Posts Tagged 'culture'

Text and photography by Roderic Gill. Click on photo for larger view

In cities, towns and villages, the architecture and character of a Place is the statement of those who live there. If I live in a street, and I paint my house fluorescent green, the character of my individuality is subsumed and dissipated as the individual statements of every other resident merge, coalesce and flatten like beads of colour merged into mud under an artist’s plate knife. Zoom out and out further, and the violence of my own demented colour choices disappear as we merge across the individualities of more and more people. At the level of a city Place, my contributions remain to be noticed only by my immediate neighbours (who will probably lobby the local authorities to repaint down to a statement less likely to assault the exertions of their own, more subtle, statements of urban individualism).

But you can still detect the imprints of individuals, in this time and through times past, in even the deepest urban collage. Despite the press of numbers, our urban landscapes are a living collective identity. As I walked down this lane in the town of Segovia, Spain, the pressing presence of the Place through which I passed has manifested through an enormity of time and population. The towering cathedral overhead reminds us of the cultural binders that have shaped this place for a thousand years. That most of us walking here are tourists is indicative of how the accumulative timelines of identity can attract and impress. But it is hard for an individual, any individual, to make an emphatic statement out of the context of the Place as a whole; other than via an act of sabotage or via a feat of outrageous individualism (like erecting a statue of oneself right in the middle of the street). These places are places of large scale, collective, accumulative identity-making where the mark of specific individuals is hard, though still possible, to detect. Perhaps that might make many feel content; less spotlighted, less exposed.

When a statue is erected as a statement of individuality, it’s usually of someone that the collective identity-makers of that Place decide is someone of singular importance. Like this statue of Juan Bravo in a square further down that same Segovia street.

Perhaps it’s comforting to people to be a part of but not to be above the collective individualism expressed in our larger urban places. To be part of the story but not beyond it. That would provide a sense of belonging and contribution without the discomfort of spotlighted difference. Perhaps many of us are attracted to cities as a place to blend identity rather than to stand too far apart. We have the potential to stand out, but not the necessity to do so. That’s consistent with the tribalism of our species. Large urban places are, though, dangerous to the project of identity-making. They are places that can fall too easily into the apparent allures of bigger-is-better mega place blending; the temptation is to seedbed the contemporary plague of globalised placelessness that dislocates the heritage of our cultures and of our capacity for localised self-sufficiency. Small and beautiful is blended and shredded into the manic uniform grey of the economic rationalist’s monochrome vision. In our increasingly globalised world, will any who pass this statue of Juan Bravo even remember who he once was? Do they now?

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In the country things are different in so many ways. These are wilder, remoter, more human-individualistic places; places where the family unit becomes a distinctive constituent. Here, there are not enough of us to blend out all the spikes of our more exposed identities. The monuments we construct as individuals are partitioned from the monuments our neighbours build via moats of space. The road, out here, is a key part of the identity of Place. The road not only connects, but is a part of the social design of a rural Place. Some of these local roads were, indeed, built by those who live there. Cart tracks became the foundation for cars. Which explains the confusions many from outside these rural Places experience when they visit. Public roads merge into private tracks. Navigating these roads is like a local cultural dialect; intelligible to those who live there and frequently intimidating to those who don’t. Ownership blends and blurs. Roads are for transport; and for the herding of sheep. Matters of ownership and permission to proceed matter only to those from outside. To those who live there, these roads are part of their social landscape.

This is a road right through the core of a Place known to the locals as ‘Scots Corner’. This is a Place with a 160 year tradition of Scottish rural settlement; a Place where the Scots who came attempted to adapt the lifestyles they once knew to the similar, but distinctly different terrain with which they had elected to reconfigure their lives. As it happens, this particular Place is at the core of one of the most resilient and most famous superfine Merino wool growing regions in the world. The families who first settled here, unlike many other parts of Australia, are still here, generation down from generation. This is a Place that has resisted the corporate takeover of rural Places that has blighted so many other parts of rural Australia. This is a Place where families still prevail, as a counterculture to the economically rationalised corporate takeover of agriculture we see virtually everywhere else. These are families who struggled, survived, thrived, adapted to and genuinely loved the Place they now called, and will continue to call, their home.

Perhaps the most evident sign that a place is a Place is its possession of both a Church and a cemetery. Better still if both were hewn out of the ground by the efforts of the ancestors of those who live there now. The character of a Place is rarely as evident as in these two cultural landmarks. The cemetery presents a reminder of the linage and resilience of those generations that have persisted, to this day. A reminder of when those lineages commenced, the journeys they have sustained and the character of the Place as it is now. This is the Kilcoy cemetery. Remote, silent, exclusive to the families who have made this place through generations stretching back to the limits of living, collective memory. Cemetery’s tell the story of the Place that these monuments sometimes cryptically recall. A line of same-shaped, same-dark granite gravestones crossing a span of 150 years tells a tale of a single family that has stayed. Read more intently and the connections between the different family groups are plotted out like an historical record. Nuanced by the tribal gathering of family groups in sub plots. Intrigues are recalled by the distance between some of these plots. Like the remote stones way off to one corner, all by themselves. Neglected, collapsed, forgotten. Like the stones maintained, sustained; continuously repaired. Look closely to note the repairs to pillars broken in the wild storms of the past. Gravestones assaulted by howling winds and the erosion of time. Look closely to see how those stones are maintained as part of the living memories of those who still connect to this Place as blood in living veins.

These monuments line up like an array of marble chairs; all facing into the valley these families have worked and loved for generations gone and, under their vigil, for generations to come. Those who have gone lie at rest here maintaining a vigil of memory over the very places where they once lived. Those who still live there connect back to times past as they meet this stoney gaze. They remember the generational heritage that has given them this gift of a lifestyle from which they could never be separated. Cemetery’s like this are not only a statement of the riligious beliefs of those who meet there through time. They are a place were the lives of those who have gone continue to cross into the lives of those who remain. This is a time stilled outstretched bridge from times past to times to come.

Apart from the homes the people have built, and the roads they crafted to connect, the only other expression of collective identity is the local church. The parallel between this local kirk (a Scottish Presbyterian kirk of the most expressively, emphatically simple kind) and the grand cathedral towering over the streets of Segovia is their manifestation as an expression of collective local Place making. These churches are markers of the social fabric that mark places as Places. Grand, outrageous opulence for a community with mighty grand pretensions contrast with but continue to serve the same purpose as this simple timber kirk crowning another windswept hill: to mirror the cultural character of those who cooperated in their construction. Consider this simple timber building, now overgrown and teetering on the final throws of white-anted decay. It’s no longer used for the religious purpose to which it was once applied. The building still remains, just like the headstones in the cemetery. Ten years from now, the building will be gone, after 140 years. But for now, the kirk and the cemetery watch each other across the span of the valley that separates one from the other; the valley where those who built both continue to live and work.

The kirk will decline as the roads the outsiders have built ease access to other, larger, less organic places to go – like the buildings for religion the centralised religious bureaucracies have built. The people now go to buildings outside this Place to pray. They go to other places to give thanks where thanks for the heritage they share does not reside. This is a metaphor for these globalising times. Even though I do not share the religious connections for which our kirk still, despite all, stands, I consider its decline to be a wound that will finally and ultimately bleed the lifeblood out of this Place and render it, eventually to be just another place defined by commerce alone. The defiant, extravagant pious protestantism of those who built this Place was grafted into our lonely kirk. That was a protestantism not just in a religious sense; but in a sense of making a life in a quiet, dedicated, unassuming way that would reward that dedication with a Place-connected life for generations to come.

This small and beautiful Place as a Place that has organically evolved through the self-sufficiency and persistence of those who have lived here is a Place struggling, just like this decaying kirk, to remain a Place under the dislocation and ecological-economic insanity of the new globalised religion of conformity and market-amenable uniformity. So too for the cathedrals towering over even the larger Places of the world. Their fate is to become mere tourist attractions to outsiders seeking in vain to connect with the character of Places that persist now only as cultural exhibits to be consumed. In these globalised times, we consume our needs for heritage rather than contribute our lives to the living entity a heritage always used to be. The more emphatically demonstrative bigger city Places are as much under the onslaught of white anting as is our local kirk. In both cases, the real decay is the white ant like colonisation of all our Places by the culture of one-size-fits-all asserted through the globalised cult of economic rationalism that has taken all our tribes to the edge of no-place at all.

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Religion is such a fascinating compulsion. A regular self-contained supermarket of spiritual satiation that would sustain even the most committed consumer of psychic rewards…

I guess my own interests in the subject are a touch unconventional; but then again, what is the convention for religious engagement? I’m an outside observer with a probably disingenuous fascination with the constructions religious people build; be they architectural or cultural. I’m an outsider looking in. I have no religion; never did and never will. I am not an atheist either. I’ve determined that athiesm is as much a belief system (belief in non-belief) as any other; you only have to observe the passionate solicitations of Saint Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest for committed followers to their atheistic cause to note the full-blown religious status of their own system of faith.

So, it’s the compulsions to faith that interest me. And the architecture of the infrastructure the faithful erect to self-validate their beliefs. For something as big as this, you need big symbols. And religious symbols can certainly be impressive. They are woven right through the history of the human race. You can’t miss them when you walk down any street. From the giant gothic cathedrals of Europe, monastic retreats (below right) in time-warped Spain, to the lonely, peace-defining cabins-in-the-woods the Presbyterians erected all over the transplanted Scottish rural wilderness of my own rural home. The architectural statements of religion can dominate all.

Faith is truly fascinating to behold. Those who proclaim their own convictions in this regard, often do so with a savage ferocity that can be scary to behold. The wild-eyed, machine-gun toting hell-fire mad Mullahs, the bible-thumping, Creative Design, Darwin-denying zealots of the Evangelical Christian tribes, the weirdly dressed, funny-haired all-black wall-bashing ultra orthodox Jews, the gold plated and bejeweled Scepter toting smoke wielders of the Catholic Kingdom and, weirdest of all, those who preach from bibles to empty streets hoping upon hoping that no one will notice – because even if they did, their religion is by invitation only and invitations are never provided…

Just as curious, and just as excitingly fascinating are the greater majority of ‘believers’ who believe in never, ever, looking deeply enough to notice that they really don’t actually believe in anything at all – except in commerce and the cult of acquisition – and that their own faith is really nothing more than a package acquired from the shelf of peer-convention. What’s fascinating is the lack of interest in asking questions, in self-reflection. It seems that the urge to self-detect what it is in which we might believe is a compulsion totally missing to such a surprising majority of the human race. I don’t understand that at all. This is such a fascinating subject, the psychology and sociology of belief, that I simply can’t believe that some simply don’t want to know what’s beneath the veneer of the shield that they wield to keep all such thoughts at bay.

Allied to all this is the reality that the sorts of things that I am discussing are universally un-discussable. Why are the compulsions that feed religious conviction beyond the social acceptability of discussability? What a tragedy that something so utterly fundamental to the society that contains us is usually beyond the kind of reflexive introspection that might apply, say, to the cultures of music and tax collection.

Discussing the undiscussable can be an exercise in death. I’m fascinated by the elaborations of most peoples’ cultures around the mores of not mentioning the mutual exclusivity of our various beliefs. If I am right, you are wrong. If we who subscribe to a particular belief are the chosen few, then all the rest are doomed to some kind of hell. Catholics know that protestants are doomed to eternal fire. Protestants think the same in reverse and the Exclusive Brethren imagine all but they are completely damned. They can’t all be right, can they? I’m fascinated by interfaith meetings couched in the pretensions of the politically correct. Muslims expressing solidarity with Christians. They each know the other mob are damned; but won’t say so even though they know so. And so does everyone else. It’s all a fascinating game; to faithless people like me. I am fascinated in advance by the reaction writings such as this are likely to invoke. The rampaging hate mail, the fathwahs, the diatribes, the pure unmitigated hate such a discussion could invoke.

Step back. Step outside. Look back in and what do you see? Wars, rivers of blood, places of gold erected in the centre of slums. Civilisations have risen and civilisations have fallen from compulsions that so few have ever bothered to explore. Why do people comply with these social constructions of belief? How can someone resist the infinite tonal scale of the intellectual freedom that non-religion can provide? Why restrict yourself to 16 shades of grey when the real world shines from ten to the power of ten instead?

I think that’s the point. Ten to the power of ten is a scarily large place to be. Especially when you might want the entire world to validate your own belief in the importance of you… It’s hard to be self-important when confronting the infinity of universal space. Our compulsions to identity are all about human ego.

You are reading this. I am writing it. There’s a ‘you’ and to you, when I say ‘you’ you know I am talking about the you you are! I have constructed a universe of meaning around the identity I have constructed for ‘me’. So have you. The eyes through which you and I see are eyes contexted by this identity we have built. Take away the identity; take away the sense of ‘I’, and what can ‘you’ see? ‘You’ would simply become. Thoughts like the wind going someplace from someplace else. Now, to me, it’s those unanchored-in-me thoughts to which I personally aspire. It’s that plane of no-me from which I would like to observe the faith systems of the people around me. From there, the observer could drill beneath the astounding edifaces of religious constructions (from the mega cathedrals, prayer mats on the desert sands and the arcanities of Catholic rituals), through the language of belief (the bibles, the Korans, the Torah’s and the rest), through the thoughts of those in deep meaningful prayer, right down to the foundations of those thoughts from which all that religious architecture stems.

Is religious belief simply a lazy way of forestalling deeper introspections such as this? Is religious belief a mechanism through which to escape the loneliness of the infinite; where the ‘I’ I am is no longer an ‘I’ of importance or relevance on a universal scale?

I wonder why it matters to others what I might think. If they think I am wrong in my convictions, what should that matter to them? Why should I be thrown on an Inquisitor’s rack or behedded in the town square for ideas such as these? What does it matter what I think when what you think should be all that matters to you? Unless, that is, that ‘you’ feel threatened by what I say and that could only be if what I say shakes your own belief, or causes ‘you’ to travel deeper into the intellectual depths of your own faith than you would wish to. Lest your own faith be unsettled. And if a person’s faith is the construction through which he supports the very foundations of his sense of ’self’, then disruptions of the kind I might invoke might be perceived as an assault on the very identity that he has devoted his very life to uphold. Could it be that my intellectual ramblings are perceived to be some kind of personal assault? After all, I don’t care if someone declares my own faith to be wrong as I don’t have any faith! And I am sure that if my critic’s response is to invoke the rack of the Inquistion or to invoke a behedding, his reactions are definitely not an expression of the love his faith might declare to be the appropriate motivation for actions of that kind. The argument that ‘you have to burn you at the stake because I love you’ does not, it seems to me, hold much by way of logical merit. No, the response of the faithful to the faithless such as me is more to do with anger; anger that I could possibly doubt what the apparently faithful might at least subliminally doubt.

I am a spiritual tourist. This journey is a fascinating source of entertainment and enlightenment. A few years ago, I tried very very hard to immerse myself in the passions of deep religious belief. I wanted to be the subject of conversion so that I too could experience what it might be like to belong to one of those deep-faith tribes. I picked Christianity because we had a Christian book shop in our town. I’d have liked to have tried Islam too; but that’s more difficult to explore for linguistic reasons and for matters of convenience. I started out with the genre of Christian apologetics. The best selling list of ‘this book will change your life’ reads. I asked around. I knew some intelligent faithful so I asked which books were influential to their own personal cause. Philip Yancey, R C Sproul, Francis Schaeffer, and Lee Strobel (amongst 50 or so others). I even tried John Shelby Spong to get taste of apostasy! (I must confess I liked Bishop Spong best of all…) Of course, I tried the bible. The King James, the New King James, the New American Standard, the Living Bible, the New International Version… I collected and read from them all. I like bibles. I have around 50 in my collection. My favourite is the King James. I like the poetry therein. This particular journey took over a year…

When I read Yancey, all I could do was laugh. When I read Schaeffer, I was impressed by the degree of conviction but not of intellectual argument. I liked the honesty of Spong and appreciated the compulsions of CS Lewis. I do love the cultural singularity of the bible. This is a massively important text that carries much of the journey of European civilisation for over a 1,500 years. I can detect the cultural history of civilisation here. Illustrated by the cathedrals and Kirks of those who have sought to express their enthusiasms through the monuments of human creativity. Few achievements of the human race rise so high as these expressions of religious belief.

But I remain untouched. I appreciate the intracies of the system of belief to which these works are addressed. But, in the end, the deepest advice is that faith remains as the last gap to be filled to truly believe. Faith is belief without the necessity to completely know. Faith is the tunnel where windows are no longer required. Faith is, apparently, the test of true conviction. Faith, I suspect, is the place that provides all the spiritual warmth the truly inspired must feel. The inner warmth of belief resides, I suspect, in one’s embracing of faith; in one’s true conviction that they can indeed base their own life story around a set of ideas closed to the scrutiny of logical introspection. Faith, to me, is an intellectual black box. Open the lid and the light of egotistical release might be too much of an escape! I know that opening every last closet in the mind is the task of Buddhist meditation. Which is why I do proclaim a sustained and thorough appreciation for that particular pathway to spiritual introspection.

I’ve heard that some atheists feel some kind of deep fulfilment in their lack of belief. That lack of belief, or lack of faith, can provide the satiation of the soul that deep, genuinely held religion more conventionally provides. I don’t believe that at all. This misses the point. The deepest insight from Buddhist introspection of our inner infinity is that any sense of fulfilment is an attachment to be avoided. All attachments are the baggage of our insatiable egos. That’s the way we feed our inner egotistical leaches. Chogyam Trumpa once wrote a great book on this very subject; it’s theme was the curse of ’spiritual materialism’. Wherein even the Buddhist urge to seek the release of inner emptiness is an attachment to be grasped and held as a shield to the release we are really seeking. Buddhism is wonderfully deep!

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