Reading like an anarchist

As a consequence of feedback on this blog, and on book reviews, a thought has occurred to me. Namely, how to read to best effect? When I touch on something that is close to someone’s experience, that seems to be helpful, but mostly I’ll be off the mark for most people – I’m bound to be. But I’d like to think I could still be useful. I’ve noticed that I derive benefit from books that other people find wide of the mark (profound thanks to Lorna who triggered this whole line of thought.) And I just read a book on Zen (thank you Jo!) that, while not entirely chiming with me, was profoundly useful.

Reading is not just a case of stuffing words into your head to see what sticks. We are largely taught to accept the authority of the author (clue is in the name and all that). There is a tendency to offer as fact that which is really opinion, and that muddies the waters too. It occurs to me that there are things I do when I’m reading that it might be useful to share.

Firstly, I watch for fact statements that are really opinions and mentally re-label them, and reject or accept according to my own tastes. It is a bit of a faff, but gets easier with practice. It makes it possible, for example, to read texts from people of other religions without getting bogged down or grumpy. After all, it’s just someone’s opinions, I can take it or leave it.

Secondly, I look for the underlying ideas. I’ve been reading a lot about prayer in different faiths – the surface stuff is of no use to me at all, what I’m looking for is what underpins, what the core concepts are, what the logic is. This means some picking out, a lot of pondering, but it does mean I get useful things out of books that really were not meant for me at all.

Thirdly I have no qualms arguing with a book. If I read something that totally jars with my beliefs, experiences or expectations, I’ll sit with that and try to figure out why. It may be that I was in error in some way, in which case I learn. It may be an opinions issue. It may be that I decide the thing I just read would be wrong for me, in which case it’s then down to me to try and figure out what would suit me better.

Here’s a case in point: I loved Fiona Tinker’s Pathworking through Poetry book. I wasn’t drawn to most of the poems she used and wouldn’t work with them, and disagreed with many of her interpretations, but that was fine because the core ideas were so useful, I could see how to take them and run with them, there was so much good material that our differences of opinion seemed like no problem at all.

Books are a bit like people: Opinionated, working to an agenda that is not your own, unreliable, sometimes wrong. Like people, you have to get in there, make a relationship, find out where the good bits are, take with a pinch of salt where appropriate, run off in totally the opposite direction when needs be, and so forth. Books are written by people and people are flawed and messy things, and most of us will see things differently to at least someone else.

The trick to getting the best out of reading, is not to submit to the authority of a book. Question it. Check its facts. Test its assertions. Throw it in the recycling bin if it lets you down too badly whilst quietly nicking the couple of bits you thought were useful. Take it as a model of what not to do (cough, Death of a Druid Prince, cough).

You have to get a fair way into History and Literature as academic subjects before anyone starts teaching you how to read critically or suggests you can argue with books. This is a shame. Especially when you consider the authority imbued in religious books, and those are stories made by people too, and all the same things need to apply with them, as well.

Rebellious Roots

I spent last night listening to the BBC radio 2 Folk awards. On the whole radio2 tends towards the shiny end of folk, and I tend towards the raw and dirty end, but they had Billy Bragg on and Treacherous Orchestra, so that was fine. Folk is where I come from, it’s home, ancestry, community, more so than Druidry because folk has been there my whole life. I’ve seen a fight, in my lifetime to keep the folk traditions alive. Back in the 80s, the prospect wasn’t good, with aging and dwindling clubs, but, there’s a tremendous resurgence going on and a lot of brilliant young people coming through.

At the Druid Network convention back in November, Paul Mitchell pointed out that our folk traditions are as much a part of our heritage as Stonehenge. More so, because folk has the potential to belong to everyone, and apparently Stonehenge doesn’t, and we can’t all get there and it would be bloody crowded if we did. Folk is where you are, there’s plenty around. It’s your traditions, your heritage, be that farming or industry, or protest or something else.

I have some sense of who my people were, what they did and the land they come from. Not everyone has that. One of the things the folk tradition does is gives you a huge pool of possible ancestry to pick from. Of course you had your share of poachers, soldiers, peasants, and poets – we all do. Not everyone engages with folk, too much beard, woolly jumper and finger in ear… except most of it isn’t like that, and never was. Folk can be sexy, angry, militant, ironic, dangerous… and also loud, or more like classical, or all kinds of things. Still, I’m not going to lure everyone in.

I was listening to Billy Bragg talking about how much now is like life under Margaret Thatcher, and about how it keeps coming round and we keep having to fight the same fights. The protest songs serve in part to connect you to all the people who had to do it before, to make it less lonely, help see the point, keep your courage up. We all have these fights, and in sharing them, they become easier. Workers protest songs from a hundred years ago and more are very relevant. We’ve rioted before over impossible rents, and lack of food, and shitty systems and we’ll do so again.

It helps to know this. How many people don’t know? How many people live in the small awareness of a few generations, overwhelmed by what the system is doing to them and unable to imagine that you could fight back, much less that it would work. How many people don’t know about Ned Ludd and the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo massacre, the peasants revolt, chartism, levellers, diggers, and all the other brave attempts to put things right. Each round of fighting takes us a little bit further forward. Without that knowledge, without the history of dissent, revolt, non-cooperation, and uprising, it’s easy to believe that you can’t do anything.

What does that give you? A whole new kind of feudalism, in which the peasants are held in place not by laws, but by our own lack of knowledge and disbelief. That’s the developed world for you, all too often. Bread, circuses and being dictated to by our lords and masters.

Show of Hands, in their song ‘Roots’ have this line – “Without our stories and our songs, how will we know where we came from?” We don’t. We have no idea, and that makes it very hard to figure out where we might be going or how to even own that process a bit.

Ancestors of Land

I talked a bit earlier this week about the relationship between Druidry and the Ancestors and Beyond the Map in terms of experiencing blood family. Ancestors of Land are also a connecting thread. We honour them in ritual, and they are whoever happened to be on the land before us. I have a keen sense of many ancestors in my current location. The canal was built, and there are ancestors of the boating life too. Go back far enough and this landscape would have been marshy. It has yielded evidence of ancient settlement. Listening to the wind in the rushes, kayaking, I have a sense of those first people who lived alongside the Severn, hunted the wild birds, and put some of their own dead in barrows on the hillsides. I’ve become conscious of how walkable the Severn vale is, and how, if there was no motorway, the journey from river to hill would be feasible.

This landscape is full of hints about ancestors. Having read Oliver Rackham’s book on the history of the British landscape, I had some ideas about things to look for, but they were broad and general. Then a thing happened. Tom and I were walking down the towpath to get to one of the places I can download email, and I saw a chap with a map in hand, looking out across the fields. There’s a footpath down towards the river, but it’s not as well signposted as would be ideal. I’ve stopped and talked to walkers many times about where the path goes. So I stopped and asked if he was looking for the aforementioned.
He wasn’t.

He had come down to look at a particularly old landscape feature indicative of former settlement, and explained to me how to read the humps and bumps in the fields. The enclosure around a settlement or farm means lower land levels on the inside as the river dumps soil round the outside. He told me how the New Grounds had been deposited by the river in mediaeval times, leading to court cases about who actually owned the land. An actual, real to goodness land historian, on my towpath, talking about my landscape. He was a tad self-effacing but after enthusing at him we managed to elicit both a name, and the critical information that he writes books. I’ve now got one of them – Gloucestershire 300 Years ago. The author is Alan Pilbeam and he’s written a few. He has an accessible writing style and an eye to the implications, so that the political and power shifts he thinks of in terms of ordinary people, too. So many of our ancestors exist as a silence in the historical record, a reasoned attempt to put some of them back in, is a wonderful thing. There’s a lot of detail about things you can go and observe, including pointers to ancient Pagan sites. It’s wonderful stuff.

To the handful of Gloucestershire Druids and for that matter non-Druids who read my stuff, I can only say hunt out this man’s work, it is brilliant. I don’t know who else is doing this other places, but if you can find any, do. There’s nothing like being able to look at the bumps in the ground and know what they mean and who was there, and why…

Speculating wildly

I’ve been talking a bit lately about the issues of shoddy history, and crazy interpretation, which comes up a fair bit in the new book, Druidry and the Ancestors. I’m being careful not to replicate content, so whatever comes up here is not in the book, for purposes of keeping life interesting. I don’t actually have any problem at all with wild and creative speculation. It is, after all, the foundation of much fiction writing. Wild speculation can lead to testable theories, new interpretations and other good stuff. It can also create confusion, spread misinformation and generally mess people about.

The first rule of good speculation is to be clear what you are doing. Offering interpretation of facts is fine, but it needs to be said that you are giving an interpretation, not ‘obviously this is the only way of reading the data’. It won’t be. There are always alternative stories available. One good way of keeping your speculation under control is to do a lot of it, ironically enough. Postulate half a dozen interpretations, and then talk about which one you like the most or which ones seem the most plausible.

Giving a bloody stupid interpretation alongside your pet theory and suggesting this somehow demonstrates your theory is the only good one that can fit the fact, is bullshit. Don’t go there.

Be mindful of the stories you already have an investment in. The odds are good that you will interpret in line with existing beliefs and will have blind spots around things you either do not know, or believe. I have an axe to grind about how we interpret human sacrifice into archaeological data, for example, so there’s every chance I will deliberately go the other way, perhaps more than the evidence supports. I am positive about historical pagans and therefore unlikely to give critical theories the same weight as celebratory ones. At least I know this. Many of the people who have written history books about pre-Christian folk had an agenda – to prove the superiority of both Christianity and the more industrialised and colonising culture they came from. As I commented on recently in the post about the trouble with animism, so much of this thinking is still ingrained culturally. Perhaps a little bias the other way is a necessary counterbalance for the time being.

Many of us have work or life experience that calls upon us to interpret information. That may be formal data analysis, but more likely about deciding what someone else’s behaviour means, or who to trust, which expert to follow, which political party to vote for. We are all unavoidably in the business of turning raw information into stories. Sometimes it is the wild speculations that take us forward. Could we…? What would happen if…? Radical things can only come from wild and original thinking. Include Green movements, feminism, new technology and modern paganism in that list. We need wild speculation. Without it, we stagnate.

There is also the wild speculation of politicians who want to make us afraid of the wrong things to keep us pliable. There are the wild speculations of creationists, and the incredible theories of people who can imagine rape as part of God’s Grand Plan. Think about it and you will see some interesting differences. The most dangerous, sick and deluded of wild speculations assert themselves as unassailable truths.

Where there is even a small margin of doubt and uncertainty, there is hope. We need uncertainty. A wild speculation that is not complacent about its own merits will be tested, explored, and only taken forward if it starts generating some kind of evidence. The sick and mad speculations automatically assume their own veracity and will mow down anything that fails to agree. Thus when a misguided vision in the hands of the right people turns out to provably not work, it gets dropped, while those who have no grip on reality keep peddling their madness. People who cannot tell between what is real and what they have imagined can get things right – by accident, if by no other means. But an argument you do not know how to back up or verify is not a very useful thing to take out into the world.

The Pagans I’ve met have all tended to be speculative people, and we do like our wild theories (Atlantis, aliens, dolphin priestesses, the burning times, conspiracy theories etc.) There can be a lot of fun to be had playing with ideas, but we need to keep our feet on the ground and make sure we can test what we think is true, and not rely on our beliefs to reinforce our beliefs.

The trouble with animism

This is a history of ideas thing, I have nothing negative to say about animism at all, just to be clear. The trouble with animism is the way it seems to be classified in a particular kind of story about human progress. Druidry and the Ancestors has a lot of material in it about the kinds of stories we invent about history. This isn’t in the book, but is an example of how problematic those stories can be.

I’m currently reading K.M Sen’s book on Hinduism – which is fascinating, but includes as a statement of fact the idea that primitive people have primitive, animist beliefs and that advancing civilization goes with more sophisticated polytheism, moving towards monotheism. It’s not a new theory, I have seen it other places. I’m pretty sure it’s in The Golden Bough, and that it goes with more 19^th century attitudes to ‘primitive’ people and ‘primitive’ belief. (Pile in if you know more than me or have your sources to hand, please!)

This is in essence a story about progress, in which moving towards ever more complicated ways of living is seen as a good thing. It’s a whole line of thinking that exists to prop up the status quo, to let us tell ourselves how much better we are than people of ages past, and of course ‘primitive’ people whose land we would like to appropriate. Progress theory is pretty much inherent in colonial attitudes and is underpinned by ideas about economic growth being an unquestionable good, industrialisation being an unquestionable good, and monotheism being also an unquestionable good.

Except that nothing works like that anyway. Hinduism seems to be a fine example of a complex dance between polytheism and monotheism, including turns with agnosticism and materialism. Once you get to a great big monotheistic belief then it’s very easy to go pantheistic. The one big all powerful all present God, is everywhere! So God is in everything. So everything has spirit, and suddenly you’ve gone round a great big loop and come back to animism again. It’s not a line of progress, it’s a circle, or a spiral, or a big mush of interconnected things, depending on who you are and how you do it. The only way you get a line is if you take atheism as some sort of exit trajectory. Then what you get is the idea that we only have what exists materially. At which point treasuring and honouring those material realities can start to make a lot of sense. At which point…yes… you’ve spotted the punch line.

The trouble with animism is what happens when you try and talk about it using the outmoded language of people with bloody stupid ideas and a very narrow view of the world. If you engage with people who use the language of separation and difference, mind body dualism, matter and spirit, us and them, the object and the subject, and you talk on their terms, you talk about animism in a language that by its nature, deconstructs animism and makes a nonsense of it. It can be tempting to want those mainstream languages of science, reason and philosophy, except that they make you fit. Which for animism, means make you into small, dysfunctional pieces of wrong.

Which leaves me wondering quite what we do with that.

Druidry at the end of history part 5

You can be an ancestor of tradition, sending thoughts and actions into the world that will live on into the future. I think people tend to assume that being a future ancestor of tradition means being famous and influential in both your lifetime and beyond. After all, without fame, how are your ideas going to spread? This way of thinking owes everything to celebrity orientated culture and nothing to the nature of tradition. A famous person is just that, but the effect of their influence is limited to their lifespan unless they have followers. That means either belong to, or founding a tradition. The life blood of tradition is not big names though. Traditions do not require famous people to keep them going. They need participants. Regular people. Us. Consider the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, or Oxfam. Organisations only outlive their originator if there are many participants to keep the project alive.

We all get to be part of that. In every ritual and moot, in every blog post and conversation we choose what to pass on, what to discard, what to tinker with. The act of sharing, one person to another, is the essence of a living tradition. Every time you interact with a tradition, you are helping to carry if forward, and you are being a future ancestor of that tradition.

I come from a folk background. While the writer’s name is attached to a song, it isn’t folk. Only when the originator cases to be visible, is it truly a folk song. All folk was once written by someone, and has been through a lot of hands. To be truly a part of the tradition is to have disappeared into it merging with the flow. Without individuals, there can be no great flow of tradition, either. We shape traditions and are shaped by them.

Most of history was not made out of famous names. Every big event, every new movement and cultural shift was not just about the famous few, but involved the hidden many. The invisible ones whose many hands and voices decide what is kept and what is discarded. When the invisible many at together, we get results. It may be Brian May who is remembered for Team Badger, but on his own, h wouldn’t have managed much.

 

(For anyne who missed what’s going on here, this is the talk I gave at the Druid Network con last weekend in bits, and the first installment is here – http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1 )

Druidry at the end of history part 3

Part 1 is here http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1

and this is part 2

http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/druidry-end-of-history-part-2

The apparent obliviousness of the majority is one of the things that drives me crazy about people. Look at us, the way we consume and destroy, the rampant expansion of our species. We’re like a cancer, and less use than wasps. What we clearly need is a ice, big apocalypse to clear the air. Then, when we’ve torn everything down there will be room to rebuild, better. We can get it right, there will be utopia. I’m prepared to bet it’s a fantasy most people entertain now and then. Of course that one big apocalypse won’t affect me, or you. The people destined to die will all be somewhere else, somewhere I don’t care about full of people I never met. A tidy apocalypse that selectively takes out things and people I don’t like, leaving only the good stuff. We are, of course, intrinsic to the good stuff.

It’s probably quite natural to want all the bad stuff to disappear, it would be an easy solution. I think we all know that the fantasy of a lovely apocalypse, is at best, totally bonkers. It’s impossible. A real, full blown apocalypse would be awful, and we know that. For too many people though, it is the plan. People whose response to history is to want to end it. These are not people whose ears I am going to get to bend. But even so, we do need to challenge nice big apocalypse theory, because it’s lazy.

The world is people. Society is people. The human future is going to be people. We’re not going to get a magically clean slate to work with, there is no re-boot reality button. Imagining what we would do if only it were made very, very easy, it a waste of time. The only way to make a future, is by starting from here, with what we have, and knowing that we can start here and get to somewhere. We don’t need epic scale drama to jump start us, but realistic visions of things we can achieve and the will to make a start. Evolution ore than revolution, building not destroying.  Knowing where we’ve come from and where we want to go.  Knowing, we will be better placed to make changes. If that all sounds like a huge and daunting task, well, it is. But it’s not impossible.

You’ll notice I’ve been talking about process, not aims. I believe that if you really understand who you are and where you’ve come from, you can make better choices. People not thinking enough is the root of most if not all problems. So I preach a doctrine of thinking about stuff. If we thought more, we’d at least make new and interesting mistakes. You don’t need a nice big apocalypse for that, just a lot of people thinking about what, and how and why, ad what if?

Druidry at the end of history, part 2

Part 1 is here -

http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1

I gave up on the formal study of history when I was fourteen. I was sick of the world wars, and due to a shortage of books we had to study them in the wrong order, which made it very confusing. I suspected geography would b both easier and involve less Hitler. History and I parted company for a while, right up until I got to doing my Degree. A horrible truth dawned on me. All books come from a point in history. Many of them don’t make much sense if you don’t know the context. Try doing Shakespeare without understanding any of the history! Istarted swotting up, and during that process another alarming truth occurred to me. That came because I was minoring in psychology, and they taught us initially by teaching the history of the subject. Every subject has its own history. We didn’t do the history of chemistry at school, with its origins in alchemy and magic. How different would that have been? The history of medicine is terrifying. The history of sex really puts an interesting spin on things.  We do not teach children the history of how people have thought about the world. A few minutes with that one is enough to show how fragile and ephemeral out whole culture is. We live in a web of stories held together by ideas about ideas. In time, all of it will probably change or be discarded.

All most of us learn is political history. Every human activity and tradition has a history, be it known or unknown. It all came from somewhere – not that we should assume that means it must also be going somewhere. How much of it do we even know?

What does the end of history mean? It means having no idea where you came from or who you are. It means having no roots, no sense of connection to the enormity of all that went before. How many people are conscious of the roles they have been born into, or the patterns they are living out? How many people repeat history precisely because they have no idea what history is. Not the history of politic and rulers, but the personal history of family and culture.  These are the kinds of history we don’t much talk about.

I ask, how can we be free and capable of self determination if we do not know what shaped us and what might be pulling our strings? The end of history is all around us, in the minds of anyone who is re-enacting all that they are oblivious too. It’s nothing new. I rather suspect this kind of end of history has been with us all along.

Of Graeme and Ancient Druids

Continuing then, with the story of what underpinned writing Druidry and the Ancestors. It was one of those serendipity things, that not long after reading Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe, I was sent some very relevant review books. Graeme K Talboys’ Way of the Druid, and The Druid Way made easy. I review quite a lot of Pagan and Druid writing for The Druid Network.

In many ways, the larger, more detailed Way of the Druid is the perfect companion to Blood and Mistletoe. Where Ronald Hutton carefully deconstructs certainty, Graeme Talboys shows the means by which something of Druidry might have survived. We’re in the realms of interpretation here, and he never creates a false impression of certainty, which I like. After the necessary doubts Blood and Mistletoe creates, Way of the Druid offers possibilities, potential, and hope.

It also made me realise a thing, and that thing turned out to be critically important.

All of history as a subject, is guesswork, story making, looking for plausible explanations. There is, as Ronald Hutton makes clear, precious little certainty. What I learned from Graeme was that I wanted to believe in the literal and dependable truth of every word he’d written. If I do that, and I carry forward in my own work, inspired by those words and by a possible path, what happens?

All we can ever hope to be, is inspired by the idea of something. Hard, solid truth is never going to be available to us, because other interpretations are also always available. Inspiration is more dependable. Which matters most, the facts, or what we do with them? Well, in terms of life lived in the present, and the future we choose to create, what we think about the past will have at least as much influence as what actually happened. What we do with history, how we use it, what we make out of it, is far more important in terms of our own, individual lives, than anything else. For some, that will manifest very precisely as a quest for truth and accuracy. For some the inspiration of the story will carry more weight. We use and subvert our own and other people’s histories in just the same way that we use and subvert other things in order to make sense of our lives, justify our actions, and craft our futures.

I figure, if I’m going to do it, I may as well do it consciously and deliberately. I may as well knowingly pick the stories and ideas I find most powerful and inspiring and work with those. I want Graeme’s vision of ancient Druids and Druid survival to be true. I have no way of knowing whether it is. I made a conscious choice to take those ideas and run with them, as though they were true. In the same way, others take inspiration from myths, from modern fairy tales like Lord of the Rings, and then there’s the glorious creative, chaotic Steampunk scene which is all about taking inspiration and having a history story that is quite deliberately not history. It’s what we want history to have been, and we have the option to make the future out of that retro-aspiration.

I have huge respect for Graeme’s work and he’s been a source of considerable inspiration to me. Not least, he made me realise that the best thing I can do is choose my story and run with it. I’ll keep following the quest for truth alongside it though, inspired by the greatest Druidic fraud, Iolo Morganwg, who claimed ‘the truth against the world’ as his motto. There is however, more than one kind of truth. Sometimes it is the soul truth, the heart truth of a story that really matters, not the technical accuracy. I think that’s why so many people find things like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings affect them so profoundly. Heart truth matters.

Out of the tension between known history, and the history we might want, came Druidry and the Ancestors. And, for added strangeness, it turns out that Graeme and I have ancestral connections, our people were close neighbours in the past! Sometimes, it’s a very small world.

My love affair with Ronald Hutton

I should begin by saying this is an entirely intellectual consideration and, so far as I know, quite entirely one sided! It began years ago with The Pagan Religions of the British Isles (can’t recall the exact title, but that’s the gist.) Stations of the Sun, confirmed me in my infatuation and I’ve been collecting the good Professor’s pagan books ever since.

There are many things I love about Ronald Hutton’s writing. His uncertainty is incredible. So much writing in all subjects is about asserting theories and showing how the evidence supports it. To read work that picks through the evidence and talks about the limits and inadequacies was a revelation for me. The very notion of uncertainty has become intrinsic to my own Druidry, and to how I think about a lot of things.

Ronald Hutton is present in his own work, in a way many academic writers aren’t. He’s not afraid to say ‘I’ and drop in personal takes, as personal takes, moments of insight and other details that lift the content out of the dry, dusty norms of academia and make it a lot more readable. I read a lot, I read widely, and I’ve crawled through many a book that claimed objective certainty. I’d rather have a sense of person and some sense of who I’m dealing with.

I love the humour. Often cutting, sometimes downright catty, there aren’t many historians who have ever made me laugh out loud. It’s a subtle sort of humour, a tad subversive, and utterly delightful.

Then I read Blood and Mistletoe. Ronald Hutton going in-depth on the history of the Druids. It was a hard read. Like many people, I came to Druidry wanting there to be a clear connection between Druidry old and new. I wanted there to be ancient wisdom, and certainty, and I wanted someone to know what it was, even if I didn’t. This book systematically stripped away many things that I had wanted to believe, and then presented the Monty Pythonesque insanity of the revival Druid movement. Reading it, and for some time afterwards, I felt lost. Where did I fit now? What did it all mean? How do I call myself a Druid and keep doing something that has meaning, in the context of all this uncertainty and more recent embarrassment?

The need to answer Blood and Mistletoe pretty much prompted me to take up the work that led to me writing Druidry and the Ancestors. I did get to swap a few emails with Ronald Hutton as I was working. I didn’t end up asking him to read the whole book because he was clearly very pressed for time, and I didn’t want to impose. He did say nice things about the bit I ran past him, for which I was hugely grateful, and it gave me the courage to keep going with what was a very difficult project.

He remains my hero.