Nick Read » Articles

Creating the Space

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:59:43 +0000

Art is not just a pleasing arrangement of shapes, textures and colours; it can only be properly appreciated in its cultural context. So-called ‘Conceptual’ artists use imagery to explores a theme that resonates with and provides insight into contemporary culture. In an age of internet dating and casual sex, Tracey Emin dares to explore female lust. Damien Hirst, on the other hand, expresses a more ordered corporate theme, in which feelings, emotions are put into boxes and bottles and categorised. But isn’t all art conceptual? Maybe historical notions of art were much more limited to religious imagery, myth, society portrait and landscape, but like classical musicians, each artist interpreted those concepts according to the fashion and spirit of the age. Likewise The Romantics, Turner’s misty decaying ruins alongside the engines of the industrial revolution, the pre-Raphaelite expression of the Victorian tension between spirituality and sexuality expressed the way the artist saw them as an instrument of the prevailing culture. But increasingly art has come to represent political and social themes. The Spanish artists, Picasso’s Guernica, Miro’s burnt canvases screamed their outrage at the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Perhaps photojournalism occupies the same niche nowadays. One well constructed image is worth a thousand words.

So art changes as the social environment changes. But the artist also helps to create that environment by conceptualising aspects of culture in images and structures. So art is a medium to help people gain insight and understanding of their culture as expressed through the expressive perspective of one individual.

Of course, the creation of the artist says as much if not more about them as it does about the culture (though they are still a representative of the culture). Successful artists can be and often are self centred to the point of obsession; you might say they have to be. And in a narcissistic age, some art has self indulgent to the point of boredom. Do we really want to know so much about Tracey’s soiled bed, used condoms or how many men she fucked in her tent? Are we interested in the relationship with Louise Bourgeois’ father and her governess? In as much as it informs us about aspects of culture and psychology we are. Louis Bourgeois depicted a whole psychoanalysis in her art. Joseph Beuys went one stage further; he invented a fantastic personal narrative through his art; catapulted from his crippled Stuka when it crashed in deep snow in Crimea in 1944, he claims to have been rescued by Tartar tribesman, who kept him alive by wrapping his broken body in felt and animal fat and feeding him milk. His art reflects aspects of that incident as well the boundary between fantasy and reality.

Other artists use their experience to express something wider, more general, while maintaining the template of their formative life experience to fashion a recognisable identity-in-style. Henry Moore drew large female figures with holes in them to represent his fixation on the beloved, though at times distant mother; there were gaps in their relationship. .

Some artists are more blatently commercial in their adherence to culture; they generate shapes, ideas that people want. Anish Kapoor creates large reflecting surfaces, bulges, wax installations, that people enjoy. ‘Art is not meant to be controversial’, he recently declared. He likes to be liked.

Art doesn’t so much create the object, it creates the environment, the mental space through which the rest of us can think about their own existence. In doing so, it both represents the culture and helps to create it. The process can be transformative, but for some artists it can become iterative and hermetic, the unending scratching, etching of an itch until something changes to change the focus; war, famine, love.

Some art will travel; either because it expresses a universal theme, like love, or because its meaning is so meaningfully abstract, so that people from different cultures bring their own meaning to it. Shakespeare travels and so does Turner. Is this what makes art great? Is this the function of art; to create the space for the thoughts of others to enter. In our instant, media culture, people are often considered clever because they say what everybody else is thinking and wish they had said it. They re clever because they make everybody feel clever. Is that what artists do; set down a challenge that makes the rest of us feel clever by gaining insight? If so, they don’t necessarily do it deliberately.

‘They tell me it’s great art. To me, it was just another scribble’

It’s always good to talk to my brother; he is an artist and gets me to think out of the box!

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All Change, Please

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:53:38 +0000

Life is a constant process of modification and adaptation, The basis of our identity is forged early on through the interaction with our parents. Our whole world is our family, our home. But then as we grow, become more independent, explore our environment, other people and situations influence us; extended family, friends, school, holidays, university, marriage, job; they all accrete to our personality to form a distinct, recognisable identity. But it doesn’t stop there. We continue to remodel our personality throughout our life. This usually occurs by a gradual process of evolution, but it sometimes occurs more dramatically by crisis and revolution.

So what is it that changes us? The simple answer is experience; the things that happen. If the environment changes, then we either adapt and grow or we stay put, stuck in the past. Not all events change us, of course; most of what happens can be accommodated within the confines of our experience and serve only to reinforce our view of the world. But occasionally, we encounter someone or live through some situation that so outside our experience that we are forced to adjust our whole way of thinking to incorporate it.

Change is an emotional interaction. Things that are different challenge, excite, shock, frighten and even depress us. If we engage with them, we may feel envious, guilty, ashamed or angry. Sometimes we may be able to change the situation, but more often than not, we can’t; the only thing we can change is ourselves. Working through, coming to terms with, are the processes of change; the reconstruction of the personality that develops out of emotional crisis. So if something affects us, makes us think and feel, then we are changed by it. Change is instigated by emotion. We fall out with somebody, argue, disengage, fume, but then later, sometimes much later, we pause, start to see it from their point of view, and reconcile our differences. We are changed by what has happened.

‘Love changes everything’, wrote Andrew Lloyd Webber. Such a deep emotional identification with another human being results in coalescence, a blending of experience that changes both. Change requires an interaction, an exchange. We are social beings; other people change us. Conflict and love; we are changed by sharing of intense emotional experience.

But it’s not just direct emotional experience that changes us. We can be adjusted by culture. Art, literature, science, technology, religion, politics are all agents of cultural change. They facilitate change in ourselves by altering the emotional environment. They can rearrange the way societies perceive their existence and influence the choices they make. Somebody proves that God no longer exists or that world is finite, and suddenly the restrictions of people’s behaviour are lifted and they change. The ability to communicate instantly with somebody at the other side of the world, the way we experience war, earthquakes and tsunamis in the comfort of our living room as they are happening, the way we can shop, pay bills, book holidays, conduct our jobs without leaving home; all off this has altered the way we are.

Governments, yes even Conservative governments, are agents of social change; they change the social environment by legislature and the people have to move into it.

Architects also change the social environment. Geoff Cohen said on Radio 4 last week that good architecture must not only be functional, it has to create hope and space for emotional development. Jaume Plensa (currently at The Yorkshire Sculpture Park) creates environments for peace and meditation as well as exciting spaces where change can happen. His sets for opera create such dramatic possibilities.

Change the environment, change the meaning. If we move away, get another job, we mix with a whole new social group and we are changed. If we separate from our partner, move on, marry someone else, we become a different person. Relationships change people, probably more than anything else. Parents and teachers create the environment/space in which children can grow, but eventually the child has to separate. A good teacher or parent equips the child to take advantage of the opportunity. By the same token, psychotherapy can expands perception and creates possibilities for change, but only the individual can change. You not only need space to change, you need courage to take advantage of the opportunity. And the good enough parent, teacher or therapist, must facilitate a safe environment for the person to develop with confidence and not seek to overprotect and confine through selfishness and fear.

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Two’s company,three’s a couple. Betrayal; the anatomy of an affair.

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:44:12 +0000

At the beginning of a love affair, one might ask oneself either ‘what am I getting into’ or ’what am I getting out of?’ Every entrance is an exit. The only real question is, ‘Are we going to go through (with it)?’

The pivotal moment in Emma and Jerry’s seven year long affair occurred just two years into it. Emma was sitting on the bed in the Kilburn flat they had bought together, excited to see him again, when wistfully, nonchalantly but not so, she said. ‘Are we going to change our lives?’ There was a pause. Then Jerry replied, ‘we can’t’. That was it; the start of the illness from which the relationship succumbed.

They were both in their thirties, married, their children were still young; they had their obligations. The time was crucial. For Emma and Jerry, thirty plus represented a loss of freedom, the acquisition of responsibility. No longer, it seemed, would life hold that frisson of possibility; it now stretched ahead, that slow decline of disillusion.

In the affairs of men and women, time is of the essence. It both offers the opportunity and then snatches it away. That chance meeting, the inventive creation of space, free afternoons, rendezvous snatched between appointments; at the time, it seems their love could last forever; feeling expands time. But in real time, such intensity of passion is ephemeral.

Falling in love is predicated on hope, and hope cannot be sustained forever. If the affair goes on too long without a resolution, then hope dies. The fulcrum of reality is followed by the inevitable winding down of the clock to when time together, like the flat Emma and Jerry rented, becomes empty and meaningless. If an affair doesn’t go anywhere, if it doesn’t change the lives of the participants, it will die and something in them will die too.

The happily married never need consider these issues. As the philosopher and psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, comments, for them the future is the same as the past. ‘Outwitting time and change, they construct a monument to continuity among the promiscuous ruins. Valuing a relationship because it lasts, they live as if time proves something.’

It was a poignant and clever device for Pinter to write the play backwards; time running in reverse. The end of an affair is always there right at the start. They both knew it was impossible that first time they kissed at the party; that’s what made it so risky and exciting. They couldn’t! But why not? They were in love. And love skews perception, makes the impossible seem plausible.

Except it’s not. Life is not make-believe, however much we may try to make it so. There are incompatibilities; the taken-for-granted and the precarious, the tedious routine and the impossible risk – the thing that couldn’t be done. There is safety and danger, habit and passion, love and lust, attachment and desire, marriage and affairs. Of course we want to have our cake and eat it. Why not, we protest, we are integrated beings. Isn’t our body but a representation of our meaningful soul and isn’t our mind the way we think about it? Why can’t we be more honest?

But in the affairs of men and women, honesty and kindness are at odds with each other, Phillips asserts. ‘We lie because we can’t admit our desire and we don’t wish to hurt or be hurt. We lie in order to keep our options open, but also to find out what our options are. The successful lie creates a fragile freedom. It shows us that it is possible for no one to know what we are doing, even ourselves. The poor lie – the wish to be found out – reveals our fear about what we can do with words. Fear of infidelity is fear of language.’

Monogamy is reassurance. It’s like believing in God. Not everyone believes, but most live as though they do. Erotic life, Phillips writes, is political, disruptive; ‘it rearranges the world, it makes a difference to the ways we and other people organise their lives. Every infidelity creates the need for an election; every separation divides the party. Friends may share, cooperate and be honest. Lovers have to do something else. Lovers cannot be virtuous.’

Rules by which we govern our lives are ways of imagining what to do. ‘Our personal infidelity rituals – the choreography of our affairs – are parallel texts of our marriages’. Successful affairs reproduce the loneliness of marriage. Unsuccessful ones intensify it. Serial monogamy, it could be argued, keeps us moving on, maintaining the hope, restoring meaning and renewing life.

Adam Phillips would claim that ‘guilt, by reminding us what we mustn’t do, shows us what we may want. It shows us our moral sense, the difference between what we want and what we want to want. Without the possibility of a double life, there is no morality. Because we are always being sexually faithful to somebody, every preference is a betrayal.’

He continues, ‘what is coupledom, but a sustained resistance to the intrusion of third parties. The couple needs to sustain the third parties in order to go on resisting them. The faithful keep an eye on the enemy, eye them up. After all, what would they do together if no one else was there. How would they know what to do? Two’s company; three’s a couple. Everyone feels jealous or guilty and suffers the anguish of their choices. No one has ever been excluded from feeling left out.’

Betrayal by Harold Pinter is currently playing at the Comedy Theatre, London. Kristin Scott Thomas is wonderful as Emma; she was sexy, playful and very attractive; how could Jerry ever resist her. The programme included notes from Adam Phillips Book, Monogamy (Faber and Faber, 1996).

(please don’t read this as a moral statement, more an attempt at analysis)Two’s company

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How you make me feel; projection and its identification.

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:06:44 +0000

Why do we trust some people and not others? Why do we admire some people? Why do some people make us uncomfortable? Is it because they remind us of significant figures in our lives; our mother, our father, a brother or sister, a lover, a husband, wife, a teacher? Are they suitable objects for our projections?

Projection is a ubiquitous feature of human nature. It is the cornerstone of evolution; what makes us human; the effect of an opposable thumb. As soon as we could throw, we could make things happen; we could control the future (see Projection, the missile of evolution. December 24^th, 2010), but this required us to perform the mental trick of imagination; to think the way things might be, to make believe.

Psychological projection performs that same mental trick, it transfers what we feel onto somebody else, to imagine it is they who have those some feelings and attitudes. So we protect ourselves from psychic damage by projecting the bad stuff onto those we recognise already possess some of the characteristics we want to get rid of. ‘She’s just so selfish.’ ‘I can’t trust him’. He’s so lazy, careless, unreliable, fussy, messy. This happens all the time. Just listen to how ‘a gossip of girls’ on the train criticise absent ‘friends’. Look at how politicians try to achieve a semblance of dominance and control by rubbishing their competitors; how newspapers take hold of that and amplify it. But it’s not just bad stuff. Idealisation is a kind of projection. When we admire somebody, respect somebody, fall in love with somebody, we transfer our wishes for how would like to be onto that person. They become a mentor, a role model, an object of desire.

Projection starts, like everything else, in childhood. Children deal with uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger by externalising them. First identify your enemy, locate all the bad stuff into them and then you can justify an attack. Or identify the one you admire, locate all your wishes in that person and make them your best friend. Projection is a mental trick. There are goodies and baddies; in my childhood these were cowboys and Indians; the English and the Germans. How differently you see things as you grow up. Maturity is a state of recognising the bad feelings, taking them back and containing them, realising that what we criticise in other people is also part of us, accepting our essential humanity.

Groups, organisations, institutions, governments, states, do it all the time. They are pathologically split; they operate at a very childlike manner and project all their own concealed characteristics, especially the bad ones like unreliability, inadequacy, lack of sophistication, to say nothing of selfishness and ruthlessness onto their competitors. Colonel Gadaffi is currently the embodiment of all evil though only a few years ago, he was our special friend. But the only thing that’s changed is our own projections. Members of an exclusive culture, music critics, art enthusiasts, historians, theatre buffs, vintage car collectors, can tend to puff themselves up by broadcasting their lacunae of esoterica to an audience they assume knows nothing and can be diminished by their ignorance.

But projection can only really work in society if others identify with it. This is what the psycholanalysts (another in- group) call projective identification or to put it in everyday speak, ‘how others make us feel’. In voodoo, pointing the bone can cause others to feel so guilty by inference whether they are or not, that they slink away and die. They have been ostracised from the tribe; they are not worthy to belong anymore and they cannot therefore survive. Social exclusion is a powerful force; guilt and shame, powerful identifications. People who have done something shameful to attract the projections of others, who use it as a shield for their own shame. And it’s always the ones with most to be ashamed of that seek out those they can offload on to. Those who feel unhappy make those who are close to them unhappy too

Projective identification operates in so many aspects of human behaviour. Bullies can’t contain their own fear, so they make others frightened of them. Suspicious people are secretive and engender mistrust and lies. Needy people cannot give and induce need in others. Those who are envious put on airs and graces to try to make others envy them. Lovers who feel insecure may do something to make their partners feel jealous. Unhappy and lonely people make those who are close to them unhappy too because at least they are toegether in their misery. Teachers, who are not confident, can make their students feel stupid, but equally the over-confident student can make a teacher defensive. ‘You make me feel sick, you make me so angry, you just make me depressed.’ These are all common identifications within relationships.

Those who carry a grudge are attracted to political groups, but can be very dangerous because they can cause others to feel bad and act out. So did Ian Brady make Myra Hindley do it. Projective identification is never a justification in law but it happens.

War is mutual projection as each side used propaganda to unsettle the other. Sport is the same. Winning the mental battle wins the war or the tennis match. Do not flinch; maintain the upper hand. And we the observers so want the underdog, the good guy to win, we will do all we can to inspire him with our enthusiasm. It almost worked with Tim and we’re trying our best with Andy, the nearly men of British tennis.

Some doctors are so anxious they can make their patients terrified. Michael Balint, the author of ‘The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness’ recognised this. Patients pass the anxiety of not knowing what’s wrong with them on to the doctor, so that he orders more tests in order not to appear a failure. Or their attitude may make their doctors feel angry, depressed, tired. Emotional transference is such a powerful phenomenon. As a therapist, I had always marvelled at how one client could make me feel so wound up and energetic; the next so tired I could fall asleep and have actually done so, but they were lying on the couch and I was sitting behind them and they never noticed.

Actors are masters of projection. They tune into their audience and can make us all identify with the emotions they project. I have had two actors in therapy. One made me feel so angry, I actually had chest pain and needed to ask him to leave. The other made me feel such surges of desire and compassion, it was all I could do not to take her in my arms and love her right there and then.

But it’s not all negative. We can also use projection to bring out the best in people. Look at the way babies project their hunger onto their mother, who identifies with it and feeds them. Falling in love feeds upon itself. We project our beliefs and feelings into those whom we love and if they love us too and are a suitable object for our projection, they identify our desire and act in a way that intensifies it.

Lovers give each other those feelings of security, excitement, togetherness, they’ve been looking for all their life, but what then happens to the bad feelings? Well, if they can never let this love become as imperfect as the rest of life, then these feelings are projected out onto others, and the exclusive couple clings together united against the world, unable to trust anybody else. But most marriages are not like that. They are states of mutual projection and identification, and partners try to look after their own well being by making their partners shoulder the blame and feel bad. You never think! You’re totally selfish! I just can’t rely on you. In a way they need the other to get rid of the bad feelings. When it works well, it’s a trade off. One may make the other feel alive while the other projects a feeling of safety. It works. The problems come when one of them changes the dynamic; meets somebody else, suffers a setback that destroys their confidence, accepts a job that satisfies their needs.

Projective identification requires us to think. When somebody behaves angrily or badly to us, we need to reflect on our own attitude and behaviour and the reason for it. How did it all start? What was the trigger, the fear? We all have responsibility in our functioning society to bring out the best in people, the most constructive response, but in a narcissistic, self seeking society, people all too often have to have their own way, because ‘we’re worth it’. It may be unfashionable to say, but I do believe that we have the friends, the colleagues, the children and the relationships we deserve because we help to make them the way they are for us

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The past is another country. Or is it?

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:18:38 +0000

Friar Barnadine: “Thou hast committed–”
Barabas: “Fornication– but that was in another country / And besides, the wench is dead.”

Christopher Marlow (The Jew of Malta)

What made people like Guy Burgess or Anthony Blunt rebel against their society, betray their country and spy for the soviet union? Was it a reaction against the seemingly inexorable rise of Fascism, or was it the rejection of a brutal class system? Did their experience of having to hide their homosexuality from a bigoted society cause them to turn against the very establishment they were supposed to be members of? I blame the father. ‘Another Country’ highlights the projection of the strict father to be found in the hypocrisy and snobbery of the English public school. Guy Burgess was at Eton. The school was run not by the Masters, but by the Gods, the only boys who were allowed to wear coloured waistcoats. And Guy, the aesthete, aspired to be elected to the Pantheon (if only to display the waistcoat).

Miranda Carter, in her biography of Anthony Blunt, claims that his miserable time at public school, fostered a subversive but also superior attitude toward British society. This potent combination – insecurity and moral superiority – fed into a belief that this chosen elite had the right to be exempt from mere conventional morality for the good of the masses.

The regime of the Gods was repressive, militaristic and essentially corrupt, a system designed to create the rulers of Empire. Guy was beautiful, louche, artistic and openly homosexual. He was confident enough to love whom he wanted; after all several of the Gods had been his lovers. And he was clever enough to be feared. But when Martineau is discovered in flagrante in the boiler room and hangs himself in shame, the Gods clamp down on homosexuality in order to contain the threat of scandal. Guy at first escapes public humiliation by threatening to expose his lovers. But as desperate as he is to become a God, he is also desperately in love with James. And this love leads him to indiscretion and exposure. So he shields James him from possible expulsion, accepts the blame and the punishment and is customarily debarred from elevation to the Pantheon.

So, was it his humiliation at school that that made Guy Burgess turn against the English class system and betray state secrets to the Russians? Was it rejection by a system he secretly admired and aspired to? Was it envy, revenge, the feeling of the outsider? Was it then, on the verge of his adult life, that he realized how much the British class system relied on outward appearance and how devastating being openly gay was for a diplomatic career? Was that the point that he allowed himself to become radicalised by his best friend Tommy Judd – an intellectually committed Communist?

Or was it in part his betrayal by his adored mother? In a tender moment with James at night in a punt on the river, he discloses how he had to release his mother, trapped in bed after his father collapsed and died while making love to her. Quite soon afterwards, she married an army officer.

Another Country portrays the road to betrayal as a personal, emotional crisis, rather than an intellectual identification. As a young man, Guy was portrayed as mischievous, sensitive, intelligent, in love, but tragically crushed by the juggernaut of the English class system? He was being bred to inflict rule and punishment in the real world by playing at Gods at school. And against this inhumanity he rebelled.

The theme was composed, as with all of us, early in Burgess’s life, and had to be worked through. Always an outsider, he ended his life, a broken, isolated, embittered man, living in a seedy apartment in Moscow with only the faded sepia prints of Eton hanging on his walls to remind him of the turning point.

‘Another Country’ made me think of my time at Taunton School. In the early sixties, the ancien regime of the English public schools still held sway; Taunton was still attempting to produce young men to run the Empire, even though that institution was all but dismantled. They still had a combined cadet force; they still do, I think. Sport, an essential component of the school curriculum, encouraged teamwork, loyalty and identification with the system. The establishment still didn’t foster original thinking and expression; it indoctrinated. At the time, I had a strong sense of duty. My parents admired that system and I felt bound by obligation to uphold it, but I never felt that emotional sense of belonging that many of my friends of that time still do. My life has been patterned by ambivalence.

For one of my school friends, Maurice, Taunton school fostered a deep sense of entitlement and rebellion. What he did at school could be contained. Now, fifty years on, he is pitted against the Justice system, the General Medical Council and the House of Lords all at the same time. But for every one damaged by the system, there were nine created by it. Sir Peter Westmacott, one time our ambassador in Paris, was one of our contemporaries at school.

‘Another Country’, starred Rupert Everett as Guy and a younger Colin Firth as Tommy Judd. It was directed by Marek Kanievska in 1984.

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King George, the stammerer.

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 18:40:57 +0000

Bertie was never expected to become King. David, his elder brother, appeared a far more charismatic leader. People turned a blind eye to his dalliances with actresses and socialites as they had with his grandfather and nobody thought he would give up the throne for Mrs Simpson. But he did. So with war with Germany looming and the country needing strong and effective symbols of leadership, Bertie was reluctantly propelled into the spotlight. But Bertie had a speech impediment; he stammered. His voice became paralysed with fear whenever he had to speak in public.

The King’s Speech, which was released on Saturday and stars Colin Firth as King George and Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth, is a moving and humorous account of Bertie’s relationship with his Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who helps him overcome his fears and deliver wartime speeches that rally the nation.

The Royal Family have always been conscious of their role and their distance from the rest of society. Some of the best bits of the film show how the King struggles to deal with Lionel Logue’s down to earth familiarity. He is propelled to an apoplectic eloquence by the sight of Lionel lounging in the Coronation chair in the Abbey.

Bertie is stuck between his instinctive desire for human affection and contact and his overwhelming sense of duty and obligation. He is a fully paid up member of the firm, but he is also a loving father and husband and needs Lionel as a friend as well as a therapist. During the war, he had a close and understanding relationship with Churchill, who had also suffered with a speech impediment when he was younger and was also frightened of his father.

Bertie, like many Royals, was brought up, not by his parents, who were always on duty, but by a nurse. But the nurse preferred his older brother and was callous and cruel to Bertie, pinching him and depriving him of food so he lost weight. David also used to tease him and his father, King George V, had no patience with his stammering. Queen Mary, his mother was stiff and distant, embarrassed by expressions of intimacy. So Bertie, despite being second in line to the throne, had a lonely and abusive childhood.

Bertie was also naturally left handed, but compelled to use his right hand. This experience is not uncommon in people who stammer. He had knock knees and suffered the pain of splints for years.

The film revealed how stammering is not so much a fixed mechanical defect of speech but more an emotional disorder; the overwhelming effect of fear, fear of humiliation and with the loss of an effective means of communication with other human beings, of loneliness.

Bertie did not stammer if he sang the words, or when music was played into his ears at the same time. When Lionel encouraged him to swear, utter the rudest words he could think of, it threw Bertie into conflict; he was brought up to repress any expression that was improper. But once he had permission, he swore with gusto and no hesitation. All these techniques facilitated emotional expression and eliminated his self consciousness. He could communicate with his wife and daughters quite confidently, but his brother, David and his father could readily reduce him to a state of paralysis.

Lionel and Bertie remained friends for the rest of the latter’s life. He was there to inspire confidence during all the King’s wartime speeches. This was the Royal Family’s finest hour. The audible and visible presence of the King and Queen in London during the blitz, their refusal to emigrate to Canada, the bombing of Buckingham Palace, the young Princess Elizabeth driving ambulances endeared them to the British people. But the King’s nervousness caught up with him. Always needing cigarettes to relax him, the King died of bronchial carcinoma in 1952.

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Projection; the missile of evolution.

Nick Read — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:38:12 +0000

Human beings don’t just adapt to their environment, they create and control it. Ever since the early hominids developed an opposable thumb that enabled them to grasp and manipulate objects, they could make things happen. The ability to throw missiles is a metaphor for how we could influence events at a distance, not only in space but also in time. The use of tools to make shelters, to control external sources of energy allowed us to escape the urgent prerogatives of survival and find time to think. Within the space of a few generations, humanoids endowed with the magic of manipulation, could create the future by intention .

Evolution does not happen by the gradual accretion of advantage, it is jerked forwards by a change in environment. That is what is thought to happen with our ancient ancestors. A change in climate in eastern Africa constricted the forest, concentrating the apes that lived there and creating a niche on the edge, where the tall grassland encroaches, a space where only those apes with upright postures and opposable thumbs could hunt in. Within the space of few generations, certain humanoids have developed a specialised way of life; they became upright savannah apes that hunted in packs with spears and missiles.

One advance creates the space of opportunity for other adaptations to occur. Using tools and throwing missiles required a big, strategic brain to imagine, plan, predict and create. Up to a point these abilities could be learnt by the small chimpanzee-like brain of our early ancestors, but those who had bigger and more clever brains were quicker and better at it, would survive at the expense of the others. No longer did the strongest and fiercest inherit the earth by fear, the ability to create the future at a distance allowed the development of a meritocracy based on intelligence. All that was required was the ability to project, not just physically, but literally throw one’s mind forward, to imagine the way things might be, how others might think, to create a world out of our own mind. Discovery always favours a mind, prepared by imagination and necessity. And with imagination comes strategy, planning, forecast, insight, hope, anticipation, and meaning; all the tools needed to build a civilisation.

Survival on the savannah needed teamwork, the ability to work together as a group. The maverick and loner would just starve. Teamwork requires empathy and identification, the ability to project our wishes and desires onto others, to inspire them and create a group identity, based on meaning. If people share the same meaning, then they will stay together and help each other. So tribes stayed together and developed into larger communities not just because of a practical need, but because the tribe could preserve the word, the identity that held them together. Having an imaginative brain allowed human beings to derive meaning from things to make sense of their environment, to interpret, tell stories, invent Gods.

We begin to see the enormous advance the upright posture and opposable thumb, how these features allowed humans to project their minds into an infinity of intellectual space, rich in possibility.

Godlike, we have produced a world in our own image and become adapted to that world. We have determined our own evolution; narcissism on an universal scale. No longer the tough stone age survivors, fighting to stay alive, dependant on the exigencies of the external environment, constantly on the move to where it is warmer and there is food, we have tamed the wilderness and created a society, in which we can produce all we need, shelter, energy, food, water, entertainment.

But in order to do this, we have had to forge ever more complex collaborations. We have outgrown the narrow self centred confines of the tribe to develop much larger societies with different values, different priorities. The ever increasing size of our communities from tribes to villages, to towns, cities, countries and finally a global community linked electronically, not only required a major logistic exercise in providing basic human utilities to everybody, but also created the need for civilisation, laws, morals and manners to keep such large in control. Only those whose behaviour is compatible with the customs of society, will be allowed the freedom to live and breed in that society. Those who are more assertive and aggressive have been weeded out, killed, locked up, exiled.

So we have we inbred domestication and passivity by our civilisation and laws. We have selected out dangerous characteristics such as aggression, ruthlessness, physical strength and activity, and bred in other characteristics like laziness, passivity, dependency and overeating. We have tamed ourselves. And since aggression and physical strength are male prerogatives, the new man has become more feminine. Civilisation means that men no longer seize their women by force, the power of selection is in the arms of the women, who arguably have a greater grasp of human nature. And women are more likely to seek out sensitive, caring men to breed with. They in turn will rear more sensitive children.

All of this has created a different strain of human being, passive, a civilised, comfort seeking, intelligent and inventive creature. Experiments conducted in Novobirsk, Eastern Siberia has shown that selective breeding over 50 generations has succeeded in domesticating Silver Foxes. They become tame like dogs. The strange thing is that in breeding out aggression, other characteristics change too, like the colour of their coats and the shape of their heads, their ears and their tails. In fact, they become like puppies. Selective breeding for domesticity favours juvenile characteristics.

Has the same thing happened in human societies? Has sexual selection succeeded in breeding out aggressive characteristics? Are we all just big babies? Have we bred domesticity in ourselves and in doing so become passive, lazy, needy and child-like? And like the domesticated foxes, have these social characteristics of being tamed, altered our appearance and the diseases we are predisposed to? Has it, for example, caused us to become fatty and less hairy. Has the combination of neediness and passivity predisposed to a plethora of diseases of civilisation; obesity, diabetes, heart attacks as well illnesses related to depression, such as Fibromyalgia and Irritable Bowel Syndrome?

Obesity and depression are the two most common illnesses of western society, affecting more than half the population. Obesity is a disease of passive overconsumption and insufficient exercise. We are consuming more than we need and we no longer need to work to get it. There is an abundance of high energy food in infinite variety in our supermarkets. Most of it is ready prepared and cooked and just requires reheating. And without the basic requirements to hunt and fight, there is little need to exercise. We travel to work in our cars and trains, we get our entertainment from the television, we do not even need to go out to work; we can work from our homes. We don’t even need to get out of bed.

In fact, we can exist without ever having to meet other people. With personal computers, many people have their office at home. No wonder we become quite isolated and depressed.

If we remove the need to hunt, to build our own houses, to fight and compete, then we remove personal initiative. And without human contact and something to strive for, life has little meaning. We just exist, eating, drinking and sitting in front of the television, rendered inert by the trappings of our own civilisation. Chronically bored, eating becomes less a necessity, more a displacement activity. Many obese people are depressed.

A few years ago, I walked out from Malleleuca along Tasmania’s South Coast Track, carrying all the food I needed for 9 days on my back. Meals were rationed; just enough for sustenance and no extra. I walked continuously from dawn to dusk across traversing precipitous mountain ridges interrupted by boggy valleys. I felt more alive than I had for years and lost over nearly a stone in weight.

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Design for Living? I don’t think it will work.

Nick Read — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 21:43:24 +0000

It should be easy, you know. The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me.’

Oh My God! Or as Mrs ‘Odge might say, ‘Well, ‘eres a pretty pickle.’

So why isn’t it easy? Why shouldn’t people be free to love whom they like when they like? Why do people get hurt? Why do they feel guilty? Why does it always turn bad?

Gilda is one of those delightful women, beautiful, intelligent, impulsive; a loving and free spirit with a real zest for life. Otto and Leo are two sensitive and sensuous young men, who are both enjoying the exhilaration of success. Otto is a painter; Leo an up and coming playwright. They are young, and in love. Gilda first chooses Otto and they live in a romantic garret in Paris. Then Leo returns after a successful run in New York and she abandons Otto to live with Leo in London. Then a year or so later, Otto returns and after a steamy night, she leaves them both and the next we know she has married the older, safer and rather tedious Ernest and become established as a New York socialite and art dealer. Meanwhile, Otto and Leo get drunk, realise how much they love each other and go off round the world on a sequence of slow boats. Two years later, they turn up in Ernest and Gilda’s apartment in New York, whereupon Gilda decides to leave Ernest and live with Otto and Leo in a ménage a trois.

It is all so wonderfully romantic and amusing – so Noel Coward! But is this so much a design for living as a strategy for loving? And will it ever work? One feels that it’s alright for Gilda. She has the attentions of two handsome, successful young men who both adore her, but how will she cope with their love for each other? It may be so exciting for the moment, but what will she do when they both get a bit fed up with her attention seeking and want a bit of basic male bonding? Go off to Ernest again? And can you imagine all three of them in bed together; the competitiveness, the jealousies? Which of the men will go first and where? How will she hold them together? How will she satisfy two enormous egos? For this to work, it would mean them all being terribly responsible and level headed. When has Gilda ever been level headed?

It’s not so much that it’s morally wrong. It is, of course, but morality is a social construct; there to protect us, not just an edict to be ignored. Any one of us can love more than one person deeply, but it is impossible to maintain an intimate relationship with two people for very long without resorting to a whole complicated web of secrecy and deception.

When people fall in love, they expose the most vulnerable aspects of themselves. It’s a courageous act of absolute trust and it risks nothing less than devastation of the personality through destruction of meaning. Gilda and Leo and Otto may think they may have acquired sufficient experience and wisdom to maintain a stable triangle, but it takes enough time for any of us to sort out a relationship with one other person; how much more effort would it take to sort out a three-way intimacy? And how long would it last without resorting to the rot of deception. And finally, would it be worth it? Some of the recent literature to come out of the middle east, illustrates the complex jealousies of polygamy. I can’t see polyandry being any better.

Still, it’s wonderful entertainment and any good art; it makes you think.

Design for Living by Noel Coward is currently playing at The Old Vic. Lisa Dillon is delicious and delightful as Gilda (and that dress!), though it was clear who was in charge. The actors who played Otto and Leo were less credible. And one had to feel some sympathy for Ernest, though his marriage to Gilda seemed less a meeting of minds and souls than a business arrangement, a mutual exploitation. It was originally banned from performance on the London Stage.

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Forged in the fire

Nick Read — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 21:29:05 +0000

It’s our ability to control fire that made us human. This is the message of Richard Wrangham’s new book, ‘Catching Fire’, which was published last year. It’s the latest big idea in evolution, the one that Darwin ignored.

Wrangham approaches the subject from the perspective of an anthropologist and primatologist; he has worked at Gombe with Jane Goodall. His hypothesis extrapolates from three sets of observations. First, when food is cooked, nutrients are more easily digested and assimilated into the body. Cooking softens meat, loosening connective tissue and allowing enzymes access to muscle proteins and fats. Cooking also breaches the rigid cell walls of plants, exposing starches and sugars and vegetable fats to digestion. Cooked meals require less work and less time to eat them. Less effort needs to be spent in finding food that can be easily digested. Cooking saves us time; time to think, to plan, to bond and it has to be said, to eat more food.

By comparison, other mammalian species spend the majority of their time hunting, feeding and digesting their food. Sheep and cows would never get enough energy to reproduce if they didn’t eat all day. A male tiger needs to spend nearly all its waking hours hunting. Only when it has had a big blow out, can the tiger afford to rest up and digest.

But for humans, it’s different. They had time. People gathered around their fires in the evening to tell stories, to sing, to drink, to plan the next day’s activities and to make love. It was around the hearth that tribes forged their identity in mythology. Fire became the focus of the social group, the hearth, the forge of civilisation. Cooking expanded the range of foods that could be eaten. This meant that people didn’t have to hunt and gather particular foods; they could cultivate and herd them in farms. This allowed people to settle in villages, towns and cities.

Fire also led to a division of labour. Women were the cooks, the keepers of the fire, the gatherers and of course the mothers, whereas men were the hunters, the farmers and the protectors.

Not only has fire enabled human beings to evolve socially, Wrangham believes that they have also adapted anatomically and physiology to eating cooked foods. Our jaws are much weaker than our closest cousins, the chimpanzees; not at all equipped for cracking hard nuts and seeds or for tearing meat. Our large intestines are nowhere near as commodious and efficient at extracting nutrients from uncooked vegetable matter. People can live on raw food if they spend time seeking out and preparing foods that are sufficiently soft, but they lose weight and tend to become infertile. Thus it seems we have evolved into a culinary ape. Perhaps even our hairlessness was an adaptation to the control of fire. Did fire allow us to dispense with fur and become the naked ape.

The important thing about a good hypothesis is not that it’s right but that it makes you think. Wrangham’s hypothesis certainly makes us think , but it is probably not entirely accurate.

We are not the only species with small guts. Carnivores, dogs, cats have much smaller guts probably because they don’t need a big fermenter to break down complex plant material. Perhaps the early homonids were predominantly hunters and scavengers; they ate predominantly meat and were strategically adapted to hunting and trapping animals. But their poor dentition may indicate that they lived on soft body organs or even on food that was half rotten with some additional fruits and leaves.

Cooking is not the only way of softening food, acid in the stomach does it too. After they have made a kill, lions and tigers need to rest for several hours for acid digestion to occur. The acid in human stomachs is as strong as that in other carnivores. The thing is, we can survive without cooking. We can all eat raw food though we may not have much time for anything else. Cooking saves time.

But is there any evidence in the fossil record that links the development of humans with fire? Humanoids with the characteristic shape that we have now, Homo habilis and Homo erectus, appeared about two and half million years ago, but the earliest evidence we have of hominids controlling fire is 750,000 years ago.

So was cooking the big breakthrough that allowed human beings to evolve into a more physiologically efficient mammal by relying on an external source of energy? Did we develop our human shape and physiology because our ancestors had learnt to harness fire? Or was cooking an evolutionary accelerant rather than an instigator?

According to Darwin’s deductions, evolution of species does not tend to occur gradually over millions of years, it is jerked forwards by environmental change; only certain individuals were sufficiently equipped to survive and breed under the new conditions and they produced more individuals with the same improved adaptations.

The accepted wisdom is that human evolution was instigated by climate change in sub-Saharan Africa. Less rainfall led to a dying back of the rainforest and its replacement by savannah. Certain of our ancestors could survive at the edges of the forest. They learnt how to trap and kill the grazing animals for food. Some had a more flexible thumb that could be opposed to the other digits allowing them to grip and manipulate tools. These better equipped individuals could make and use tools, they could fashion weapons, they could throw things; they could project into the future. These adaptations led quickly to others. Only those with the most efficient weaponry and skill, would survive, the rest would be killed off.

Genetics provides the potential, the environment brings it out. The brain develops according to experience, though some brains are more adaptable. In a rapidly changing environment, only those apes able to adapt, survive. So, over relatively few generations, a sub culture is selected out. Seen from this context, fire is another tool, something the advancing ape learnt to control, but it rapidly became indispensible. Hominids adapted to it and indeed could not survive without it. Fire now does so many other things besides cooking, it drives engines that make things and get us places. And now we have discovered enormous supplies of fossil fuels, we are totally dependent on the energy it gives us, so much so that few of us would survive without it. And yet, supplies of fossil fuel are finite. They will be depleted in 30 years.

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Keep on dancing

Nick Read — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 21:20:28 +0000

Every Saturday evening, sixteen million people turn on their televisions for two hours to watch Strictly Come Dancing, and turn on again the following night to see the results. But why? Why should a dance competition captivate the nation so much? It’s not Brucie’s jokes. And I can’t really believe that people turn on to see the redoubtable Ann Widdecombe express her desperate need for attention in one more ritual humiliation. No, I think it’s the romance of it all.

Dance is the physical expression of romantic love. Every week, we witness transformation in dance. Under the guidance of their professional partners, C list celebrities; rugby players, singers, actors, even politicians, who have never before trod the fantastic light, develop the confidence and attitude to dance. And as they improve, the relationship between the couples gets closer until they almost seem to merge and move together as one. It’s like watching people fall in love. The women all lose weight and glow with passion; the men perform like Gods. Urged on by the comperes and the judges, week by week they take more risk. We fear the crash – but at the same time desire it. This is compulsive viewing.

Pamela Stephenson, psychotherapist and one time comedienne, now one of the contestants, described it like this. ‘ Suddenly you’re in this hot bed of emotion, locking loins, arguing, fighting, making up, hugging. The professionals are very attractive, very intimate, very attentive, very emotional. It’s very hard not to fall in love a bit and that for some, can be very confusing.’

Contestants may enjoy the sensation of having their heads in the clouds but they have to keep their feet on the ground. Nabokov once defined fame as a stranger caught in their own snapshot, but they mustn’t let themselves believe in it. Celebrities are commodities for projection. We, the voyeurs, enjoy the frisson with desire and dread.

Love is not for the faint hearted. It’s a dangerous business; full of conflict and ambivalence. Dance, like courtship displays in birds and mammals, expresses the desire, the fear, the aggression, the affection.

If you truly love somebody, all meaning is invested in that person. Even the most mundane aspects of life are enhanced by the most intense colours, textures and tones. But if that love fails, that intensity suddenly evaporates and life loses its meaning. It’s all or nothing, life or death. So the dreadful danger of love is the disillusion and devastatation; the death of the spirit that ensues from a catastrophic loss of meaning. The professionals understand this; they never really lose themselves in the dance, they have the technique to act ‘as if’.

But how precarious for those learning to dance for the first time; they stand on the edge, make to go and then hold back, and their body can expresses the ambivalence and spoil the performance. They lack the technique that experience provides, to make it up. They have to dance with their heart or not at all. That’s why the judges, especially the effusive Bruno Tonioli, are all the while exhorting contestants to let go. Love can make any of us dance perfectly!

But it can be so difficult to trust. If we give ourselves to another person, then we lose our autonomy. We may crave the freedom of love, but we fear the dependence, because therein lies self deception and delusion. People don’t fall in love with another person; they fall in love with themselves or more accurately, the enhanced image of themselves they see in their lover’s eyes?

Fear of solitude and nothingness encourages us to take refuge in love, but fear of entrapment may cause us to flee it. Dance is the enactment of the ambivalent; cynicism; the elevated eyebrow of fear?

But let’s be positive. Love is such wonderful make believe. Even by proxy, it has the potential to create such poignant joy. How dull life would be without that dangerous hope?

So take care but not that much. And keeeeeep dancing!

The same applies to the bland, self satisfied conviction, the hand-me-down intimation of bliss that is spiritual love. Do you really need to relinquish your soul in the service of your God? Spiritual leaders grow fat on the respect and adoration of their disciples. And the faithful thrive on the illusion of righteousness. But human beings never got anywhere by sitting on a mountain contemplating nirvana just because they don’t dare to express their own thoughts and desires. Religions have always been based on fear.

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