Taoiseach’s response to the Fennelly Report and an Opposition Leader, Micheal Martin’s, response last week to questions raised by the PSI, Northern Ireland, as to whether the IRA still exists have in common? And what does the RTE documentary on the training of Army Recruits have to add?

     Did the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, show presidential style leadership in 2014 in the midst of revelatory reports, official and unofficial, that were unravelling trust in the Department of Justice and the Gardai? Or did he overstep his brief while demonstrating more of the technical ethics – where the rule but not the spirit of the law is honoured – we have come to expect in public life: an expectation that continues to erode confidence in Irish and International politics?

     As with our eroding coastline that - where possible - continues to be restored when funding and the political will allows, when the erosion has gone too far nothing can be done except to shore up what remains. This is a dangerous business. When law and order breaks down it’s a long road back to restoring sufficient trust in politics to build peace.

     The slow and frustrating road to that restoration is something Micheal Martin should know about. He was a Minister in successive Fianna Fail governments engaged in the painfully slow peace process required to enable a return to the rule of an elected Northern Ireland Assembly.  Those in the front-line of organisations who took up arms (whether you call it terrorism or war) when they no longer believed the political system could, or had the stomach to, deliver an adequately just society had to be particularly patient. They had to act with painstaking attention to detail as they both negotiated peace and led their former – or present, at the time – organisations to continue to take steps for peace and to put their trust in politics instead of the bullet.

     Ironically, it may have been the now relatively normal context that led a Senior Northern Ireland police officer to choose the words he did last week, rather than the more carefully phrased sentences that have come since - familiar over the long years of a return to peace in Northern Ireland.  The Statement from a member of the PSI (Police Service in Northern Ireland) that the IRA was still in existence to a degree and that members are suspects in the investigation of a murder might not have been phrased that way in the immediate winning of a return to politics and the putting beyond use of weaponry held by the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries. 

     

     The remains of an organisation, now with strong criminal elements, is not at all the same thing as the former organisation itself. It is generally understood that former members of all the paramilitaries have variously turned to active politics or to criminality, while others have retired entirely. The failure to spend enough money to resolve the societal inequities that fed the violence or to put in place sufficient processes to help to resolve grievances and grief after years of atrocities made that inevitable. It was nothing new that one of them might be a suspect in a criminal investigation. A suggestion that the paramilitary organisation, the IRA, was back in existence was however entirely new and a grave threat to the peace. It was surprising that the PSI Chief Constable backed up his Officer. His careful statement was never going to be fully reported after the first instance. He should have been less equivocal. Again, it appears he was not as fully conscious of the political dangers as former incumbents of the post might have been.

     Micheal Martin rushed to compound that failure to duly regard politics with his expedient use of a shorthand sound-bite. It was political opportunism at its worst. There was no need to repeat the inaccuracy. He could have added critical clarification. But it served to score a point against a Sinn Fein he now has to compete against for votes in the election next year. I have been impressed by his leadership of a party struggling to make a comeback. His success so far has been impressive but last week I knew nothing had changed. The old politics are still in place. Expediency rules.

     In Ireland and many States, the call from all sides for a renewal of political structures to rebuild the trust that polls and low turnouts on polling day suggest has been badly eroded is pointless if the attitudes at the heart of the problem prevail. One could even argue that if the attitudes changed (and research shows that it is attitudes that are foremost in deciding behaviour and change) the need for structural change would be significantly reduced. 

     I hate Joan Burton’s statement that the Taoiseach has been ‘cleared of wrongdoing’ by the Fennelly Report. It may have been the required political sound-bite but it stinks of expediency. It avoids all mention of the fine line he was traversing. We will never know the ins and outs of the responsibility the Garda Commisioner in the Republic, who retired early last year, has for what was going on in a culture that increasinglyseems to be the norm throughout the organs of the State. It could be argued that with all the emerging controversies arising from his time in office he ought to retire early. But we do not have a culture of people resigning when the perception of things happening under their watch turn sour. Wasn’t that what politicians used to do? Doesn’t that make the Garda Commissioner a scapegoat? The Taoiseach can no longer have trusted the Minister for Justice or he wouldn’t have gone over his head, but it was the Commissioner he felt should be informed that he might no longer be able to tell his Cabinet he could put his trust in. If he hadn’t been put in such an untenable position, the Garda Chief could have retired anyway – in protest at the behaviour of the political establishment. Maybe that is what has happened.

     I watched with initial horror the bullying tactics and expletives, totally unacceptable in any other workplace, deployed to train the Irish Army recruits on RTE television’s documentary (11th & 12th Sept, 2015). I refused to allow myself give in to an urgent desire to change channels. Some of the recruits laughed in the first instance. It was so ridiculous it was laughable. I smiled myself, remembering going to a Secretarial College and wanting to laugh when the teacher called on ‘Miss Harris and Miss …’ to ‘stand up’ for speaking to each other in class. Even in the 1970s, (I was brought up in rather privileged circumstances, given I was sent to a liberal school)I hadn’t seen anyone being asked to ‘Stand up’ for misbehaviour since First Class in National School. But the Sergeant was serious and she made it very clear by further expletives and demands backed up by the Lieutenant and other Officers.

    The would-be soldiers were given the justification that discipline is essential. It became clear that attention to detail – taught through attending to details of uniform and dress, no button could be out of place – and the developing of an inbuilt automatic response to follow an order could save their life, or that a fellow soldier, within  a couple of years. The runner up for best recruit of the year was an exceptional  woman recruit who may have been pipped at the post because she answered back under the extreme conditions, and for the first time in seventeen weeks, on a week-long training exercise out in the mountains. It doesn’t augur well for overcoming groupthink in the Army. I presume they’d argue first things first: there isn’t time when lives are at risk to have soldiers questioning orders.

     If the attention to detail required by our soldiers was required in politics, or in other parts of the civil service and in civilian life in general, we might be living in a very different country and not find ourselves in the straits we’re in. However groupthink and the kind of discipline that doesn’t allow questions or critical thinking is antithetical to what is required for creative and just solutions to problems.

     One has to ask if it’s still appropriate in the times we live in to train soldiers with bullying and expletives. I find it hard to believe we can’t do a whole lot better. Nevertheless, if I were a soldier looking at the shenanigans of the political leaders in whose hands their lives are ultimately held I’d be concerned. Without soldiers and Gardai the State has no power and can’t uphold any values. If we are going to teach our armed forces to be disciplined we had better all be disciplined in taking care of the values and peace we are asking them to help us to uphold. Nightly we see the refugees fleeing the breakdown of politics and the chaos of war. On an international scale, it has never been clearer that we need to build and take care of the peace. Politics is critical in that care. We don’t need a new politics we need a renewal in politics. We need our leaders to take leadership in demonstrating the values in their own behaviour that we want to ask our soldiers to risk their lives to uphold for the Nation.

Low Rate of Irish Divorce. Is Austerity a Factor?

Opening Night of  Love & Marriage Revisited 

The Merriman Summer School, 2015.

     Former Supreme Judge, Catherine McGuinness,  blamed her love of the Culwick Choir - in which she continues to sing alongside the publicist for the Merriman Summer School - and her former husband’s association with the Merriman, for her invitation to Open the 2015 School last night, at Glor Theatre in Ennis, Co. Clare. Her commitment to working towards divorce legislation over a sustained period was mentioned twice from the floor - to applause from the audience. Those members staying in the Old Grand Hotel will be able to update their knowledge of the bible, she quipped, as there is a related seminar on offer there. She got a further laugh when she quoted the Church of Ireland Gazette, saying she is member of that church, 'I know you all read it weekly!'

      The first law allowing for Maintenance for women whose husbands are no longer with them was passed in 1976, the year after I graduated as a social worker. Listening to her mention of other laws passed, after long and arduous campaigns, was like listening to the social history of my lifetime to date. By the time the second Referendum on divorce was passed in 1995, by a small majority,  most of the legislation needed to sustain separated couples was already in place.

    This may account for the significantly low rate of divorce in Ireland. Tom Fahey, Professor of Social Policy at UCD School of Applied Social Science demonstrated that the peak came in the first few years afterwards. If the people who had already separated by the time divorce was available here were the only ones to have divorced since, it would account for the figures.

    Along with Spain and Italy, we are the only country to have a two-step process to divorce. The requirement that couples be separated first for a period of at least four years may be a deterrent. In the first instance because Separation Agreements need to be made (although they are not legally required) to enable couples to put some sort of arrangements in place for that period. They may not wish to re-visit those often hard won agreements lest conflict re-emerges and unnecessary difficulties are raised. There may be no real need for divorce until one party wants to re-marry, Judge McGuinness suggested.

    Members of the audience pointed out that the economic difficulties of recent years make it extremely difficult to contemplate divorce, or even separation. Living apart may not be a viable economic possibility. Another indicated research suggesting that austerity is putting severe pressure on marriages in Ireland. As the legislative details of divorce law were put into the Constitution rather than allowed for in accompanying legislation they would be very difficult to change here. We do, however, have a fairly liberal law – no-fault divorce – once the long separation period been seen through. Professor Tom Fahey pointed out that findings in relation to the reasons for such a low divorce rate in recent years are ambiguous. It is hard to ascertain the reason, particularly in the context of International comparisons. Italy and Spain have low rates also.

    I was sorry to hear, from a local Co. Clare solicitor trained in Mediation, that a lot of couples still do not go for mediation before engaging in what inevitably is an adversarial process once both parties have their separate lawyers. My own separation was amicably agreed with my former husband. We waited till quite late on to engage the advised separate lawyers (to ensure neither could later claim later they weren’t advised) and move on to arrange a divorce to ensure we didn’t get adversarial – at least until our children were further grown up. It worked for us but it’s not ideal. Once a third party – a potential new spouse for one partner is involved – things could get more complicated. The divorcing spouse wanting to re-marry could find themselves with conflicting loyalties. Mediation is by far the best route to follow if at all possible.

     Dr. Linda Connolly is Director of this year’s School. She is Chair of the Irish Social Sciences Platform and  a member of the Royal Irish Academy Social Sciences Committee.  She is a Sociologist and Director of the Institute for Social Science in the 21^st Century  (ISS21) at UCC.

     The Merriman School continues until Sunday to consider the topic Love and Marriage Revisited through literature, sociology, history and music. You can attend individual events or join the school. 

You can book at www.glor.ie . 

More information  is available at: www.merriman.ie / eolas@merriman.ie

Rising to the Challenge of Summer.

Solos – whether living, working or otherwise alone - need to be just as creative as parents occupying children, double as much if you’re child-minding alone as well.

At the gates of a play-school last year I met a Grandmother, child-minding for the summer. She was visiting from England and lamenting the absence of activity groups to join. ‘Every group I contact has stopped for the summer months.’ I recommended investigating the Meet-Up site online but, living alone myself, I fully appreciated the challenge she was facing. At least her adult family would return home in the evenings but they’d have their own commitments. She needed a life of her own – temporarily in suspension across the Irish Sea - to complement child-minding and acting adjunct to her younger family, so busy themselves they’d be unlikely to fully appreciate her difficulties which could lead to problems. She could quickly find herself isolated, or at odds with the family she had come to assist with little left to contribute in terms of company after a day of child-minding alone.

Solo, whether through living alone, working alone from home, recently: retired, widowed separated, with a spouse working away or simply absent with their own activities – is a challenge to rise to if you are not to disappear into yourself and feel body-less. Without the synergy of engaging with others, as interested in you as themselves as you collectively engage in a shared enterprise, it takes a lot of creative energy to simply keep on track. Don’t dismiss that as valueless. This creative engagement can have you more consciously weaving life than those who are more engaged. It would be worse were there no challenge to keep you creative. This realisation is a good place to start.

Setting up a structure that works for your day and week, once you’ve practised it for a while, will save you from wasting energy. President Obama bought suits of only two colours, with matching ties for each, when he began his presidency. He wouldn’t have the time or energy to be daily deciding on clothes. I’ve also taken this advice from a seasoned solo traveller heard on radio before I took my first trip away alone to Rome a few weeks ago. ‘Decide beforehand what you will do when you get there, give yourself an itinerary -otherwise, when you arrive, you won’t bother and find yourself wandering aimlessly’. It worked a treat. Tired from simply getting there, it was great to have sought out the city tourist travel bus before I’d even left the station on arrival and to take it up next day without effort. All that was left to decide was where to get off and when to get back on!

Exercise needs to be part of your structure. A daily walk, tai chi or yoga exercises or whatever you fancy yourself. At the worst of times: movement of any kind is a first step back on track – even if it’s walking across the kitchen and stretching before you put the kettle on. Already your brain is re-activated. I love Julia Cameron’s idea of Artist Dates – from the book The Artist’s Way. Choose to visit or do something you wouldn’t normally select and go there, or go somewhere that will stimulate your creative side - and don’t think about creativity as something that is only for artists, it is not. Engage in a project: make something or learn. Wellbeing research indicates that anything that absorbs you to self-forgetfulness leverages happiness and August is a good time to visit special events and put a toe in new waters.

‘Power poses,’ I’ve been known to chant as a mantra on occasions. The research indicating that people who have taken power stances before interviews – hands on hips, leaning on a table with your hands, or punching the air – instead of only sitting curled over to surf the internet on a smart phone before being questioned, not only performed better in their interview but felt better too. Their cortisol levels, associated with stress, were down and testosterone levels up leaving them more sense of agency and action.

Smile, it changes your brain chemistry and there is something to be said for the old adage about the world smiling with you but I wouldn’t rely on it. You need company and it is good to do everything you can to find it but failing that there’s a lot to enjoy and, meanwhile, you’re building resilience, toning muscles readiness to rise to your next challenge – maybe the new group you’ll join in September or the skill you’ll take to the next level when you add it to the familiar friends and activities you enjoy during the rest of the year.

The Honouring of Poets: Derek Mahon

     I was listening to poet Derek Mahon’s controversial biographer, Stephen  Enniss, last night - as he was interviewed by Vincent Woods on  Arts Tonight on RTE Radio 1*. Savouring the pleasure of hearing Derek Mahon himself, in excerpts from previous interviews and hearing him read a few of his poems. Stephen Enniss acknowledges that Mahon and Seamus Heaney were good friends but also, inevitably, rivals. He linked the withdrawal of Derek Mahon from the public sphere of poetry, including his refusal of an OBE from the Queen of his birth-place, Northern Ireland, to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Heaney. The wisdom of which withdrawal Enniss absolutely regrets and he hopes his book will provide a counterbalance, keeping Derek Mahon’s poetry closer to the foreground of international attention. It will be good if it achieves that although the poems speak for themselves.

     Whatever his own reasons, such as he knows them, Derek Mahon himself, however, has not only done the right thing in withdrawing but given the greatness of his commitment to serving poetry; he has, arguably, taken the only possible option open to him. This is, I predict; what the greats of his generation, his early friend Evan Boland, perhaps, and friends Michael and Edna Longley - along with other present and future great writers will say, or may have already said privately or in public.

     There is a paradox at the centre of a culture of awards and prizes. True poetry and art is beyond such things – there can be no single winner, given the diversity of poems and poets  - yet they are crucial to maintaining a framework that ensures it can continue to be formed. The humanness at the centre of it, also paradoxically, requires sufficient recognition to battle on in the face of few material rewards. The greatest prize in literature was awarded – to Heaney.  The only thing left to a true poet and candidate of similar stature is to transcend that culture, put himself beyond the question of current acclaim and leave it to history.

     It is important that Seamus Heaney was awarded and accepted the Nobel Prize. It was important that in the year of his seventieth birthday the laureate could be heard on radio at the centre of Irish life reciting his poems - in the midst of the collapse of so much. He held, and held us, to poetry.  It is equally in the service of Irish and all poetry that Derek Mahon has not second-placed himself by accepting less prestigious awards, however honourable in themselves, but rather holds for us the space in poetry that is beyond all such.

    In the greatness of time in Northern Ireland it will not be the creeds and identities of the relatively petty wrangling that will be remembered but the bloodshed. Neither will it be awards of literature, whatever gratefulness is felt that the artist received recognition in their time. It is poetry that endures. The words and the due honour inherent in the manner it has been served.

Reference & Link:

Book: After the Titanic: The Life of Derek Mahon by Stephen Enniss. Gill & Macmillan.

*http://www.rte.ie/radio/utils/radioplayer/rteradioweb.html#!rii=9%3A10440736%3A1538%3A%3A

*First broadcast Autumn, 2014

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Postcript and Prelude

An Apprentice Verse-Maker’s Take on the Exhibition -

Postcript: Visual Artists Respond to Seamus Heaney’s Poem.              

Transfixed, I was listening to the radio in my kitchen when I heard the Chair of the Irish Countrywoman’s Association, Bridin Twist, say that she was in favour of legalising divorce. There was now every chance something heretofore unimaginable could happen. I was reminded of that as the votes were counted in the recent referendum.  It was one of those heart-stopping moments when time is suspended and you know the landscape has irrevocably changed. A few years later I met my hero in her home The Burren Holistic Centre below Mullaghmore Mountain, where I was to facilitate a workshop.

Bridin, who sadly died a few years ago, brought my attention to the poem Postscript, by Seamus Heaney.  I bought a copy from the Kinvara shop named after the poem and had it hanging in my own house afterwards.

On Saturday evening last in the Russell Art Gallery, just north of the flaggy shore road that inspired the poem, I attended the opening by Micheal O’Suilleabhain of ‘Postscript: visual artists respond to Seamus Heaney’s poem’ - an exhibition curated by Tim Emlyn Jones. Introducing Micheal, Tim spoke of the transformative powers of the Gallery space where, if you stop by for a cup of coffee before walking the flaggy shore, anything can happen. You can even find yourself agreeing to curate the exhibition to which you had agreed to contribute!

The response of the artists he invited was so generous that the Burren Art College is now going to host more of the exhibition. It will be formally opened there by Fintan O’Toole on Thursday 9^th July at 7pm. Both sections of the whole exhibition will continue until the end of July. Just over a week later, on Friday 17^th July, The former RTE radio producer, John Quinn, will introduce and present “Remembering Seamus – interviews & correspondence,” a selection of radio interviews with his friend.

The RHA artist, Donald Teskey’s Longshore II - a wild seascape created in mixed media, waves crashing the rocks of the shoreline, immediately grabs attention on entering the Russell gallery space. To the left of that is an exhibit where lines drawn in black interact with thick white paper, drawing attention across the waves to the horizon and the sky’s lines above. This picture had me smile without quite knowing why - the horizon, with its persistent waves, its sense of timelessness maybe. It is the work of Tim Emlyn Jones himself and there is a smaller similar piece of his further along the wall, with more variety in the waves and light. The juxtaposition of colour and black-and-white is striking in the montage of images in mixed media in Judith McKimm’s work, while The Blue Flower, in oil, by Nick Miller and Geraldine O’Reilly’s work give a more immediate take on the Burren landscape - as does RHA Charles Harper’s, striking piece Burren Day highlighting mountain and flagged Burren landscape – although in a very different style. I was also particularly taken by the abstract work of the other artists: Ann Quinn, Lorraine Wall and David Ferry.  Conor McGrady’s ‘Borderland 1’ and 2, undertaken in Gouache on Paper, revealed to the returning eye of this observer a zen-like sense of stillness. I wondered was the artist influenced by Japanese landscapes: a black sun above a strong I Ching-like line was suggested to this novice when I reflected further. And the placement of the scene on the paper in his second piece, reminiscent of rocks planted in the Japanese landscape – timeless and natural, yet carefully placed, this time here in Co Clare, suggested it further. The blurred boundaries of the gouache medium somehow only strengthen the outline. Again, there’s the suggestion of a here-and-there-ness.

The boundaries of the exhibition itself are blurred in the Gallery. Hunting for treasure, glance moving from catalogue to walls, it became clear all the paintings on the walls are exhibits. The other work, enjoyable for itself any other day and propped on shelves among exceptional craftwork, cards and jewellery that, one suspects, assist the gallery to host such exhibitions – they have related books too – inevitably distract somewhat from the exhibition.

‘Heaney’s “…neither here nor there” might be taken as an insult but it also reveals something of poetry’. ‘It is the place where poetry meets you’, Micheal O’Suilleabhain suggested as he reflected on Heaney’s lines. ‘Everyone should have a flute carrier’ he remarked as the young man kneeling at his feet unbent himself to extend the instrument. The musician did not want the audience to be trying to imagine wild swans or any such – ‘we’ll just see what happens’ and the notes trickled and danced.

Across the road, as I left, across the fields and the grey sea in the bay the white and yellow light was highlighting dark edges in the white clouds. Silver glanced the arms of the wind turbines lit from the disappearing light behind them as they turned on the hills – straight across from the place Heaney visited and wrote, in Postcript, ‘You are neither here nor there,/a hurry through which known and strange things pass/As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.’

Relevant links:

Russellgallery.net

http://visualartists.ie/listings/exhib-munster/postscript-group-exhibitions-at-the-burren-college-of-art-and-the-russell-gallery/

aica.ie/postscript-group-exhibitions-at-the-burren-college-of-art... 

How is Money, Money? Bitcoin and Other Currency Questions.

I was on holiday in the 1970s, on the Ring of Kerry, when the recently graduated husband of my friend from earlier days, shocked me into thinking differently about my bank account, then happily in credit despite its low value. I was reminded of this, on Monday 18^th May, at the UCD workshop on Gaming Money.

‘I threatened to move my loan to another bank,’ he said. Far from feeling himself at the mercy of his bank because of the significant loan he had had to take out to equip his dental surgery he realised that the interest he would be paying on the loan for a long time to come made him a valuable customer. It was the first time I realised that my careful ‘staying in the black’ strategy was only that and not necessarily the best one. Credit is valuable. A credit history can be valuable too, if you want to take out loans in future. Banks sell loans to us and to each other and in the process create more money. Contrary to what is often thought to be the case, most money nowadays is created by commercial banks rather than Central banks.

The ‘nice’ history frequently taught in College courses on Economics describing the humble beginnings of money as token object used as substitutes to barter, is only one way of looking at the money story. Another begins, by seeing money as credit – debt. As money becomes increasingly complex exploring the stories and histories that best describe how it works may be the most realistic way to understand it.

How is money, money? No longer backed by gold (Nixon fully and finally removed it from the Gold Standard in 1971), with only a fraction of the value of credit given, or ‘money’, backed by reserves of savings it is no longer accurate – if it really ever was – to think about money as a thing. All of this was the starting point for ‘rules of currencies, and how they are and could be twisted by digital currencies’. The Workshop was part of the UCD Centre for Innovation Technology  and Organisation’s (CITO) research on coding value. The invited speaker, Professor Ole Bjerg from the Copenhagen Business School, explored the question, ‘How is Bitcoin Money? He finds the question ‘How is money?’ more effective than ‘What is money?’.

Bitcoin is growing in significance. It is the best known of digital currencies using block-chain coding – a kind of linked computer coding that is considered to be particularly secure. The European Union takes it seriously enough to have brought out a report last year advising Central Banks as to important considerations to bear in mind when considering it.

Author of Making Money, Bjerg employs a model from Lacanian Analysis to propose three overlapping circles one of which he calls ‘Real’, placing within it an image of a house - but it could either, arguably, be a block of gold bullion. The second one he labels, ‘Symbolic’ and places within it a hundred euro note. That note, or any such, is backed by Nation States and has ‘sovereign power behind it.’ In the third circle, titled ‘Imaginative’ he puts a Visa card. In this circle money is credit. ‘The banks owe us a lot of money and that is what we use as money’. These overlapping circles give the fuller picture of how money is.

Professor Donncha Kavanagh – at UCD, proposes a further circle he labels ‘Shambolic’ to include  ‘excess’ – the value added by leveraged derivatives and more. Kavanagh considers stories and mythologies useful aids to better understand business: his paper, with Majella O’Leary (2004), considers heroic leadership styles within business organisations in the light of Irish Legends -The Tain and Chu Chulainn. Think of the myths about alchemy, the eternal search to turn base metal into gold – powerfully symbolic in our collective imagination.

Bjorg points out that Bitcoin, although it can’t be held in the hand, has similar characteristics to gold in that its story includes ‘mining’. Would be miners have to spend considerable time on a computer bank on which they have to rent time on very expensive powerful computers, or pool resources with lots of other miners if they want to get themselves Bitcoins. Most will, instead buy them from those who have already done this.

A member of the audience high-lighted the significance of this difference: the distributed power is in the hands of the miners - and much is made of this de-centralised, democratised, non-State power  (‘Symbolic circle’above) backing the digital currency - and not with the majority of holders of Bitcoin who are more likely to have bought or exchanged the ‘coins’.

The second guest speaker was Nigel Dodd, who talked about ‘Origins and Utopias of Monies’. He is a sociology professor from the London School of Economics who has made the sociology of money the focus of a long career. He talked about local currencies, such as the Brixton pound in England: they definitely add value to local economies; it is best argued that they add resilience to the greater picture by being currencies within the framework of other currencies.

The workshop suggests that so far the most valuable aspect of digital and other forms of currency may be the way they force and assist us to think further about what and how money is.

Fat is Not Immoral and Those Who Claim the High Moral Ground Are in Danger of Bullying.

I wish I could be as smart as Derek Davis was.

Fat is no longer ‘a feminist issue’ alone. It’s a health and fashion issue - for all. It always was. Face facts: fat is most associated with having a low income, although genetic make-up and many other factors play their part; once it has been put on, the body has an in-built tendency to return to its former highest weight. This is why many who diet fail to sustain their weight loss and why attacking those who have weight on is inappropriate and counter-productive. To demonise those putting on weight, or their parents, is to bully those often already suffering.

You may have a lean mean physique. You may work hard to keep it that way, sweating the calories off in the gym or on the road. Well done.  I celebrate your success, health and wellbeing. If you also need to hit out at the less fortunate then I question your motivation. You want to add moral high ground to your accolades? Is your self –worth so low? Is it built on body image? You are then about as unwell as the rest of us.

All the indications are that we live in a society with an eating disorder. Magazines sell best, now that Princess Diana is gone, when they have something about weight, fat or food on the cover. We have anti-weight campaigns and more cooking food programmes promoting sugar and fat ingredients than ever before. See-saw weight gain-loss and an obsession with food are clear indications of addiction. We photo-shop images that no-one can live up to because they are not real and then we make them an ideal to fail to live up to. It makes sense to be obsessed with food when it is genuinely in short supply other than that, we have to ask: what else is going on.

The short answer is that an industry is going on, an industry with as many charlatans as academic experts. The second answer is that industry as a whole needs more output from fewer workers to keep the economy going. 

Last Sunday,10th May, 2015, the retired broadcaster Derek Davis contributed to a conversation on the Marian Finucane Show about Obesity Policy, This week we are mourning his death. The panel agreed the focus needs to be on prevention, starting with children. Children need to be allowed to play. They need to be given space to run around and allowed out to safe-enough spaces we need to ensure are created. We do need to exercise. We also need to get out more. We need to address our false fears of the world out there. Having been a pscychotherapist for many years I want to say that many of those are generated by fear in here – internal fear generated by the false myths we need to stop promulgating. We also need to face the fact that life is uncertain: we can contribute to outcomes but we can’t control them. Counteracting obesity begins best with breast-feeding which brings us back to the question of work lifestyle balance and the need for companies to be more conscious that mothers need to breastfeed and that companies need women if they are to succeed best so action is needed here too.

I never thought I’d write on this issue. I didn’t want to join the obsession. It is a tragedy that in the last week of Derek Davis’ life he had to say, ‘I am sitting here getting angry…’ as he listened to Sinead Ryan, introduced as the Consumer and Property Analyst from The Irish Independent, who had castigated the parents of overweight children. Davis talked about what is known as Fat Guilt and how G.Ps. and others are ‘not up to speed on obesity.’ It is ‘profoundly anger inducing …only feeds the so-called fat industry’ including its' charlatans’. 

We owe it to the memory of a generous man to deal with our communal addiction: face our fear and address best eating and exercise habits in a way that is both fair and respectful. I wish I could be as smart as Derek Davis was. I loved hearing a replay of him talking about books to George Hook this week. I wanted more.

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/marian-finucane/   Sunday 10^th May. Click on Obesity Policy

http://www.newstalk.com/podcasts/The_Right_Hook/ click on ‘Remembering Derek Davis’

Cupcakes, Blogging, Poetry and Sleep – Build a Sustainable Blog and Lifestyle.

Notes from An Apprentice Verse-Maker (4)

We may not all want – or have the expertise and experience – to blog about cupcakes and style, however we may enjoy both or either.  But Jeff Haden’s interview with Emily Schuman, author of the highly successful business that her Cupcakes and Cashmere blog has become, has a lot to say to anyone seriously interested in writing a blog and building a sustainable following.

If literature and poetry is your thing, Cupcakes and Cashmere may seem a little frivolous and the best-selling book of the same name further evidence that a large Market Share is inevitably not for you. An argument I dispute – at least to the same extent it is held to be true.

Best-selling poetry Anthologies such as those edited by Bloodaxe UK publisher, Neil Astley, are among the poetry books that have given the lie to the suggestion that poetry isn’t for everyone or won’t be loved by many who haven’t yet found it accessible. By accessible I don’t mean easy to understand, I mean the poetry flag found and followed because it stands out among the clamour of flag-flying products and services vying for attention. There is always poetry easy to understand amid the intrigue of greater challenges. In the midst of all the clamour poetry is a refuge you can bring home – more immediately accessible (time-wise and geographically), by click, purchase or browse than the restorative power of any Spa, beauty product, cupcake or other splurge - although it can as equally complement as provide an alternative to all of those.

The poetry anthology or collection by your bed is the best night-time dip you’ll find on those nights sleep is determined to elude you or your mind is humming with events properly belonging to day-time. One sound, image or penny-dropping melt leads to another. You are diverted and captivated. How come, someone has captured in a few lines the distress you’ve been secretly hoarding, or your obsessional hidden desire? How do poets do that?

If that doesn’t do it, you can give your attention to learning a few lines by heart. You’ve toned your brain, given your imagination a quick fix and taken ‘time-out', it’s probably  time to settle down and go back to sleep. Those lines repeated to yourself, an oasis you instil in your brain for the future as you drift away, will easily win out against counting sheep.  Even better, a poem or two before bedtime can become an essential de rigueur transition between digital drives, the obligations of daytime and night-time peace. There cannot be a better way to obey the strictures of sleep experts and build a bed-time routine that prepares the body for sleep. If the pages do become a little damp and curled because you can’t resist dipping while in the bath then, there is nothing to worry about. Any book is better damp than dry-leaved and closed.

Emily Schuman adjures bloggers hoping to build a successful business to

       ‘Be patient…success will most likely come slowly, if at all’.

       ‘Be authentic and learn to differentiate yourself’.

She reminds her audience that

        ‘…creating original talent…will take a lot of your time’.

Warns against

     

        ‘...sacrificing quality over content. Your audience will be built on trust and the entertainment      

        value you provide. If your quality slips, so will they.’

Warns against,

        ‘…taking every offer that comes your way. (Advertising offers! You wish.) At first it’s very

        tempting to accept ….ultimately, it degrades your credibility if you become an advocate for

        anyone willing to pay you.’

Now, why does that sound more convincing coming from that source than it did when I heard it from poets and artists?

Start Blogging, Start a Business, and Build an Authentic… - Inc.com

Bestselling author and successful entrepreneur Emily Schuman of Cupcakes and Cashmere on building a thriving business.

An Interview by Jeff Haden

Is at  www.inc.com/jeff-haden/start-blogging-start-a-business-and-build-an-authentic-brand.html.

Other relevant websites are:

cupcakesandcashmere.org

bloodaxebooks.com

I Have My Ass Kicked at the Thirtieth Cuirt International Festival of Literature, Galway Ireland, 2015. Notes from an Apprentice Verse-Maker (2).

Mattie kisses me on both cheeks. There’s a jazz band playing. The boathouse doors open onto the terrace where people are talking their heads off in summer dresses and flowery tee shirts and a team of rowers are sculling the river behind them. We’re at the launch party for the thirtieth Cuirt International Festival of Literature. Perhaps the warmth of his greeting is in honour of the workshops I have on offer in the Cuirt Programme this year. While moving the black box that served as a stage, the year I read for Doire Press at the Cuirt Literary Brunch, Mattie told me that everyone contributing to Cuirt gets the same treatment from him. This is whether they are Seamus Heaney or are undertaking their first reading ever. It is ten years since I saw Mattie welcome Mr Heaney to Cuirt, on the steps of the Galway Town Hall theatre. That handshake made a lasting impression. It was the first time I’d seen the Nobel Laureate for literature, the first time I attended a literature festival. For five years of my move west to Galway I’d gauge my progress through greetings: first I knew no-one; then I could recognise people; then they’d recognise me. When I found myself being greeted on the street by people I didn’t yet know, I knew I’d finally arrived.

The Agency I’d set my sights on for my Memoir, the one that didn’t get short-listed for the competition - the deadline for which  I’d aimed it at last year, has written to say that although they like what I’ve written they just can’t see a large enough audience for it. They think it would appeal in particular to women in later life. But they do sweeten the pill with a comment that ‘this is nicer than that’ (a best-selling memoir I’d mentioned) and suggest submitting it to one particular publisher, giving me his e-mail address. That’s generous consideration. I push away the thought they are just letting me down gently. I am grateful.

Yet, what bigger audience could there be than women in later life? These are the women who fill book-clubs, provide theatres with at least sixty per cent of their audiences, who have always read – as distinct from surfed – books. They are keen to know about people of their age trying new things and to have a go at writing themselves - and they actually have a little more time now to read. Almost weekly, someone proclaims -in print or on air - that the ageing population is the fastest growing population in the Western world.  But, no doubt the Agent is right. The publishers they pitch to may be keen to target a younger audience, dare I say a more masculine audience? That last is unlikely. Does targeting a younger audience mean they have to neglect their long-term paying customers? It shouldn’t, but it may well be what’s happening. I’m glad I received the rejection notice while I can be distracted by the buzz of Cuirt and my big opportunity in this year’s festival – the chance to transfer skills from my former profession to augment my poetry writing by facilitating two workshops, Having a new Conversation – About Dreaming. The workshops use poetry as a springboard and container for conversations about particular topics.

The first workshop Conversation goes well. Returned questionnaires evaluating the event give further details – a few participants expected more on working with their dreams, either therapeutically or as writers. I’ve given up therapeutic work but I’ll include a poem likely to have been inspired by a dream in my Sunday workshop. How much time it gets will depend on the group. Regardless of having wished for a bit more of this or that, it seems the Tuesday participants at GMIT overall enjoyed their experience greatly. Inspired by encouraging questionnaire evidence I search my online documents, start editing and save the brochure I draft onto a memory stick I bring to the printers. As with so many requests printers suffer from receiving: I want copies yesterday. I’ve woken up to the value of designers though, so I pay the extra bit to have them work their magic. I place copies of the resultant flyers beside the till in Charlie Byrne’s bookstand at the Town Hall theatre.

Naomi Shihab Nye and Kay Ryan – both of whom have won myriad prestigious awards, while Kay Ryan was also United States Poet Laureate 2008-2010 - blow me away with their poems. I leave the theatre full – and inspired. I wish now that I hadn’t done anything as crass as having put out leaflets for possible festival organisers to pick up in the hope they might consider me for future events but I haven’t the courage to go and retrieve them.

I attend the workshop on Journalism -with a particular focus on interviewing - led by Olaf Tyaransen of Hotpress fame. It seems that the fact that a poet I interviewed for the poetry broadsheet Skylight 47 allowed me longer than the time ordained by her press agent was a good omen. Tyaransen says this can happen if you are lucky enough to be getting along with your interviewee, so it’s important to allow extra time for an interview in case you get lucky. Similarly, Sinead Gleeson, leading the Friday workshop, ‘A Guide to Working Freelance in Arts Media’ encourages me, with the news that the fact an editor of a newspaper gave me the word count he would want for a feature while turning down one of my submissions means he considered my work sufficiently promising to want more. She goes on to point out I should consistently follow up with offers of further submissions and ‘doggedly’ persist. His mail was received well over a year ago! However I have been getting the vital practice she urges us to get by continuing to write whether or not I submit or post the resultant articles. She believes that, contrary to pessimistic proclamations, there is still work for Freelance writers. A lot of pages have to be filled daily and editors are keen for new voices. She included radio in this. Turned down by an Agent? She suggests a particular London Agent for the next try ‘…and try publishers at the same time.’ She proffers the name of another one. We should write daily, ‘you’ll get better’, be blogging regularly. It’s no good having someone look at your blog and see that you haven’t written anything for a while. Ouch!

By dinnertime I’ve written the first draft of this blog to allow it a couple of days’ further consideration. I have been reminded that the real writing is the re-writing that will have to happen before I post it. As one participant said to two of us as we left the freelance writing workshop, ‘I’ve had my ass (usefully) kicked’. 

Free Teachers to Assess Students by Changing the Objectives We Judge Them By

      A facilitator is not a teacher but leads people to learn. The psychologist, Carl Rodgers dedicated his professional life to researching Communication. He once answered a question put to him by John Quinn, on RTE television, saying that despite the evidence for better alternatives teachers will   probably remain committed to the cup and jug method of pouring information into people. This happens largely because we are committed to ego and imparting accurate information lends credibility and a sense of importance. We feel more secure standing on a solid knowledge base. It leaves us more in control.

     It is unfortunate yet entirely understandable that teachers in Ireland this year are utterly opposed to the Minister of Education’s wish to have them assess their student’s work at Secondary (senior) school level for the state’s Junior Certificate. When the points system was introduced to ensure a fairer entry system to universities teachers were encouraged to move from enabling students to learn through exploration and enquiry to prioritising teaching them the answers that would best get them through the exam system and gain the most points. Students’ answers could be gauged against ‘ideal answers’ and points awarded according to the comparison.

      Accountability has become the buzz word in all fields of work in the recent years of economic cut-back. In education it has come to be measured in terms of performance, particularly if not exclusively, by exam results. This has also had unfortunate consequences for universities. It has been reported lecturers are concerned at the lower ability to think and the desire to be fed information found in recent cohorts of students.  A spirit of enquiry is essential for research – the ultimate raison d’etre for centres of learning and the thing that leads to the discovery of new information that leads to progress.  

     For teachers performance has become all about getting students through their exams. It requires a complete turnaround in attitude and job definition, if it is to become reasonable and satisfying for them to assess their students’ work. We continue to see the object of education in economic terms – exam results and expertise in subjects that will satisfy the needs of the economy - instead of enabling students to bring out the best of their selves, to learn all they can, to see learning as a skill they’ll use for the rest of their lives. We need to see education as preparing them to make their best contribution to the whole of society, as enabling them to ask awkward questions to ensure against the group think that most endangers the economy and society as a whole. Until we can do that, although entirely desirable, it is not a feasible option for teachers to assess those students. To do anything other than award their students top grades goes too far against the grain recently ingrained – the grain that has parents, teachers and all of us judge by the achievement of short-term goals with minimal regard for the greater picture.

     This is a pity. I imagine all of the Minister’s arguments in favour of on-going assessment and the fairness of ensuring students are no longer judged alone on one day performances in each subject are excellent and that teachers would wish they were free to see it that way. It would be best if they could take a lead in turning our short term educational goals around. I can’t imagine anyone involved with young people not wanting to reduce the stress of exam pressure, especially teachers.

    The ability to asses one’s own work and value the feed-back good continuing assessment offers is an essential life skill. Teachers and the Department of Education need to find a way to create an environment where the process can be valued by everyone involved, an environment that facilitates learning and the ability to learn and deliver results as distinct from one that measures output in terms of the expurgation of information imbibed through the anathema, and currently inevitable route, of rote learning.