begging

At the local swimming pool as I arrive in the car and pull up to let the girls out two boys knock on the door. They follow the car and when I get out expressionless they ask for fifty pence to go swimming.

The Roma have been moving to this area for a few years now. They are highly visible, they move in large groups and there are various somethings that distinguish them from other groups  here.

One thing is that the children will, at times, directly ask for money. There is no ‘side’ to this, the request can be at times insistent but no more. Like today it is almost expressionless.

Some children have come down our road either going through the bins with an adult or at other times tasking things left in the front gardens, kids bikes were taken from our house. We got then back though because people on the street had noticed them, they are visible and a sense of predictability comes with then too. They are, it is assumed, going to take things.

It is as if there were a group of people living amongst us who are coming out from the forest. Today it felt like we were the pastoralists and they hunter gatherers.

However to the hunter gatherers aren’t they ‘other’ too? Are they every ones other? A shared category, one that aides integration by being so much the ‘other’?

eyepatches and the devil

I took my daughter to school this morning and the class were cutting out a pirate hat.  The teacher had used a shape that included an eye patch (the image shows a similar but more complex model).  As the children were cutting, colouring and attaching the strip around the back to hold it onto their heads I noticed one boy had cut off the eye patch.  Why? I asked him assuming he just wanted the hat for some reason without the bit sticking out.  The answer:

If you have an eye patch it means you have got the devil in you.  Our bible tells us this.

One by one all the children in the class who follow the teachings of that particular bible cut their eye patches off.

Image

god and nature and the solution

Some time ago in a sitting room in France with some British friends I was looking at the photos, prints and paintings hanging on the walls. I had began a conversation with them about the idea that the natural world, the landscape, nature shared important attributes with God, perhaps the Old Testament God who had unlimited power that knows no bounds and cannot be controlled. The natural world, nature is also bounteous, offering food, shelter. Nature is destructive but without blame in spite of this, it is essentially unknowable.

We were discussing the images on their walls, landscape images of walking destinations in the Lake District, views of fields in southern France, seascapes with Yachts. These were like icons I felt and in fact were in a very literal way icons, they stood for the natural world but were not in themselves nature. Looking at them, admiring them was not the same as being in nature, walking in it, breathing it, mourning it.

There are some images of the natural world, Sunflowers by Van Gogh, that are seen as expressing such proximity to nature that they are valued highly, they evoke great passion and offer a sense of idolatry where they are more than representations but have some power to themselves.

This is part of a set of ideas that relate ecology and fascism. The central concept is that that the position of nature above people ethically (and most terribly scientifically) required to submit to nature’s needs (of which they are part) is the ideological form that could support a final solution where the victim is the unregulated resource consumer.