Shifting Fantasy to Imagination

In a world where the promise of life is in depressing contrast with life as it is lived, fantasy reigns as unopposed master of our hopes.

The promise of a job that will make you happy, while paying the rent; the promise of a soul mate, who’ll also be a life partner; the promise of recognition for the things at which you excel; increasingly, the promise of fame, fleeting though we may all, deep down, know it to be. These are the promises that sustain our daily trudge through the day.

The casually handsome man, rubs his perfectly manicured hand across his freshly shaved chin. There is a confident glint in his eye, the cat that got the cream. His beautiful, well toned and sweetly smiling girlfriend kisses him lightly on the lips. The best a man can get.

Attractive, but not abnormally so, the youthful women laugh and pulsate in a spasm of solidarity. One woman stands and walks confidently towards us. The picture behind her blurs into the ether – she is all we see, as the wind blows the long auburn hair. Because you’re worth it.

Sex has always sold. So has success. And confidence. And belonging.

Eat this food and you’ll fall in love. Buy this car and you’ll feel the greatest liberation. Read this magazine and you’ll be part of a community. Buy this watch you and you’ll be successful. Consume this, you will feel better about yourself. It’s what the advertisers have always sold us. They do it very well. And often with a pleasant self-ironic twist.

While the promise of fame through reality television might be somewhat novel, a version of it has always existed – the myth of fame to be found in Hollywood, New York, London – and someone has always profited from it.

Fantasy requires forces beyond our control to align in a particular formation. Sexual fantasies, for example, require the willing participation of another person (or else the breaking of the law), and finding someone who shares ones fantasies, or rather desires the other side of those fantasies, while more greatly facilitated by the internet, is still in the realm of fancy. The fantasy of fame and fortune, while largely achievable with the requisite hard graft, still requires that big break. That great lost beast of a lucky break. While dreams come true for some, on occasion, the fantasy remains nothing more than that for most of us.

Though, the eventual non-fulfilment of fantasy is probably for the best. Fantasies, almost by definition, require the very basis of our existence to shift. They demand an alteration so fundamental to ever really enjoy. Which is why most fantasies, when fulfilled, leave one feeling empty, having lost a measure of hope. We are all too used to celebrities, that most unique species, falling apart before our eyes in self-hate fuelled destruction. The façade crumbles beneath the weight of attention, as there is rarely much to support it.

The hope of fantasy is a false one. It is a spectre, a fault in perception. A sculpture of sand, it is destroyed with little force.

Perhaps more than this, fantasy renders us passive – unable to break out of the stupefying cycle of dreams and dreaming, indulging in our delusions we are left motionless, unseeing of the world around us, unwilling to change anything of it.

There is, however, an alternative. Where fantasy provides a false destination, imagination provides the possibility for real achievement. Where fantasy brings us to an ultimately soulless and empty realisation of ourselves, imagination can fulfil our lives in meaningful and novel ways. Where fantasy leaves us passive, imagination spurs us to act.

It is in imagination that our hope finds structural integrity. To imagine our future is to have it within our grasp. It necessitates that we can understand the possibilities that future presents. Within our comprehension, such potentials are within our power to attain.

Imagination does not require a grandiose hope for the impossible. Rather it seeks to discover how to make the fantastical possible. It is the bridging of the gap between our fantasies and world we inhabit.

Imagination is not the compromise of fantasy, but rather the more solid articulation of hopes, dreams and improbabilities.

If we want to bring positive change to this world, our only weapon of consequence is the clarity and vivacity of our imagination.

Rational, logical building blocks have their place in the creation of a more equal, just or peaceful world, but only in the fulfilment of our imaginations. For if our image of progressively altered society is to be realised, it must exist in this world first. In order to enact a paradigm shift in societal progression towards, say, sustainability or peace, we must be able to imagine a world that prioritises other forms of achievement over the financial, that rewards communal progression rather than personal achievement.

But that world is not on another planet, or with a different six billion odd inhabitants, it is this world, and we must imagine from this stand point first. We must have a foot in our reality – or realities – if we are to envision new ones. But even with this, the primacy of fact becomes a difficult burden to undertake for any who look to a future which might possess new possibilities.

Imagination is the currency of those who work in the creative arts. But it does not belong to them exclusively. Each of us, wherever we are, or who ever we are, has, right now, the power to imagine a life, a world, a society that is a changed and a more perfect articulation of human possibility.

At the intersection between fact, reason and logic on one hand, and fantasy on the other, we find imagination. Surely, a world which values and indulges in imagination in the same manner it does fact, logic, reason and fantasy is already a world half changed, for the better.

- by Neil Keating

Assumptions, beliefs and the continuum between them

Assumptions underpin much of what we do on a daily basis. Extend this to discussion and debates of a more theoretical nature and assumptions are quite essential. Many economic theories, for example, must assume that humans behave rationally – one of the more contentious assumptions in that field of study, understandably. Making assumptions eases our progress through life – if you need to set the terms of engagement on every conversation you might embark on in any given day, you might find yourself never actually saying anything at all.

Assumption is the more common and acceptable younger cousin of belief. Assumptions, at least on some level, are understood by us all to be unfair simplifications (never quite the whole story) which make our lives just a little easier. They are also challengeable and, with a bit of resistance, can change. Beliefs are a little more intransient. They tend to run deeper than simple assumptions, they are more fundamental (a dangerous word these days) to one’s view of the world.

One day, some centuries ago, some English man had an apple fall on his head. He theorised and proposed the existence of what we call gravity. Gravity, for all the evidence to support it, remains nothing more than the best explanation we have for why apples fall to the Earth.

Before proceeding it feels important to recognise unequivocally that the theory of gravity is very compelling, indeed the evidence is overwhelming and largely without genuine challenge. On that basis one can believe in gravity without fear of being proved wrong. For that matter, one of the most heartening things about science is that it deals in evidence and not proof.

Some many centuries before that day of the falling apple, some people believed that the Sun was pulled across the sky by a horse, others believed that it was carried by a boat. These respective theories were, at the time, the best known solutions for the journey of the Sun across the sky. Arguably neither theory has ever been proved to be incorrect. Simply the weight of evidence has pushed us to believe that there are, in fact, better explanations out there.

In order to theorise about the world scientifically, you need to believe in certain things. Certain specific requirements could be considered assumptions – you need to assume that theory X is correct in order that theory Y might even be possible. Other things must, by necessity, be more accurately called articles of faith – you must simply believe that gravity exists as a force in this universe before you can consider further theories of physics.

If one was to ask someone of an even moderately religious nature if there is evidence for the existence of (a) God they would say “Of course, it is in every blossoming rose and every smiling baby” or words to that effect. And, of course, given their belief system, they would be right. There is such evidence. For some people the existence of a deity or series of deities remains the best possible solution for the world being the way it is.

One does not need to reject either science or religion to argue that at one point in our history that religion acted as science. When looking at the rising and falling tides, when experiencing the change of winter to spring, when witnessing birth and death and all that happens in between, when contemplating our dominance as a species above all others on this world – what better solutions could we have come up with? And different peoples came up with different solutions. And they all stood up to scrutiny given the logic they followed and given the evidence available.

Slowly but surely the balance of evidence started to slip away from the religions – actually it make more sense for the Earth to rotate around the Sun rather than the other way around; also, humans are more likely to have evolved from a lineage linked to the animal world over the course of several hundreds of thousands of years rather than being created over the course of a few days. In time the argument simply becomes impossible to make (even if the second named is still in contention). And it is still possible to be religious and believe the Earth is round.

That religions lost their position as the best explanation for how Earthly and celestial phenomena happen, did not remove their power or influence or importance. Where religion could no longer provide people with the explanations for how the world is, it started to focus more solely on the reasons why the world is.

Some may see the growing virulence of the debate between atheists and the religious establishment (the relativist and fundamentalist sectors of both camps being embroiled) as evidence of the nearing end of the entire structure of and, by implication, need for religion. Such a thought process negates the continuing power and impact religious faith has on people’s lives. Indeed, use of such logic exposes the blind self-confidence of the more extreme atheist sectors of the debate, very much a characteristic of the crumbling façade of irrational empires.

But thankfully, science isn’t irrational. It may sound contradictory, but my faith in science comes from knowing that if a better explanation for, say, gravity does come along that science (not that we talk about science as a single entity with a single consciousness) will accept it as the new best explanation.

Science lives and dies by the validity of its arguments. If science compromises itself, or the evidence it uses, it becomes worthless. It is for this reason that ‘serious’ scientists take such entertaining glee in ripping to shreds clinical trials, for example, that have been funded by drug companies and are not double blind and peer reviewed.

Religions, on the other hand, do have a vested interest in considering the evidence that supports its foundation and not that which attacks it. While the Pope can retain his infallibility in the eyes of many Catholics if he changes his mind on a policy – say the use of contraception – he would have a hard time of it if he changed a central tenet of Catholicism – the Immaculate Conception or that Jesus rose from the dead, for example. Such a change could topple the Catholic Church because the contradictions it would throw up would be too great for anyone to ignore. That is why it is impossible to imagine the Pope doing such a thing (it is, indeed, hard enough to imagine him changing the church’s position on contraception).

So, while science may deal in many articles of faith, these beliefs are somewhat more flexible – closer on some imaginary continuum between assumption and belief to the former. It is also fallible and uses fallibility as one of its strengths.

One imagines that religions will continue to reject their fallibility. But so be it. For many people, religion remains the best explanation for why the world is. Until something else comes along to tip the balance of evidence, it will remain so.

- by James Grogan

A Space for Thought, Part 2

- by Dan Marsden

Will John Prescott re-shape eating disorders debate?

When I heard the news that John Prescott, the former deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has admitted in his memoirs to suffering from bulimia, I found myself unsurprised. Prescott’s weight has long been the subject of satire, but the more I discover about eating disorders the more convinced I am that serious obesity has less to do with the body than the mind. Why shouldn’t Prescott suffer from an eating disorder? He has all the classic characteristics; he’s an over-achiever, under a lot of pressure and has a serious weight problem. However not being young, thin and female he has challenged our simplistic view of what an eating disorder is and means.

Prescott admits that he doesn’t fulfil the eating disorder stereotype, saying “People normally associate it with young women - anorexic girls, models trying to keep their weight down, or women in stressful situations, like Princess Diana”. It is for this very reason that his revelation is so important. As Diana herself said fifteen years ago in her 1993 eating disorders speech, “many would like to believe that Eating Disorders are merely an expression of female vanity”. To understand eating disorders we must first accept that they aren’t ever just about fitting into a dress, or being like a picture in a magazine, even if some people find these to be triggers that unleash a deeper and more complex self-loathing.

Anorexia, the more famous sister of bulimia and binge eating, has had more press because it is, on a superficial level, easier to understand and, crucially, easier to identify. However, the portrayal of anorexia in the media has only gone further to skew the understanding of eating disorders and their causes. ‘Size zero’ is an unhelpful catchphrase, because it reduces our understanding of anorexia to the level of a fashion dilemma.

As Laurie Penny’s article for the brilliant feminist website The F-Word points out, “Anorexia is a complex psychological disorder, often stemming from deep, long-standing self-esteem issues and triggered by specific personal trauma. […] The ‘size zero’ myth reduces anorexia to a frivolous pique of silly little girls who aren’t clever or mature enough to take proper care of themselves”.

While I commend anything that highlights the prevalence of eating disorders in society, I can’t help but notice that the ‘skinny shock pictures!’ approach of magazines like Heat focus on rich, successful women and portray eating disorders as the reserve of glamorous, airhead females. Whilst spending time in the murky world of pro ana/mia (anorexia/bulimia) chartrooms last year, I learned that for a lot of people eating disorders go hand in hand with personality disorders and/or depression, or are a response to abuse. If you want evidence that eating disorders go beyond a simplistic desire to be thin, just look at an anorexic’s loss of perspective driving them to lose more and more weight, moving to a lower and lower target weight until they reach a point where, even if they desperately want to eat in order to stay alive, their problem has become so intense they are simply unable to consume food. That has nothing to do with fitting into a size eight frock.

Although women do make up the majority, around one in 10 of the UK's 60,000 people reported as suffering from eating disorders are men. The fetishization of women’s bodies is partly responsible for the female focused eating disorder debate, because women’s bodies are seen as up for grabs, sexually and in terms of comment and judgment. On some level the focus on anorexia has been connected with the associations made between glamour, death and violence against women. Could it be that the media culture that brought us the crime scene victims photo shoot on Americas Next Top Model is the same media culture that illustrates the eating disorders debate with pictures of gorgeous emaciated teenagers staring out from sunken eyes that seem to say ‘fuck me, I’m so sexy I’m almost dead’? We are yet to rid our culture of the destructive heroin chic, where ill, thin and dependant are all sexy. Maybe bulimia and over-eating would get greater press coverage if we had an equivalent gluttony glam…

Having found myself increasingly offended by the ‘who ate all the pies’ analysis of bulimia and binge eating, I hope I don’t have to throw my radio out of the window in rage when satirists get their hands on Prescott’s confession. One common mistake is the idea that serious eating disorders have some kind of a weight limit. Many sufferers of bulimia actually gain weight, but still prevails the dangerous myth that to have an eating disorder you must be thin. This perception needs to change if we are ever to help the people who wake up late for work, with swollen faces, burst blood vessels under their eyes, sore throats, chest pain and faster heart rates after a night of binging and vomiting, only to think they don’t have the right to seek help for their problem, because they aren’t underweight.

Many will have heard the joke, ‘I'm half a bulimic – I eat a lot but I don't throw up’ (recently causing controversy when it was bafflingly cracked by the Trade Minister Lord Jones in an after dinner speech), and the bizarre offhand comments people make about wishing they had bulimia so they could eat what ever they desired. John Prescott’s comments in The Times of London are therefore understandable, "I've never confessed it before. Out of shame, I suppose, or embarrassment”. The misconception that bulimia is in some way to do with greed must be dispelled. If someone eats to the point of physical pain, barely tasting the food they are consuming, they are not doing so for pleasure. If somebody engages in this kind of behavior for twenty years without them losing weight, it cannot be misconstrued some kind of stupid quest for attractiveness.

The truth is that very quickly one learns that binging and purging has no purpose; it will not change your body or the way you feel about it. Obviously every sufferer acts with different motivations, but the addictive nature of destructive behaviors makes the bulimic cycle hard to break free from. In a world still so ignorant about a condition that can consume peoples lives, I can only hope John Prescott’s brave decision to go public will finally make us realize that it will take much more than banning size zero models at The London Fashion Week to seriously address the silent eating disorders epidemic.

- by Anna Beecher

Confused Days

The association forms daily

Each yanked towards it, invisibly sewn

A public property no one appreciates

An unseen agreement, manifested

In the oblivious routine of our course

Tattooed by the steps we leave on the ground

It’s what we all have, yet none of us own

The conjoined existence we’ve perfected to slavery

Infinite circles congeal and congest

Impossibly wrapped in a meaningless vine

An all-encompassing stream of sourceless information

Nameless, as collective as the ocean

Ever conscious, never defined

At one single time, the sound of orderly confusion

Of chaos of no-one’s making

Yet everyone’s blame

The soundless decomposition

Of old information

The murderous kiss of time

The seamless script of ill communication

The miniscule classifications of spoken desperation

A collage of couples, singles

And knots too tight to classify

Or be viewed by anyone outside their constriction

In designated anonymity, the asphyxiation

The claustrophobic glee of a motionless stampede

Flattens your lungs

Chokes your eyes

And leaves you hanging, a carcass in twisted momentum

Like a fly, dead, on an endless wall

But which could never move when live

The human connection, constructing its own irrelevance

All customs and logic completely opaque

A food chain of no consumption

Only waste, of words and time

A chart that never stops moving

All the useless vibrations form a straight line

For all these lost years I have charted courses

Made alliances, brokered trade with the heavy tangibility of words

Made maps of paths that succumbed to non-existence

Read people whose language was never mine

My notes made no sense then, their non-meaning drained from them now

The information comes and goes, and plummets through a sieve

As you are left to fall, amongst it all, until the day you leave

- by Halligan Quin

Crusts of forgetting - Dental Floss and Walter Benjamin

I just found my dental floss. I lost it three months ago. Three months without dental floss is a little troublesome. I didn’t buy any more because I felt I knew I would find it. In fact I knew where it was, I just couldn’t remember.

I was just reading about Walter Benjamin’s death ‘by his own hand’ as it is favoured to say for figures of historical import. He chose the wrong day to try to leave France, he chose the wrong place to leave from, he chose the wrong place to receive his visa. I suppose if you start to pull it out further, he chose the wrong time to live, the wrong ideas to think and write about (rejected by dialectical Marxists and most certainly an enemy of the Nazis), the wrong religion, the wrong country. None were chosen, of course, but that doesn’t stop the feeling of historical injustice. If he had lived passed his own death, I think he would have enjoyed the confluence of events that led to it: the sheer chance of it all, tragi-comic in its own sad and individual way. His death, as I read it, led to others being granted the invaluable passage through Spain and out to freedom and a delayed death, presumably.

There are things that escape your consciousness for a while – the location of wayward dental floss, for example – and decide to reside somewhere in the depths, or at least underneath some sort of calcified crust of recollection, the surface of which is the portrait of the memories we hold with us every day. For some people, this upper crust of memory – essentially the reality we hold with us everywhere we go – if fractured and allows surprising things to seep through all the time. I’m not one of those people. My crust needs to be broken by a direct dart of perceptual signification – a smell, a sight, a sound, a word – which pierces the surface and allows an insight into something of the past; a glimpse at best, intuitive and esoteric.

And yet, like the Earth’s own thin crust, there are signs on the surface of the things underneath – mental mountain ranges, chasms, seas of tranquil stillness – which tell us that something lies beneath. Something that moves and shifts, adjusts all the time, never really comes to rest. I think it was something like this – some psycho-geographic feature – which told me my dental floss was under my desk, the very desk I was sitting at, reading about the death of dear Walter. Something in the stillness of the end of the paragraph, finalising the details of his sad and all too early demise I found a moment for insight – I didn’t have time to even think “Yes, I know!” before I dived below the desk to find the small circular plastic piece of everyday dental hygiene equipment.

It is too much, in this day, to speak of collective experiences, societal forgetting and cultural landscapes. Our experience of the world is a different one to everyone else’s. It must be – how else can we fail to understand each other in even the most simple of situations? Agreeing with someone else has become one of two things: a political choice, based upon some ulterior motivation; consent based in the lack of relevant information. An ever growing generation of individualists – not different from any previous incarnation of society in the degree of connection to others, but rather only in recognising the inherent alienation of each individual from any other – is learning that ‘alone’ is all one can ever be.

And yet. There is that unifying voice – the complete, comprehensive and seamless narrative of history, of culture, of society. This is the voice of unified media; the voice of parliamentary government; the voice of university historians – contexts in which a diversity of opinion is encouraged, but where all opinions must work off the one logic, the one agreed set of principles of order. The story of history, that found in history text books that read like novels, that which we hear about, that which we can understand – this is the story of the world we live in, the story we have agreed, the story which supports our sense of the normal.

Normal or average. The jury is out.

And this normal history, narrative which makes most sense to us, can at times behave like I do – forgetting things it knows, forgetting people it knows it knows, forgetting thoughts that didn’t quite fit. It creates a crust of forgetting, under which one finds the thinkers, the artists, the activists who are making the mountains form above them, but who are the unseen forces below. When we uncover them (some dead long ago, some more recently deceased, some blessedly still alive) we label them as ‘ahead of their time’, or worse ‘avant guard’ going some way to denying the very fact of their existence in a historical moment – because they don’t quite fit the narrative.

Walter Benjamin was one of these men.

He stayed submerged a relatively short time – within decades he was being posthumously published and remains today a bedrock of post-Marxist and Critical Theory. Indeed, it is from his writings on history that we recognise many of the equalising forces of dominant narratives in our culture, our history and our society. He encouraged us to be playful in our approach to history, rearranging the building blocks that make up the story of the world as we know it.

So, my dental floss is returned to its place with the other daily hygiene paraphernalia in my life, just as Walter was placed within the canon of discourse we take for granted now.

Perhaps in time we will learn to read the surface more accurately, to understand more of what is below. Seismic shifts, providing a view to the world below, are all too rare, and tend to come just as the bubbling material underneath has passed by, leaving only a trace of what we might have otherwise known in more complete intimacy. And as the world ticks on, the moment of clarity is soon replaced with a million others of cloudy uncertainty. If only we could catch some more as they flitter by, if only.

- by James Grogan

Reframing myths – stories of the city

Shrouded in the mists of memory, tinted in certain sepia tones of distance, told and re-told stories of glory days come, gone and here again. Certain people and places carry a baggage of mythology. In people it’s almost inevitable – a construction of enigmatic behaviour, a flair for exaggeration, battle tails recounted at dinner parties; everyone propagates their own myth, some are accepted and encouraged by others, some are rejected. We do it endlessly with celebrities, politicians, sports personalities, even journalists: Bill Clinton, the relaxed sax player with Southern charm and Northern politics; Tiger Woods, the steely-eyed genius of the golf course; Jeremy Paxman, hard-hitting, strikingly intelligent, witty.

It’s never entirely without truth, of course. But on some level it must be a careful construction. In some ways our everyday identities will always be constructed, playing roles as student, mother, taxi driver, whatever. More subtly, but perhaps more persuasively, we construct our identities as black, white, Asian, gay, straight, man, woman and all the subgenres of identification that one can find beyond those. As you continue to break down the classifications you come closer to that unique, undividable me. Each of these sub-divisors has their own set of mythologies, identifiers and implications. And on some, perhaps less public, level we propagate a myth all of our own – reliable, intelligent, charming, sociable. None of these are false, but it is never the whole story.

Inanimate objects are just as capable of developing mythologies (the hallowed turf, the sacred shroud, the lucky hat). Such objects can become the focus of worship, they possess a power far beyond their use as things and inevitably they have a history to them which people enjoy, which people find something of themselves in. Such mythologies really do relate to a sense of where we have come from – a father introducing a son to the pocket watch that has been passed through the generations, an atavistic link to a world he cannot inhabit. Such objects become powerful and permanent tokens of origin; they provide scope and definition to where we have come from; they initiate a legacy which one is party to, and to which one has to adhere. One may even go as far as to speculate that such objects (of a familial, cultural or religious nature) go a long way to ensuring social stability and cultural cohesion.

Some of the greatest mythologies surround cities. Hong Kong: bustling Eastern (this is, of course a mythology from Europe) metropolis of sky-scrapers and Old Colonial charm. Tokyo: city of endless money-making, epic movements of people, a spiritual centre. New York: exciting, pulsating place where art and culture are pressure boiled and where anything can happen. Dublin: quaint and pleasant city of slightly bleary eyed jolly Guinness drinkers, statues, history and music. London: city of ancient rituals and traditions with a thrilling mix of artistic and cultural activities, a people of steeled cohesion.

In this last named case, the myth is sadly lacking in reality. London, as a place to live in and as an experience for anyone who ventures forth on its famous thoroughfares, is a nightmare. Streets heaving with suicidal-looking pedestrians, crazed black cab drivers for whom zebra crossings are little more than an opportunity for some excitement, unfriendly and inept staff at overpriced and odd smelling eateries, corporate branding that has ensured every café, pub, restaurant and shop is a carbon copy of every other on every other dirty street. Screeching underground trains, filled with more dead-faced souls, trundle through century old tunnels, shifting millions of people from one place to the next every day. It is a city which exists to ensure the false economy of its over-inflated nature (not to mention its grossly over indulgent levels of consumption and waste) is propagated and supported in a continuous cycle.

The two greatest constituents of the London myth are that it is a place of solidarity and cultural engagement.

Many will have, as I did, witnessed the unforgettable scenes on July 7^th 2005. London, having been struck by a series of terrorist bombs, continued. People got to work as best they could. Then, with the transport systems grounded, they walked home. Walking from central London to the suburbs is quite a trek; but there they were, endless streams of regular Londoners walking quietly home, because that’s what they had to do. There was solidarity in that mass of people, there was a strength that you only find in a people that support each other. We were reminded of our (cultural, historical) memories of Blitz era London, bomb shelters and blackouts, the all clear and The White Cliffs of Dover. The pit of one’s stomach was tweaked by the scenes. “Yes”, one though, “this truly is one of the greatest cities of the world.” A city held together in solidarity – a rare and wonderful thing indeed.

The vision of a cultural London is more historically based. King’s Road, The Beatles, Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, David Hockney – The Swinging Sixties. A time of political and cultural revolution; hippies in Hampstead and Belsize Park; the golden age of The Royal Court Theatre; a new era of peace and harmony. The King’s Road is now one of the most fashionable shopping streets (no independent stores could even consider the rents in such a place); Abbey Road (or somewhere in the general area) has a Beatles museum; Belisize Park and Hampstead’s hippies have either moved on, or grown up, shaved and started working in media or finance. The cultural institutions of London today, many and valuable though they are, seem more concerned about the ever dwindling funding from the Arts Council and performance related targets, the very essence of life under New Labour. There is all but no space for experimental or fringe arts – the cost of even a small theatre space in London means that only the most crowd pleasing pile of drivel will break-even.

I am, I know, being unfair – July 7^th was an incredibly rare set of circumstances, which produced something truly unique, unpredictable and perhaps in line with human nature. That Londoners don’t display the same signs of communal solidarity on a daily basis is an inevitability of urban living, or so it would seem from here. The past always produces misty eyed memories, especially when those who lived through it are still around, though not living quite as exciting lives as they like to believe they once did.

But either way these things have found their way into the mythology of London as a place. They are inscribed on the fabric of the city, they are written into its historical narrative, they are as much part of London as Big Ben and the changing of the guard. But that’s just it – London, as we like to understand it, as we like to speak about it, is a set of signifiers with cultural or historical significance; it is a fantasy constructed through the telling and re-telling of those places, those times and (perhaps) an exaggeration of the significance of those self-same things.

But does it matter? Arguably the myth of London, like the myth of how your grand dad won the war, is harmless and unimportant. It’s just part of the way we identify our place in the world, a way to attach ourselves to something we can understand, be proud of even. It gives us context and a basis for definition and identity. These things are valuable – essential even.

But there are moments, in the most genuine of London experiences, when the myth and reality start to bare next to no relation. London can possess qualities of incredible intimacy (unspoiled days spent picnicking on Primrose Hill spring to mind) and immense fun. But even these do not tally with the agreed, collective mythology of the place. Perhaps the only way to survive is to create your own myth of the city – rediscovering memories down shady roads, catching a scent on the breeze, buzzing through streets of good times gone, and maybe to come again.

And here we come close to the nub of the point – the myth’s I outlined above will be disputed by many. We do all construct our own myths, found in the retelling of stories and the recounting of experiences related to place. The problem comes when myths are imposed from elsewhere. See above – you’ll find assertions about places, arbitrary associations between potentially random cultural signifiers. It is something you find in newspapers, documentaries, novels and the ever expanding broadcast news. These are the building blocks of society, and those who control the narratives of myth have a hand in the control of society.

Perhaps our only recourse is to insist on reframing the myths to our own purposes. Shifting the viewfinder to a new position, taking one section and making it our own.

These mythologies are only ever a product of our desire. Without people to pass them on, agree on them, adhere to the collective experience, they would vanish in an instant. Is it the ever more prevalent mass media that pushes such myths through into our subconscious with greater speed and effect? Or is it simply that we need the myths to get through more easily – the realities feeling just a little too boring, or empty, or uninspiring? Either way we sustain the mythology because it sustains us; we need to believe in it – what else is there?

- by Neil Keating

Relay

“What’s in the bag?”

 

I don’t have much choice,

 

“It’s a panda costume officer”

 

He isn’t fazed. Which is fair; velour panda legs are quite visible under my wishfully inconspicuous coat. I have no one to blame but myself it seems.

 

“I’ll need to do a search”

 

It’s only the panda head and paws in the bag. I’ve left everything else at my girlfriend’s house, apart from a £10 note and a phone number to call in case of emergency.

 

If I do end up at a station (which is now of primary interest to me) they could take my phone and document my contacts, which I consider a discourteous offence to the reputation of my friends (none of whom are in the least bit disreputable…). I would loathe implicating any into the records of police clerks due to my dissenting behaviour, standing here in Ladbroke Grove, headless but panda-bodied.

 

It snowed today. Lovely, puffy big flakes making a stand against the English calendar. London was for one day a little Siberia, and I its proud panda preparing for peaceful protest. That is, until we got utterly rumbled by a group of policemen who didn’t really need to be too observant to notice a group of people aimlessly loitering, two of which with very big black feet.

 

“When were you intending to put this on?” gesturing towards the panda head, now looking distinctly dejected.

 

I detail our plans with openness and calm. This is how we’ve been briefed. We even had role-play exercises;

 

‘Excuse me Sir, could you please vacate the premises or we may arrest you for Breach of the Peace and Obstruction of the Highway.’

 

‘Fuck off pig or I’ll cut yer inta’ cubes bitch! I’m the motherfuckin’ P.A.N.D.A.!’ was generally a tone we were recommended to avoid.

 

They group us into a side alley and await further advice. We exchange humoured glances of incontestable defeat. The Olympic Torch and its entourage process before us; legions of police on foot, bikes and cars, black vans with black windows, carnival floats with offerings from official sponsors (who will not be mentioned), dancing girls pretending it’s not freezing, crowds pretending they can see anything…

 

We hear word that the torch is actually in a bus as it’s too dangerous to be exposed. That shouldn’t seem so reasonable.

 

Another policeman takes our details, which does involve one panda having to de-robe to access his wallet. “Oooh Officer!” raises the faintest smile, and I conclude that we’re both just fulfilling a role.

 

After we’re deemed to be of no danger, we’re free. We follow the wake of the procession, taking photos with the displaced spectators, performers and other protesters. Somewhere ahead someone is carrying a flame to China, and with it angry people are rushing like moths.

 

But that urgency is absent in me, as I question my reasons and motives, personal and political. I’ve never done this before. I find myself looking at the eyes of a child staring at me through the holes in my panda head.

- by Dr. Fieldmouse.

Nailing my lungs to the post

Non-smoking crowd, please forgive me, but smokers are nicer people. Except for fashion world smokers – designer cigarette people are way out of our league. Smokers always gather somewhere, and whether they know each other or not, conversations will be had, cigarettes will be offered and lighters will be lent.

Airports. No one really likes them. Waiting rooms, 6 hour long stop-overs, all-the-same duty free shops, the mystery really isn’t there. So you sit in the waiting room, waiting for your flight. Stare as blank as a goldfish towards whatever screen is, or occasionally fall asleep on those more than uncomfortable chairs. It really is a life of an aquarium. Unless you happen to be a smoker. Oh your fingers and lungs tingle just at the thought of stopping over and being able to smoke. And as you make your way to the smoking lounge at the airport you ponder as to why airplanes can’t have a smoking area. Smoking lounges, I find, can vary immensely from airport. But whether they are cancer-closet-like or ample, chique and comfortable they all have one feature in common. The glass wall. And though some might interpret it as a nice act towards smokers, enabling them to not feel so excluded from the outside world, it actually serves a didactic purpose. Parents from all over the world can stroll along the lounge pointing at jolly smokers and saying: “Sophie, Candice… Do you see those people there? They’re all engaging in a very un-healthy habit. And one day they will be very sick. And might steal your place in a public hospital. These people have black lungs and yellow teeth and nails and bad breath.” But, obviously, what Sophie and Candice see differs largely from what her dad is telling them. What they see is an exciting world, much more exciting than the goldfish world they are stuck in. They see people interacting, laughing, and blowing smoke out like magic dragons. And except for the occasional suit and briefcase introvert everyone seems to be happy, entertained. They walk off, bemused at this alternate, smoky, almost mythical world and follow their parents in pursuing cheap whiskey and Lindt chocolate.

Other than having each other, smokers have also that precious little tobacco stick that can be of most use in many situations. Cigarettes have been told to prevent mosquito bites, provide little but crucial lighting to dark areas thus impeding smokers to walk aimlessly around, minimize stress levels and heal the sense of post-modern world loneliness. Absurd, you say? I beg to differ. Upon making plans with friends one can many times be left to wait alone for a good hour as said friends make themselves fashionably late. No cigarette, you’re left to stand there, looking sad and stupid and feeling abandoned, with nothing more to do than people watch. Cigarette in hand, your confidence is restored, your sense of loneliness and abandonment diminished. You are no longer someone just waiting, you are a person smoking. You are no longer passive, but active. You have a purpose in life, the world will not crumble down over you. You are in control. If Estragon had been holding a cigarette in hand during the first section of Act 1 in Waiting for Godot the play would’ve had a completely different impact. The power of cigarettes is clearly underestimated.

A cigarette can not only change the entire course of an earth-shattering play, it can also make people look smarter. The act of taking the little white stick to the lips, inhaling, holding it in, and then exhaling makes people gain a complexion of insightfulness. It’s as if life was revealed to them in a different way. And their sensorial, chromatic and chronologic perceptions are a whole different thing altogether. Smoking also has an impact of mystery on other people. It is an ambiguous endeavor, especially if accompanied by iconic clothing, such as leather jackets or scarves. It can at the same time make one look absorbed in life and nonchalant. Imagine if there was a Nicotine Addict Barbie. Life as we know it would no longer be.

But as all better-off minority communities, we must be fought and eradicated in the name of alienation, fragile and therefore more easily corrupted labour, selfish individuality, goldfish lifestyles, Sophiesms, Candiceisms and Malibu Barbiecisms. As every day goes by smokers are restricted to smaller and smaller areas, making population density in these places higher than in any corner of São Paulo. Our favorite characters on main-stream TVs, battling against cigarettes, buying nicotine gum and nicotine patches and being encouraged by their friends to quit. Most of the cigarettes that get airtime are found in the mouths of villains and women of dubious professions. No one to identify with, we are unworthy societal types. Not even the market, which is out after every different group, hype and clique – from midget anarcho-punks to blonde samurais – want us. And unlike other minority groups, no one will be by our side to raise our flags and offer a helping hand or a comforting word. We will not despair, however, fuelled by our daily intake of nicotine, sense of community and insightfulness and will ride off into the sunset, hat on a high-held head, cigarette in hand.

- by Mariana R.

Podcast: Dual Identities (Dafur Radio Project)

In "Dual Identities," the Darfur Radio Project explores the divides between Khartoum and Darfur, Sudan and Kenya, and expatriates and their homeland. First, a look at how economic growth in Khartoum compares to development in Darfur. Then, in the second installment of our series on Sudanese culture, we speak to two Sudanese musicians who find they're connected in unexpected ways.
And, who's who? This month, an introduction to the Sudanese Liberation Army, one of the key rebel groups in Darfur. Finally, we look at how the Sudanese expatriate community in the US is preparing for the 2009 Sudanese elections.
Click the title to download the podcast.

The Darfur Radio Project is a monthly radio broadcast that explores the historical, political, economic, and social contexts of the conflict in Darfur. Using personal stories as well as critical analysis, we aim both to introduce listeners to the complexities of the situation in Sudan and to give them the tools to effect change. We believe that education, good information, and analysis will play an important role in the search for sustainable, long-term peace in Sudan.