A Kind of Christmas Card ...

The (temporary) creative pause from posting regularly on this blog which I decided to acknowledge (or give myself – I’m not sure which is closer to the truth; probably both) is something that I’m actually finding very pleasant. Just tooling around, doing the stuff that has to be done, spontaneously doing other stuff I feel like doing, it’s all very relaxing. But then there are other things; the things that fall into that wide convergence zone between want to and have to, between can and must.

Including writing this. I’ve never been a Christmas card person, though I remember their contribution to that exciting crescendo of anticipation which is my childhood memory of December, the expectation which is the very soul of the season known as Advent. Back in the day; a pre-digital age, a time when we didn’t even have a telephone (imagine that, if you can!) so that communication between people who didn’t meet regularly was limited to pen and paper, envelopes and stamps, and a postman on a bicycle.

They came daily through our letterbox, first a trickle, increasing to a daily flood as Christmas grew nearer. I remember my mother making a long list of people, buying cards and sheets of stamps and then writing them all. A few would be left in reserve to be sent to those from whom cards were received who had been forgotten on the original list.

And the cards poured in, being opened and set out on every available surface, when these were all used up hung from the walls or ceiling on string catenaries. We use to decorate the house for Christmas in those days too, paper and tinsel chains and garlands hung from the ceiling. As a kid I loved it all; it turned the familiar geography of our living room into a wonderful world of glitter and magic, ruled by the twin sovereigns of the Christmas tree and the crib, Mary and Joseph, the ox, the donkey and the shepherds all gathered around a central empty focus, that space where the baby in the manger would be placed on the evening of Christmas Eve, the first certain signal that Christmas was actually, inevitably here.

I don’t know if people still decorate their living rooms in Ireland today they way they used to do when I was a child. I suspect that fewer do – increased sophistication and a more developed sense of kitch are always purchased at the price of a certain innocent naïveté, and one of the basic facts of temps perdu is that it is like virginity, once lost it is irretrievable. Maybe this is one of the deeper reasons why so many adults are ultimately so often disappointed by Christmas; it is a seductive, insatiable longing for the innocent joy of childhood – a joy which, if truth be told, was probably never as unalloyed in reality as memory likes to present it. But memory is inclined to do that, isn’t it?

However, I realise that my thoughts are wandering in a direction which I had not planned, a direction with intimations of more darkness than I want in this … this what?

I started this by mentioning that I’ve never been a Christmas card person – after I left home, where such things fell primarily in my mother’s area of responsibility, I somehow never managed to make the exercise part of my own personal self-organisation. For too long, I suppose, I was intoxicated by the ephemeral, self-centred, invulnerable immediacy of youth, for too long afterwards I was involved in struggling with my own private demons and the trip-wires they had been busy installing for me in my life.

It’s well over a decade now since I managed to banish most of those demons, or at least to cage them so securely that they can no longer urgently threaten my life or my happiness. In those early days of putting my life back together again I realised the importance of friends and people who love me, and it became clear to me that the ordinary rituals of keeping in touch, however fleetingly, are an important part of nourishing those relationships.

Although I realised that the sending of Christmas cards is one of these important rituals, I consciously decided not to take that way. There had been too many caesuras in my life, too many friends for whom I had no longer addresses, for many of whom I had no contact details whatsoever. But the realisation of these losses, and the personal impoverishment they had given rise to, fortunately coincided with the spread of general digital connectedness at the beginning of the new century.

I had started to renew contact with many old friends, often using the internet to find them. And, as more and more people acquired e-mail accounts, I decided, instead of sending Christmas cards, to commit myself to the new virtual reality and send a longer personal e-mail to all the friends who could be reached by means of a web-tag containing that old mercantile symbol - @.

So, for many years now, I have been writing my Christmas e-mail. But the digital world changes, changes, changes, and my use of it changes too. In the past decade I have made many new acquaintances and established a number of what I regard as real friendships with people whom I have never met in real life. There are people, old friends and new, people all over the world, with whom most of my regular contacts now take place through various social networks; facebook, Google+, blogger, wordpress, and all the other virtual equivalents of the Irish pub, or the 18th Century coffee house.

Therefore, my friends, I have decided to move my Christmas mail here this year. And all of this has been nothing more than my usual rambling, roundabout, long-winded way of getting around to wishing you all a very happy Christmas.

Over the past couple of years I have published a number of essays here on Christmas and I feel no urge to repeat myself – if you really feel like reading them, just type “Christmas” into the search bar on the right of the page. But there was just one idea that occurred to me, which I would like to share with you.

In the Christian version of the much older urge to celebrate mid-winter/new year which seems instinctive to humanity in the northern hemisphere, the angels sing of “peace on earth.” There is something deeply quiet, inherently peaceful, about these shortest days of the year, when nature sleeps and we follow a deep urge to seek sharing and harmony with those we love. It is, perhaps, this longing for fellowship, generosity and solidarity which we try to express in the circle of our loved ones at this time which makes all the violence, injustice and needless pain which humans are capable of inflicting on each other appear so particularly horrible and useless. Whether in Newtown, Connecticut or Aleppo, Syria, in Timbuktu, Mali or Bethlehem, Palestine, the wrongness and futility of violence, hatred and killing strike us particularly at this time of year.

This Christmas, my friends, I wish you and me, us all and the world peace. Peace in our hearts, in our families, our communities, and our countries. Peace on earth. A wish as unfulfilled now as it was two thousand years ago. And yet, a wish still worth wishing. Maybe our wishing it – our really wishing it – is the only thing which stops us from finally and completely destroying ourselves.

Happy Christmas. And peace on earth. Salaam. Shalom. 

Fiddler

An item posted on various networks on the world-wide-web shocked many people this week; Kenneth Dunlap had died.

The internet has changed – and goes on changing – our lives; creating realities unimaginable for our grandparents. One of the most enriching changes it has made for me is the boundless possibilities it offers for making contact and developing friendships with all kinds of fascinating people worldwide. In my case, this has had an emphasis on people interested in meeting for the purpose of presenting, developing, discussing and exchanging ideas; people engaged in what might best be called “the life of the mind.” It has been, and continues to be a rich and fascinating adventure – one in which I have made many contacts, more than a few of which have developed into genuine friendships.

Given my interests, it is therefore not surprising that – long before things like Facebook and Google+ – one of the first places I started to make real contacts was on a Google Group known as Minds Eye. A couple of years ago, a new contributor exploded into the group, posting extensively and intensely on all sorts of subjects, someone with an online/group identity known as Fiddler.

Minds Eye has always been a group of very diverse free spirits, with different views about everything under the sun, views which are staunchly presented and defended and, as such, achieving a consensus among those active there has always made the challenge of herding cats look like a piece of cake. But – unusually among the thousands of forums which evolved out of the old talk-rooms and Usenet groups – Minds Eye was characterised by an predominant atmosphere of … civility, coupled with an exceptionally high standard of erudition and discussion on all sorts of subjects; philosophical, theological, anthropological, political, cultural, etc.

Fiddler irritated, irritated massively. He had very definitive opinions on all the subjects about which he posted and he did not suffer fools gladly – and his definition of a fool would have encompassed anyone who took up an opinion contrary to his own. His passion for the positions he held often made it difficult for him to distinguish between the ideas of those he saw as his opponents and their persons, so that his argumentation often became seriously personal and ad hominem. It was on Minds Eye that I first encountered one of his favourite words for describing someone with whom he did not agree and whom he consequently regarded as being seriously deficient in reason; “fucktard.”

Some of those involved in the group regarded him simply as a troll and a few even suggested banning him. But many more of us sensed that there was real sincerity here, combined with intelligence and education, but also with anger and a tendency to flame. I, for one, tried to engage with Fiddler, attempting to point out that, for example, there were many sane, intelligent, rational people who sincerely believed in God and who could not all be simply dismissed as “fucktards.” Moreover, there were more (and usually better) ways to win a debate than to try to bludgeon your opponents into submission, using your arguments as a cudgel.

In the course of that discussion, Fiddler – or Ken, for that was his real name – revealed something more of himself; he had Asperger Syndrome. It explained a lot, particularly about his difficulties in relating “normally” with other people. He was well aware of this, though not particularly apologetic about it – in common with many other “Aspies,” he did not regard his condition as an affliction or illness, but rather as a different way of being; one which made his social relationships more complicated but which also had compensations in other areas. He described being able to “taste” numbers, for example, something which made mathematics a real source of joy for him.

In the end, Fiddler/Ken quit Minds Eye. It was a reaction he made, I believe, in something of a huff, as he had received some sharp rebukes for the way in which he had been addressing others and there had been renewed calls for his banning. But we soon met again, at various other online hangouts, like Gravity (which kind of went and died) and obnoxi.us (which is sadly also currently moribund) and we hooked up on Facebook and Google+. Ken joined that increasing network of virtual friends my burgeoning on-line life was producing, friends with whom you (just like in “real” life) sometimes have more, sometimes less interaction, but with whom you always keep up some kind of loose contact.

In the course of the last couple of years I learned quite a bit about him. He had lived, and continued to live, a chequered life, full of drama, conflicts and discontinuities. He grew up in an abusive family and had a sister who was murdered as a teenager. He had six children, from two different marriages. He had spent much of his youth in a religious fundamentalist setting but had abjured this in favour of a pretty muscular type of atheism. He had struggled with poverty for most of his life, but never let this stop him doing anything. He was a student, and passionate about learning – though his major area of study was geology, he was interested in almost everything.

For somebody with such innate difficulties in social relationships, there was something about him which seemed to fascinate people. I can only imagine how it must have been in real life, but over three and a half thousand people had him in their circles on Google+, a social network which he (inevitably) much preferred to Facebook. It was perhaps easier to be a friend to him on-line than it was in real life, for I have no doubt that Ken could be very strenuous. Even on-line he could be strenuous, but a computer you can always switch off.

I suspect that it was very hard to switch Ken off in real life. He was one of those people whose transmissions have one gear, full steam ahead, and whose brakes only work intermittently. But all that power, that energy, that rage which drove him, he channelled into a struggle for the rights of others, for the weak, the oppressed, any group or minority he perceived as being put down or persecuted by the forces of illiberality, intolerance, ignorance or small-mindedness. It got him practically involved in actions to free women in the Middle East who suffered under misogynistic forms of Islamic practice. And it frequently put him at loggerheads with the practices and values of Middle America.

Ken had a vision of what a free, pluralistic, caring and tolerant society could be like and it made him furiously, relentlessly rant against the present complex of hypocritical religious fundamentalism, heartless, profit-driven, corporate capitalism and anti-intellectual, petit-bourgouis jingoism he described – with his typical, savage wit – as Teathuglicanism. Though he was disappointed in Obama, he regarded the prospect of a President Romney with genuine horror, and his ascerbic, cutting commentary will be sadly missed in the coming months.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum [Speak of the dead naught but good], they say, but Fiddler would have been contemptuous of this, also in respect of himself. De mortuis nihil nisi veritas [truth], I am certain, would have been much more to his liking. Truth, in that scientific, open, testing, questioning sense, was for him synonymous with the good and it was the lodestone of his life.

I can only speak of those truths about Ken which I know; his engagement for tolerance and liberalism (in its best, original sense), his championing of the rights of the weaker and those discriminated against, his campaigning for more social justice and a more caring society. The many other truths of his life – those which I sense or suspect, like the centrality of his love for his children in his whole being, are for others to tell, perhaps even today (July 22) when a service in celebration of his life will be held in Ferndale, Washington State.

Ken’s death was a shock to everyone. He had been seriously unwell in the past months and had found it hard to get adequate medical treatment, an indictment of the current American health system and something which is very difficult for a West European like myself, with our unquestioned systems of socialised medicine, to understand. But he also seemed down recently, feeling the weight of the seemingly constant struggle which was his life. Of course he carried his own, not insignificant share of responsibility for the many misfortunes to which he was prone, but he was also – at least in part – a victim of the callous, unfeeling harshness of the society in which he lived and, I feel, he deserved to live in that better world, the establishment of which he spent so much of his fury and energy for.

For those of us who knew him –  if only in the attenuated virtual world – he was a figure somehow larger than life, his struggles heroic, his difficulties epic. Thinking of him in the past few days, since hearing of his death, it strikes me that his character and story offers the stuff for a marvellous film, with Sean Penn, at best (for they share many characteristics), in the title role. But, for now, Fiddler is finally at peace. I will miss him, him and his outraged, idealistic fury. But I also feel honoured and lucky to have known him, even if only from a digital distance. Goodbye, my friend. Rage on.

The photos in this post are all from Ken's Google+ profile page

On Friendship

I’ve just come back from spending a few days in Ireland where, among other things, I had the opportunity to meet up with a number of very old friends. It was a marvellous series of encounters, one which left me with a feeling I can only described as blessed; blessed by the luck I had to encounter such people in my life and even more, blessed by the fact of their friendship.

I have lived a life which, for many complex reasons I’m not going to go into here, has been characterised by quite a number of pretty radical discontinuities. One of the major factors which has given me the courage to make major changes or to cope with them when they have occurred, apart from the continuing dynamic stability of that basic, continually changing, evolving and growing anchor known as family, is the support and (often unquestioned and unreflected) presence of friends. There have been phases in my life where I have just accepted such things as a given but, as I have grown older (and hopefully wiser), I have come to realise just what an amazing grace friendship is and how important it is to cherish it and, when the opportunity presents itself, to invest a bit of effort in it – just to make or re-establish contact, to mutually give one another that gift where the giving is so far less than that which we get from it; a little time.

“Friendship” is a word which has suffered under a strange kind of inflation in recent years. Facebook has a lot to answer for in this regard, with every occasional contact you make automatically gaining the sobriquet “friend” (although that’s still better than Twitter’s “followers”). This is not at all to knock the hugely positive effect the internet has had in the whole area of building up and sustaining friendships – I find it marvellous in many ways and it has helped me track down quite a number of old friends and revivify our relationships. It has also been a platform for me to forge a number of new friendships, which are developing and deepening all the time, with people I have not yet seen “in real life” (and doesn’t that open some more exciting vistas for the future? J).

Sartre once commented, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Although I would regard myself in many ways as an existentialist, I see this as too pessimistic, or perhaps just incomplete. Anyone who has gone through an acrimonious break-up of a relationship will immediately confirm that hell can be other people, but they can be heaven too – perhaps no more so than in that suspension of time and sense of the limits of one’s own self which happens in the delight of meeting with real friends. Thinking about this post, my magpie-like memory threw up a hint about something I vaguely remembered reading once and, thanks once more to the internet, I was able to track it down. More than two thousand years ago, Cicero wrote a treatise on friendship, de Amicitia. Dealing with a view that “our affection to [friends] should exactly correspond and equal theirs to us…” he responds, “such a view reduces friendship to a question of figures in a spirit far too narrow and illiberal, as though the object were to have an exact balance in a debtor and creditor account. True friendship appears to me to be something richer and more generous than that comes to; and not to be so narrowly on its guard against giving more than it receives. In such a matter we must not be always afraid of something being wasted or running over in our measure, or of more than is justly due being devoted to our friendship.” (De Amicitia, 16)

Thank you, Marcus Tullius, I couldn’t have put it better myself! And thank you too, my friends, just for being there. I’ll be seeing you …