Excel

A life spent copy-pasting a
liturgy of inherited anxieties -
a spreadsheet of the mind
full of SORTIF lies;
NAND gate fears.

A personality built from
conditional formatting
must fall, must fail.
The only hypothesis
is that the truth opens

through no logic gates
but the heart's.

Just that: "Yes, that."

Image from The Lengths Issue 1 (out in shops in May, issue 2 in July)

Seems like once again, this pirate heart's back in the right place for blogging again, and I'm thinking a lot about where I'm heading and what I'm after, but this time it's not with a sense of fear or uncertainty. After the protests yesterday, I was talking to Anna at the Festival Hall bar and she said a lovely thing that really rang true to me:

"I don't understand why it is that someone who trains as an artist still struggles to call themselves an artist or that people doubt you're an artist unless you're making work or getting paid for it. If you study something else to that level, you're qualified and that's it, there's no question about it, but there's this weird uncertainty and self-doubt around the art that's almost mystical."

It's true. You study linguistics, you're a linguist, whether or not you work in research. Like Maureen Lipman said, "You get an -ology; you're a scientist!" so why is there this bizarre hesitancy that so many people feel about describing their entitlement to call themselves artists?

I think it's because artists, whether writers, poets, performers, painters, singers, musicians or whatever their discipline are experienced in some way as if we are contemporary priestesses and priests and mystics.

There's something about art that people hopes will speak sooth.

Those coded truths that ring through in art, whether the gasp of admiration in the draftsmanship of an architect's hand or the blade of a poet's words that slips as a stiletto knife past the thick plate armour of modern hubris; there's something we hope for in art that represents and reflects aspects of human experience, and that's a power we, as humans, experience as a (capital R) Romantic experience of nature - it's the awe of a sunrise, the thought-vortex of quantum physics, the possible impossibility of proving or disproving the divine, the poetry of connection, that simple static shock of contact that builds up after dragging your feet for too long.

That's what art reaches for; that's what we fear failing to achieve.

If I am an artist now, it is because I aspire to something akin to that. I don't pretend to have anything to teach anyone; I don't know if this is what a priest experiences as a calling, only that there are stories that I long to tell because I want to connect with people because I feel that static charge build up whenever I drag my feet for too long and I just hope that drawing, painting, writing, speaking it out might one day make some kind of spark that lights something up in someone else that makes them look at me and say, "Yes. That!" the way I've felt when I've read the poets whose work has torn through me like thunder or the sculpture that has drawn tears from me, or the comic books that have turned my life completely from its headlong path towards self-destruction.

Just that.

"Yes, that!"

That's what I'm terrified I'll never be entitled to lay claim to; it's a title I can never really grant myself and it's a qualification that although I'll study as hard as I possibly can to learn all my craft to the best of my ability, it's not the degree I tried to kill myself over and over again to achieve, nor the MA I'm desperately pushing myself to attain that will truly count as the proof I think most artists are after.

Just that.

"Yes, that."

Who Are You and What Are You Good For?

So, after yesterday's massive march for a society that's united, tonight is the night where we're meant to sit down and be counted, not for civil rights, but to become statistics. I'm sure that like most people, filling out surveys about myself is giving me a little bit of an egotistical thrill to me, but there's something horribly unsatisfying about the census this time around.

Quite apart from the awkward possibility that hasn't been adequately addressed about whether or not Lockheed Martin who are handling the survey could be asked by Homeland Security in the US to hand over the names and addresses of every Muslim in the UK or the question about why the job needed to be outsourced in the first place (is the money for the project leaving the UK economy, too?), I'm slightly disappointed that it's now considered to be more important in shaping the future of the country that we get an exact picture of how many people have electric heaters in their homes than it would be to know how many people identify as gay or lesbian.

This might be the last census we do, and what this data can do for social justice is incredible. The data captured around ethnicity and faith has driven policy decisions around funding and equality in the past, so why are we covering every other diversity field except sexuality? We're getting data around gender, age, disability, faith, ethnicity and through education and information about housing I'm sure they'll be inferring judgements about social class, so why the conspicuous exclusion of asking a very simple question about how many people in the country aren't heterosexual?

I know the results cut both ways, that the Kinsey report's 10% club is probably an over-estimate, since its terms were vague and not about identity but experience, and I suspect that the number of people who'd say they were gay or lesbian would be fewer than had had same-sex desires or experiences and fewer still would tick bisexual when that's still got strange identity politics around it from both heterosexual and homosexual politics, but nevertheless, the same uncertainty creeps in around questions around health and disability, or whether you're a carer. Does being there for a friend who's depressed count as being a carer? I'd say yes, but most wouldn't recognise it as such because it's a part of being a friend, and I agree.

Similarly, with faith, I'm Christian by culture, a jumble of Christian, atheist, angry, apathetic, Jewish and Taoist by upbringing, with paganism by experience and I'm quite rationally agnostic in how I view matters of faith now, believing very firmly in the power of stories and symbols as moral guides, but holding to no fixed religion as such. To say "No Religion" feels like I'm sort of adhering to an atheist creed I'm not sure I buy into entirely. Especially when my agnostic stance is informed by Christian values.

But the question's there, as are ones around age and gender (which can be as tricky to answer for some people as faith is for me, or ethnicity might be for others), and so's health. What the hell do I say for health? I have a nebulous disability, but I've made massive changes in life to get along with things now I know it's there. What do I say for my health? "Fair" hardly seems apt, when I doubt anyone would say there's fairness to things like health which come down to the roll of dice.

So there's really no excuse that sexuality might be a bit of a thorny one to be asking people, and the simple fact that it's a difficult question is another reason it should be being asked, if we're asking about things like health and whether you're male or female.

It certainly matters more, in my mind, for society than whether you're heating your bedroom with gas or a log fire.

Hmm, maybe a log fire and a harem of beautiful men and women might be nice, though. There's still time before I've got to fill the form out. I'm sure there's an app for that.

26th March Protests Across London: Why are windows and the olympic clock more important than people?

 

The Trojan Horse of the Apocalypse and the Big Society on Westminster Bridge.

Well, yesterday was the big march for the alternative which I almost made myself late for by blogging about before leaving the flat. As I mentioned in that, I was worried about being kettled by the police and having all manner of weird health problems, not to mention the risk of being hit, so I packed a bag full of food and drink, a scarf that could be used as a picnic blanket a nice warm hat as well as a medic alert bracelet and spare medication, just in case I needed to talk to medical staff about why I'd need to leave - although I'd decided that if I was trapped in, I was staying in, not playing a get-out-of-kettle-free card.

No Hesitation, No Deviation, No Repetition.

It Cuts Both Ways...The Alternatives from Oonagh Cousins on Vimeo.

I'm marching today with the March for the Alternative, despite the prospect of being kettled and the very real possibility that being dehydrated, hungry and stressed will bring on seizures for me. I thought it only sensible that I wrote a little bit about why.

There's a lot of misdirection going on with the cuts, which I find objectionable and deeply divisive. The financial crisis has emerged from a culture where the greed of the few outweighs the needs of the many or the one, and in the aftermath, this is once again being accepted as some immutable truth.

There are many painful truths about personal greed that we need to address, and it's not just the bankers who need to shoulder the blame for what happened to cause the situation we face.

First off, I think the roots of this problem are knotted in with the history of the sell-off of council housing in this country in the 1980s, which generated great personal wealth out of thin air for those families who had been fortunate enough to be able to profit from it, but it was largely a matter of fortune and it meant that the relationship between the price of property broke away from the ideal of three times an average household income in the area plus ten percent, which then led to the kind of wildly speculative borrowing and lending we were seeing a few years back where people were taking out loans for five times what they earned on the assumption that their home would rise in value and that their income would somehow catch up to make up the difference.

When that became an option, people then bought second homes, third, and, encouraged by the tv presenters with more foundation on their faces than under their property portfolios, the idea of a home disappeared as bricks and mortar became a speculative investment, an exciting spin on a roulette wheel, where with a bit of swift thinking, some MDF radiator covers and a lick of neutral paint, someone's family home could suddenly make you a hundred grand to invest in your next property to get you another rung up on the ladder.

Just never think about how steep a climb you're all making it as you're all clawing up; never think about what it's doing to the people you're renting to that the "rental value" jumps up by £200 a month because of that cheap carpet you laid, knowing it'll shaft your tenants for their deposit on their way out because they dared to have a life while they were living in your investment.

It's fine, though, because if the tenant loses their job, Housing Benefit will cover that rising rent, because it's tied to market value, and market value is just going to go up and up.

With the revenue you're all making, why not invest in stocks and shares? Keep your ear to the ground and pile money in when you smell that Apple are about to release a new bit of technology, but when an earthquake shunts Japan eight feet from its previous position, pull out of every Japanese technology firm faster than the rip-tide from the tsunami. You can't possibly have your money stuck in such toxic assets.

Speculative trading and the idea that money can come from nothing is something I think I've complained about before on this blog, and it's something that permeates our culture. Buying a tombola ticket in a local fayre is one thing, but when companies and livelihoods are destroyed on the back of gossip, or when personal banking is threatened by the wild vicissitudes of gamblers' bad luck or by the recklessness of lending out money where there's clearly no possibility of it being repaid because of an assumption that it will be recouped through bankruptcy payments, insurance claims, repossessions or whatever is a callous disconnect from a sense of what money is meant to represent, and that's worth.

So, when we've got that guy from Barclays saying that the time for banker-bashing is over and paying out millions of taxpayers' money into the bonus pot, I think it's time to examine our collective conscience if we're actually going to start wondering why it is that poor people who receive the support of state benefits "expect something for nothing."

When there's a target of cutting 20% of DLA claims, but a fraud rate of well below 1%, you know there's something quite fundamentally amiss about why we're being asked to accept these cuts as essential.

Yes, the housing benefit bill is ridiculous, but it'll grow if we continue to think of houses as investments rather than investing in somewhere homely for ourselves. Giving 20% loans to first time buyers out of the government purse is more money going from the taxpayer to pay already wealthy people, rather than addressing the structural problem that the majority of people are paid too little and that housing options in this country are fucking awful, by and large.

I'm in a very privileged position, I completely recognise that. I had a job that could pay me up to £35,000 a year and I lost it because my arm was wrecked by nerve damage. I relied on incapacity benefit for almost a year, a benefit that now no longer exists. Once I'd had intensive physiotherapy and quite grisly surgery on my arm, I was able to slowly return to work, but it became clear that ADHD means I can't work for anyone else and also that the stress of the last couple of years means I'm having more odd seizure type things than I'd been having previously.

I chose to return to college, which meant my fees were waived as a disabled person - a term I'm still not entirely comfortable with - and that while I started to work as much as my hand and my head would allow me, I get financial support while my business picks up.

The way things are looking, if the same thing happened to another Howard right now, he'd not get Incapacity Benefit, because that disappeared, he'd face far more intrusive and demoralising assessments to qualify for Disability Living Allowance (which is a pittance, before you say anything) and would probably have to go to a tribunal to get it, which he would struggle to do, entirely because of his disability.

With a nebulous challenge like the ongoing epilepsy investigation I'm having at the moment, it's phenomenally expensive and it's hard to pin down. I've spent in total about 18 days in different doctors' clinics just on making sure I'm well in the last year and that comes out of my local GP's budget. I wouldn't die without this help, but it improves my quality of life enormously. If my GP was solely in control of their finances, would I really want to be in a position where I had to persuade them of the merits of my case?

So, this Other Howard might well not be having medical support.

He wouldn't, therefore, be able to get support with studying, he wouldn't get financial support rebuilding his business, he wouldn't get the adapted equipment he needs for work and study. He wouldn't be working as an artist now. He'd be relying entirely on unemployment benefits, even though he wouldn't be able to hold down any of the jobs he'd be sent for. He'd cost the government more money, he'd get ill very quickly and he'd have very poor prospects.

And, more to the point, he'd be the kind of person who the people who own three houses would accuse of expecting something for nothing.

Even if I was expecting something for nothing, getting my rent paid to pay off someone else's buy-to-let mortgage isn't me being the one getting something for nothing.

Think through who the cuts are attacking, and think about how we all need to behave if we're really going to make things better.

Don't be distracted into thinking that the victims are to blame, and don't be so selfish as to fail to accept that we've all fucked up in making this happen. We all have a part in making things right.

I'll see you on the streets.

Kosmica at the Arts Catalyst

I went along to Kosmica at the Arts Catalyst this evening, thanks to Töve being really rather brilliant at making sure I don't just lock myself in my studio all the time to draw and that I actually get out to do some things sometimes other than work or nipping down to Brighton to see a man about a dog.

It was a charming night, tucked away in a secretive venue above a glaring Foxtons on Clarkenwell Road that garishly had a disgusting amount of light pollution blaring out while three forlorn-looking estate agents worked away inside (they were all still there when we left after ten, still looking just as utterly full of total satisfaction with their job). A screen was set up and a few drinks and snacks were on offer while two talks were given and a performance piece was run. The first talk was about a series of projects undertaken by an artist whose work investigates the depths of the earth and the reaches of space, where she's made some incredibly beautiful pieces in heightened gravity and in simulated weightlessness during parabolic flights, but she's also explored different attempts to reach out into space, from the pathos of home-made rockets in the Mojave to the poetic beauty of attempts to use geese to lift a cosmonaut to the moon. Beautiful.

The performance was a wonderfully immersive experience where you picked out a piece of music (I chose Kate Bush, apparently so did most people during the evening) and the two women who'd made the piece lowered me back on a chair onto the floor so I could watch a film upside down about the lunar landing - the tale being told through animated pasta, performance, archive film and a poignant sense of just being out of place. It was brilliant. When they hefted me back upright again, I had such a massive grin on my face I could barely manage to giggle out my thanks to them as they gave me a hand-made badge to celebrate my voyage.

The final talk was another one I could also relate to, where an astronomer-turned artist and an illustrator-turned-astronomer talked about how they've begun collaborating on work together after a chance comment in the Norwegian landscape about colonising the moon. They spoke about the intersection between art and science and it sparked an interesting thought for me that I feverishly wrote down in my sketchbook in a way that'll probably make no sense to me when I look back at it later. They'd also been looking at what might be the scents of space, thinking about how astronauts had said their suits had smelled like gunpowder when they'd gone back into an atmosphere and from that thought had tried to replicate other smells of space.

I think I might need to relay some of this work back to the Observatory, seeing as I can still see the place from my bedroom; I'll feel guilty if I'm finding out about cool things like this and I'm not telling them about it.

You know? London's really not so bad, is it?