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Life in the fast lane
You might think I’m some sort of masochist but, once a year, I carry out a fast. In fact it starts tomorrow.
For a relatively few days, I refrain from eating and drinking between the hours of sunrise and sunset. And, believe it or not, I find that those early mornings give me a wonderful time to reflect and get my life in order – and after a while I feel healthier too. When I am at home, I also get to see the amazing skies over Wellingborough out of my kitchen window. Look at that picture, un-photoshopped, the real thing! Castle Fields at 0610hrs.
I’m not the only one: I just did an online search on the word fasting and it came up with almost 12 million references. There’s: fasting for healing, fasting for weight loss, fasting to look like Carol Vorderman – and fasting as a powerful spiritual discipline. That’s the one I’m interested in.
A Christian colleague told me that when he and his wife have to make an important decision, such as whether to buy a new house or something to do with their son’s education, they fast for a few days to clear their minds so that they’re inspired to do the right thing.
Not everyone though is so sympathetic to the idea. When one of my fasting friends told her workmate during our last Fast why she wasn’t going out for lunch, the colleague said, “I would never let my religion make me do that”.
It struck me as very curious – this notion that somehow a religion would, or even could, make me do something that I didn’t want to do. I was under the impression that I have the freedom to choose how I want to live and what I want to believe.
I chose to be a Bahá’í because its writings and the friendships I have in its community inspire me, its teachings are attractive and good for the world, and service brings me fulfilment. And I choose to follow its powerful spiritual disciplines, if you like, because I tried them out, tested them and found them to be beneficial to my well-being – and true.
“Being one, truth cannot be divided,” say the Bahá’í writings, “and the differences that exist only result from attachment to prejudice. If only men would search out truth, they would find themselves united.”
The freedom to search for truth is one of the blessings of living in this society. In some parts of the world, the decision to change one’s faith is a capital offence. We have the freedom to choose a faith or choose not to have one.
Some months back, I saw an article which said, ‘Freedom from religion in Britain is becoming as important as freedom of religion. Nearly two-thirds of British people do not claim membership of a religion or never attend a religious service.’
While I personally think society would be much healthier and happier if everyone lived their life according to powerful spiritual disciplines, the freedom to choose is more important than enforcing someone to do something against their will.
Mae West summed up choice thus, “Between two evils,” she said, “I always pick the one I never tried before.”
Filed under: Thoughts | 2 Comments
Tags: Bahai, fasting, freedom
Last Thursday, more than a dozen of the United Kingdom’s top comedians – including Jack Dee, pictured, Jo Brand, Omid Djalili, Alexei Sayle – put their names to a letter in The Times, expressing their concern about human rights in Iran, particularly the danger being faced by the national administrative committee that has been looking after the affairs of the country’s 300,000 strong Bahá’í community.
These seven, ordinary citizens have been detained in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for eight months now. They have been denied access to their legal counsel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr Shirin Ebadi. Up until recently, no case has been brought against them. It’s now been reported, though, that their files are to be handed over to the Revolutionary Court and that they will face serious charges including “espionage”. The possibilities of a fair, independently observed trial – and, based on previous precedents, the likely verdict when such a charge is leveled – are grim to say the least.
Over the past two decades, we have grown used to celebrities voicing their opinions on all manner of issues – from global warming to the fur trade. For many years, comedians have annually done their bit for Comic Relief and Amnesty International’s Secret Policeman’s Ball, while rock’s megastars strut their stuff for famine-stricken lands and Nelson Mandela’s AIDS charity.
Such public displays of conscience are not without their critics. Cynics mock the celebrities’ intentions, dismissing their efforts as self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, ego-boosting publicity stunts. When this particular letter was reported on Sky News, some of the comments that readers left on the website were, to my mind, extraordinary. “These so-called comedians want to make me puke!” wrote one, “Is it the fact they honestly think it will make a difference? No chance! Is it to look like they give a **** in the public eye? Absolutely! Their hypocrisy stinks beyond belief.” “What is the point of writing a letter?” wrote another, “Do these guys honestly believe that Iran will listen to a bunch of westerners with no moral or religious integrity?” “Once again so called “celebrities” jump on the political band wagon about something they probably know nothing about,” retorted one reader. “If they’re so interested in politics then why don’t they become politicians ? But of course the work isn’t as easy and the pay and lifestyle isn’t as good is it?” asked another.
Rather than being a fashionable cause, the case of the Bahá’ís in Iran is like so many examples where innocent people are facing the most extreme hardship or persecution but aren’t actually dying in droves. The UK media generally isn’t interested, so supporting such a case is not destined to get these comedians widespread exposure to boost their already high public images. This one has barely been reported at all, save for an excellent interview with Shirin Ebadi on Channel 4 News. In fact, this cause doesn’t really fit into the predominant liberal grain, of which comedians are most likely to be the representatives. Why? It’s about religion, for a start. Generally speaking, people don’t want to start interfering in a matter that has, at its root, a difference of theological interpretation. For most comedians, religions are more for poking fun at than to be protected or defended. Furthermore, people seem dubious about speaking up against certain elements in Iran’s regime. They suggest that such widespread stories of oppression and human rights, despite being independently reported and condemned by respectable agencies, are either fuelling the flame of Western antagonism towards Iran or are even the fabrications of countries intent on intervening in Iran’s affairs.
Faced with a multitude of social ills, charities and causes to speak out about, celebrities in Britain are in a unique position. They are, at the same time, people of influence and targets of public vitriol. Ours has become a celebrity-obsessed nation. An article in this week’s New Statesman marking the 30th anniversary of the start of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister dates the beginning of such a culture back to the prevalent mores of the 1980s where wealth, selfishness, enterprise, getting ahead, were to be valued above the welfare of society which the Iron Lady famously denied existed.
Newspapers today report that the unhealthy obsession with celebrity culture is damaging the academic success of British students who are ignoring career aspirations to pursue the chance of fame instead – fame, not for their achievements, but for being famous. This obsession with celebrity is seen to be a symptom of a larger cultural obsession with three As – affluence, attractiveness and achievement – not in themselves inherently harmful, but with the great potential to cast into the shadows other values such as three Cs – community, charity and commitment. One American psychologist James Houran, has written that in a secular society the “need for ritualized worship can be displaced onto celebrities.” “Nonreligious people tend to be more interested in celebrity culture,” he says. “For them, celebrity fills some of the same roles the church fills for believers, like the desire to fit into a community of people with shared values.”
Fulfilling that role presents celebrities with huge responsibility. They are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. Wherever one’s sympathies lie for the ailing Jade Goody, there is no doubting that her very public life and death is boosting by the thousands the number of women going to have screenings for cervical cancer.
When our own government spoke up a week or two back for the safety of the Bahá’í leaders in Iran, how many national and regional newspapers reported it? None.
When this group of comedians signed their letter, the story was reported in the Daily Telegraph, on Sky News, in the Glasgow Daily Record, Metro, on teletext, in the Western Daily Press and, most excitingly, on This is Scunthorpe.co.uk – evidence enough, if any were needed, of the power of celebrities in our society to bring an issue to the fore. That is something, I believe, that comes with the territory and to be applauded. The courage on the part of these comedians to speak out deserves our gratitude. In all seriousness, it is no laughing matter.
Filed under: People, Theatre, Thoughts | 3 Comments
Tags: Bahai, comedy, human rights, Iran, persecution
The mummy returns
It’s half-term week for schools in the south of England and London’s Underground was packed today with grandparents and parents roving the capital on a quest for activities to divert their children.
The national Bahá’í Centre is situated close to the Natural History Museum – always a hardy perennial with those kids who for some reason like to be scared out of their wits by the very realistic animatronic figure of Tyrannosaurus Rex. But my tube journey also takes in Holborn, the train stop for the British Museum.
This morning I was amused to overhear the following conversation between a bright young boy and a woman who I assumed was his grandmother.
“Are there skeletons in the museum?” the boy asked, a fearful expression on his brow.
“Well there are Egyptian mummies which have skeletons in them…” Grandma smilingly replied.
Trepidation crossed the lad’s face. “I’m scared! What if they come alive?”
“They won’t come alive,” she replied calmly. “Skeletons can’t come alive. They’ve been dead for centuries. That’s why they are in a museum.”
“Some skeletons can come alive,” said the boy. “I’ve seen them.”
Grandma had an answer for everything. “That’s only on television”
“Yes, but what if they come out of the television?” he asked.
There was a certain logic to his line of thinking.
I remember as a child being very fearful of just about everything. At that time there had been a spate of high-profile kidnappings that I had overheard on the news. Someone calling himself the Black Panther had abducted a 17-year old heiress and demanded £50,000 ransom money. I was convinced for some reason that I was going to be kidnapped too. It didn’t help that a rumour swept round the children in our junior school that the Black Panther had been seen at the local swimming pool the night before.
Now when I think about it, why would Britain’s most wanted criminal be taking a quick dip in the Canterbury municipal baths? And, come to think of it, how would anyone know it was him? Did he have Black Panther emblazoned on his Speedos?
But for a child with an imagination such as mine, reasoning doesn’t help. Even my parents flippantly saying, “Don’t be stupid. We haven’t got any money” failed to assuage my paranoia of being kidnapped. Every time we travelled anywhere and a car was following us for any reasonable period, I would duck down out of sight on the backseat convinced that I was being pursued by someone who was out to get me. I wouldn’t sleep in the bedroom at the front of the house because a ladder could easily be propped up to reach the window.
Even today, when there are so many more frightening things bombarding young minds and kids are much more savvy, a child’s imagination is extremely vulnerable. The other day a friend of mine’s four year old daughter came home in tears from a birthday party at which the parents had stuck on a video of Indiana Jones. I don’t know which episode in the series it was but there’s not a lot of difference when you are four years old between melting Nazis, voodoo priests, or resuscitated skeletal aliens. They are all terrifying and, for a youngster unaware of the craft of special effects, all real. How could they be otherwise?
I am not sure what the answer is. I suppose bedtime fear has been and will always be part of growing up. Children, I guess, need to be helped not to give energy to their imaginings. A looming creature on the wall may be nothing more than the shadow of a tree outside the window. But when a child invests energy in the imagined danger, it takes on a whole new, potentially threatening life.
I suspect praying with children before bedtime can help redirect energy. ”In a time to come,” predicted ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “morals will degenerate to an extreme degree. It is essential that children be reared in the Bahá’í way, that they may find happiness both in this world and the next. If not, they shall be beset by sorrows and troubles, for human happiness is founded upon spiritual behaviour.”
That would seem to be a good measuring rod for what we choose to do with our children not just at half-term but all year round. But when will the museum of spiritual behaviour and positive thinking be opening? And what would they put on display?
Filed under: Thoughts | 5 Comments
Tags: British Museum, children, kidnapping, mummy
Dancing on Ice
I can honestly say I’ve never been a suffererer of paraskavedekatriaphobia. In fact I’m rarely aware of what the date is on any given day, which makes the phobia even less likely to impinge on my consciousness.
Paraskavedekatriaphobia, in case you haven’t come across the word before, is the fear of Friday 13th. According to one American stress management centre – or center, as they would have it – an estimated 17 to 21 million people in the USA are affected by this condition. Some people are so paralyzed by fear that they avoid their normal routines in doing business, taking flights or even getting out of bed. Some $900 million in business is lost every Friday 13th, which comes around at least once a year.
If I had known what was coming last Friday – Friday 13th February – I probably wouldn’t have got out of bed either. I was involved in a very nasty four-car smash as I drove home in the evening from visiting a friend. The first piece of bad luck was the sudden freezing of water on the road that turned its surface into a lethally invisible skating rink. The second piece of bad luck was my car skating with the gracelessness of Torville and Dean-wannabes into a snowy bank at the side of the road. The third – the car that slammed full speed into my passenger side as I sat trying to reverse out of my predicament. The fourth, another passing car that attempted a toeless lutz, bouncing off at least two other vehicles that had stopped to assist me.
The life of my trusty Nissan Micra, about whom only that day I had been singing praises and saying how she had never let me down, is over. She has gone to that heavenly playground for little cars who chug and splutter no more – the Parker Fry scrapheap in Huntingdon.
Once all the formalities were over with the police and ambulance men, the exchanging of numbers with the other drivers for insurance purposes, the RAC sent out a truck to pick up what was left of the car. The driver was a relentlessly cheerful chatterbox who, I suspect, has developed his repartee from years of experience picking up people like me, in a state of adrenalin-soaked shock.
“It’s Valentines tomorrow, innit?” he opened, as I plugged in my seatbelt. “The missus said to me, ‘Surprise me’. I says ‘Aw, don’t say that love. If I buy you flowers you say ‘Did ya get ‘em at a garage?’ If I get wine, you say you don’t like it.”
“Oh…er…what about going out for a meal?” I suggested, wondering what had hit me – with admittedly a little less force than that first car 90 minutes earlier.
“Nah. She don’t eat anything fancy. She’s a very simple eater, the missus. Me, I like a steak with peppercorn sauce. She just likes pork chops out the oven. No sauce, nothing. Just pork chops and mash.”
“Cinema?” I tried, once more.
“Nah. She’s a smoker. She says if she can’t have a fag in two and a half hours it’ll drive her up the wall.”
Eureka! I got it. The perfect gift. “Nicorette patches,” I said. He didn’t look impressed. “Well, you can say to her that she wanted to be surprised,” I added.
“Yeh, I’ll slap six of them on her and go to the pictures!” Then, my cheery rescuer regaled me with the story of his Valentine’s Day proposal several years ago. How him and the missus-to-be had got all dressed up and gone to a fancy restaurant but she, only liking pork chops, was not impressed. They ended up in a Travelodge eating scampi and chips from a newspaper, with him having to reach into his sock at an opportune moment to bring out an engagement ring.
“It was really surreal,” he said.
I couldn’t have agreed more. How appropriate to raise the spectre of surrealism on such a bizarre night – the forces of nature propelling different lives to intersect for fleeting, never to be repeated interactions. And how wonderfully talented are the British at dealing with crises – the stoical stories, the jokes, banter and camaraderie. I thanked God for not being more badly injured than a few cuts to my hand, and for my garrulous rescuer.
So my Friday 13th was not particularly a day of bad luck. In fact, quite the opposite – if you had seen the state of the cars after the accident, you would have said it was a day of particularly good luck. No one was badly hurt and I was driven home by a man who made it his business to keep me nicely distracted from the shock of what had happened. By the time he dropped me off, Friday 13th was over and the paraskavedekatriaphobia suffererers were no doubt getting out of bed ready to embrace St.Valentines Day. Good luck to them.
Filed under: People, Thoughts | 5 Comments
Tags: black ice, paraskavedekatriaphobia, scampi
A case of religious hatred
On Wednesday 14 May 2008, six members of the informal administrative committee that attended to the basic needs of Iran’s Bahá’í community, were taken from their homes in an early morning sweep ominously similar to episodes in the 1980s when scores of Iranian Bahá’ís were rounded up and killed. A seventh member of the group had already been arrested two months previously in Mashhad.
Now, reports are circulating that seven Bahá’ís imprisoned in Iran have been accused of “espionage for Israel, insulting religious sanctities and propaganda against the Islamic republic”. Their case, it is said, will be referred to the Revolutionary Court next week. It is presumed that the seven are the group who were arrested last year.
Such reports, say the Bahá’í International Community, are deeply concerning, potentially marking a new and dangerous stage in Iran’s persecution of Bahá’ís. The seven Bahá’í leaders have been held in prison for over eight months and no evidence against them has been brought to light. At no time during their incarceration have the accused been given access to their legal counsel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mrs. Shirin Ebadi. Mrs. Ebadi has been threatened, intimidated, and vilified in the news media since taking on their case and has not been given access to their case files.
No clear reason for their imprisonment has ever been given although, at the time of their arrests, Iran claimed that they were arrested “for security reasons and not for their faith”.
Unjustifiable treatment
For more than 160 years, the Bahá’í community has received unjustifiable treatment fuelled by religious hatred. The Bahá’í Faith has often been viewed in Iran and elsewhere as a threat to Islam. Bahá’ís have been branded heretics and apostates. The progressive position of the Faith on women’s rights, independent investigation of truth and education has particularly rankled Muslim clerics.
In the mid-1800s, some 20,000 followers were killed by the authorities or by mobs who viewed the movement as heretical. In the 20th century, periodic outbreaks of violence were directed against Bahá’ís, and the government often used them as a scapegoat. In 1979, with the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the persecutions became official government policy and were pursued in a systematic way. Since then, more than 200 Baha’is have been executed or killed, hundreds more have been imprisoned, and tens of thousands have been deprived of jobs, pensions, businesses and educational opportunities. All national Bahá’í administrative structures were banned by the government, and holy places, shrines and cemeteries were confiscated and destroyed.
While the overt persecution of Bahá’ís since 1979 came under intense international scrutiny and condemnation, the Iranian regime switched to enacting more covert social, economic, and cultural restrictions to destroy the Bahá’ís without attracting attention. Their plan was outlined in a memorandum, written in 1991, that established a national policy aimed at the quiet strangulation of the community. Its measures essentially dictated that Bahá’ís should be kept illiterate and uneducated, living only at subsistence level, and fearful at every moment that even the tiniest infraction will bring the threat of imprisonment or worse. In recent years, in line with the memorandum, extensive social and economic restrictions have been put in place and Baha’is have been subject to revolving-door arrests and detentions calculated to sow terror amongst them.
Branding Bahá’ís as Zionist spies is the latest in a long history of attempts to foment hatred by casting the Bahá’ís as agents of foreign powers, variously of Russia, the United Kingdom, or the United States – and now Israel – all of which are completely baseless. The Bahá’í world headquarters and some of its holy sites are sited within the borders of modern-day Israel as a result of the actions of Iran – or Persia – itself. Sixty years before the state of Israel was formed, in 1868, Bahá’u’lláh, exiled successively from his native Persia to Iraq and Turkey, arrived as a prisoner to ‘Akká, then a remote penal colony of the Ottoman Empire, now part of Israel.
A commitment to principles
Bahá’ís are fundamentally committed to non-partisanship and nonviolence. As a matter of principle, Baha’is are obedient to the governments in the lands in which they dwell and refrain from any partisan activity.
Far from being a threat to state security, the Bahá’ís of Iran cherish a great love for their country and are deeply committed to its development. This is evidenced, for example, by the reality that the vast majority of Bahá’ís have remained in Iran despite intense persecution, the fact that students denied access to education in Iran are forced to study abroad have returned to assist in the development of their country, and their recent efforts to provide literacy and moral training for underprivileged children. Baha’is are the well-wishers of Iranian society and proud citizens of their homeland.
Every principle to which Bahá’ís subscribe exhorts them to face opposition and hatred with friendship and love. In countless places, the Bahá’í scriptures give clear guidance on how followers should deal with those who wish them ill, for example ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote, “If others hurl their darts against you, offer them milk and honey in return; if they poison your lives, sweeten their souls; if they injure you, teach them how to be comforted; if they inflict a wound upon you, be a balm to their sores; if they sting you, hold to their lips a refreshing cup.”
Throughout their history, the Bahá’ís in Iran, when given the opportunity to recant their faith in order to save their own lives, have refused to lie about their inmost convictions. It is illogical to suggest that they might break other cardinal principles and resort to the kind of crimes they are accused of – espionage for Israel, insulting religious sanctities and propaganda against the Islamic republic. What, after all, would they hope to accomplish by such acts? It would provide a justification for even greater violence and oppression with no hope of any productive outcome.
The facts demonstrate that the Bahá’ís are persecuted purely for their religious beliefs. Time and again, Bahá’ís have been offered their freedom – and in some cases, their lives – if they recant their faith and convert to Islam. For more than a century, and particularly in the past three decades, Bahá’ís have responded to such attacks with nothing other than resignation, dignity and patience. They have preferred to face the most extreme punishments rather than deny the very principles that shape their beliefs.
Filed under: History, People, Thoughts | 1 Comment
Tags: Bahai, human rights, Iran, persecution
An extreme snow event
It’s official! “Worst snow for 18 years brings Britain slithering to a halt…” That’s according to the Daily Mail. The BBC also tells me that south-east England had the “worst snow” it has seen for 18 years, while the Telegraph trumps that by no fewer than 24 months – it’s the “worst snow in 20 years.” What’s more – there’s “more misery ahead”. How challenging our lives will be!
What precisely, I wonder, makes this the “worst” snow? Does snow have evil motives? Was it loitering with intention, in retention at a cloud detention centre, mischievously plotting to bring our lives to a standstill? Did it want to take revenge on all those centuries when we have forced it against its nature into rotund caricatures of our fellow human beings with vegetable noses, compressed it into small pellets of punishing power, or pulverised it with our vehicles into unappealing, grey mush? This snow must be extremely angry, determined to show us its very worst behaviour.
The photograph here, on the other hand, shows my experience of Monday’s calamitous events. As I stood in my warm and welcoming kitchen, a mug cradled in my hands, I gazed out on a vision of a world purified – dusted with white, softened and inviting, glowing with all the charm of a Christmas greetings card.
This was, I was bafflingly told by the Met Office, an “extreme snow event”, something akin perhaps to the promise offered by that gravelly-toned voice-over man in cinema trailers who nowadays describes every other new film release as a “major motion picture event”.
We, as human beings, uniquely define our experiences with words and words are charged with meaning. We place ourselves at the centre of the universe and assign values to things according to how they affect us and our routine normality. This “worst” snow was nothing more than a precipitation of crystalline water ice on our lands. A crisis? Well, six million people enjoyed a day off work while children cheerily skidded, slid and skated through the most pleasurable day in living memory. I do not deny it was tough going on those who were trying to go about their normal business, but come on guys, take a heaven-sent chill-pill once every 18 years!
I wonder how our attitude to the world and life would transform if we used words that turned experience around and saw the providence in situations that are apparently calamitous. How would our feelings about the world change if news reports began, “The human race took another step on the road to its peaceful future today when the crisis in such-and-such a place impelled leaders to work out a ceasefire…” or “The understanding that human happiness is not entirely fulfilled by materialistic pursuits was boosted today as some of the world’s richest entrepreneurs saw their stocks collapse…”
“Material fire,” Bahá’u'lláh wrote, “consumeth the body, whereas the fire of the tongue devoureth both heart and soul. The force of the former lasteth but for a time, whilst the effects of the latter endure a century.” From snow events to share collapses, we define our world and our feelings about it by the words we choose to use to describe it. Within that choice lies the options of positivity or gloom.
Filed under: Thoughts | 5 Comments
Tags: Bahaullah, snow, snow event, words
From the realm of the invisible
More than 20 years ago, in one of the many classes I was then attending on film theory, I remember hearing a lecturer present his own, I presume Freudian, perspective on the psychological roots of why watching a film or looking at art is such a pleasurable phenomenon. The experience was a primal one, he averred, a direct evolution from the experience of the suckling baby – something to the effect that, as the baby is being nourished at the mother’s breast, its mind plays out fantasies on the blank screen of flesh in front of it.
Then, as now, I personally found this theory a little hard to swallow, so to speak. I am not sure if the parts of the brain that are accountable for imagination are formed at such a young age to begin with. And besides, I disprove it – I have always passionately loved films and art but was only ever bottle-fed – so I was inclined to consign the theory to the large brown receptacle in my head marked ‘Non-recyclable waste’.
Yet it re-emerged after a quarter of century last Wednesday as I had the profoundly moving experience of standing in front of some of the most remarkable works of art produced in the latter half of the 20th century.
The exhibition of the late paintings of Mark Rothko at London’s Tate Modern ends tomorrow but you have until 10pm in the evening to catch it, if you haven’t done so already. So what happened which left this experience lingering in my mind and brought back long-repressed memories of Freudian film theory?
On a first glance at Rothko’s vast canvasses, particularly the late “Seagram” series – those which employ an apparently uniform palette of deep maroons, vivid crimson and black – one sees little that is remarkable. In the past, I have heard people passing them by without anything more than a shrug and a harumph, reeling off the contemptuous condemnation, “I could do that” or that it looks like a radiator on its high setting.
But Rothko’s paintings demand of us more, much more, than a curt dismissal. The hushed reverence with which thousands of visitors to the Tate Modern have lingered in front of these canvasses over the past few months is an indication that there is more here than meets the eye.
Today, we live in a world of reductionism – headlines, sound-bites, snappily-edited video and press photographs. This conditions us only to respond to the surface of things, the first layer of instant meaning – the fly-festooned head of a malnourished child, the stiff blanched hand of a victim poking out from the aftermath of a bombarded city. The publication and broadcast of such images generates an emotional response that is instant, provocative and devoid of nuance, imagination, context or history. It is what it is and there can be nothing more to say.
To stand in the presence of a Rothko – canvasses on such a vast scale yet, in a sense, so devoid of subject – one could equally say it is what it is, referencing nothing. But I found that the experience seemed to open in the mind two complementary processes – the projection onto the painting of one’s own thoughts, dreams and visions, and the invitation to look deeply at what is imminent in the mist.
“If people want sacred experiences they will find them here,” Rothko said of his paintings. “If they want profane experiences they’ll find them too. I take no sides.” Here, the artist has provided us with a screen on which fantasies can be played out and imagination nourished – an opaque mirror, perhaps, for the self.
The one work to which I devoted the largest amount of time was “Untitled” of 1958, pictured above, which usually hangs in a gallery in Sakura, Japan. Reproductions of this work do not do it justice – one simply can’t see everything that is going on within its simple forms. As I sat in front of it, a curious thing happened. Firstly, I felt that the image was constantly shifting between possible meanings. Is it an ancient gateway, a door to something ineffable glimpsed beyond, some kind of portal from a ruined temple where rituals were once played out? Or is it two totem poles – monuments from a primal act of worship – immersed in fire, flames licking at its weathered edges? What was actually the subject and what was the negative space it creates were constantly changing place with eachother.
Secondly as I focused my attention closely on the brushwork, the shadows, the subtle gradations of tone within the blocks of colour, I began to hear sounds emerging in my head – the voices of ritual acts, the timeless roar of Aslan, the sense of breath emerging from a transcendent world.
Two days later, I came across two passages in the writings of the Báb which seemed to describe this image which still lingered in my head:
“O ye kinsmen of the Most Great Remembrance! This Tree of Holiness, dyed crimson with the oil of servitude, hath verily sprung forth out of your own soil in the midst of the Burning Bush, yet ye comprehend nothing whatever thereof…” and ”O peoples of the earth! Cleave ye tenaciously to the Cord of the All-Highest God, which is but this Arabian Youth, Our Remembrance—He Who standeth concealed at the point of ice amidst the ocean of fire.”
Could Rothko’s twin pillars be such trees of holiness in the midst of the Burning Bush? Are they points of ice amidst an ocean of fire? I find the resonance remarkable.
What makes an artist a great one is, it seems to me, the ability to give birth to something that has never been seen before which is, at the same time, something that can never be repeated. ”Know that the reality of man embraces the realities of things, and discovers the verities, properties and secrets of things,” wrote Bahá’u'lláh. “So all these arts, wonders, sciences and knowledge have been discovered by the human reality. At one time these sciences, knowledge, wonders and arts were hidden and concealed secrets; then gradually the human reality discovered them and brought them from the realm of the invisible to the plane of the visible. Therefore, it is evident that the reality of man embraces things.”
Rothko, it seems to me, managed to have a deep encounter with some part of that which was hidden and concealed, and brought it from the realm of the invisible to the plain of the visible. As it emerges, it then becomes the work of the viewer to discern what it is saying and give it personal meaning. Such images were never produced by anyone else before, or could be reproduced with the same raw power afterwards. The Tate that morning was filled with schoolchildren, hands stuffed with maroon and black oil pastels copying the Rothko paintings into their sketchbooks while chatting merrily away. At the surface level, yes, it was evidently simple to copy the forms and the colours. But what did they learn about the process that brought Rothko to his discovery? How, if at all, did it encourage them to look beyond what is there?
At the turbulent end of his life, Rothko painted another extraordinary series of works which, when one encounters them, seem to be nothing more than dense black space and hastily brushed grey foreground. Are they images of nothingness and bleak despair – the final outpourings of a man who was soon to take his own life? Or are they pictures inspired by the first moon shots, contemporaneous as they are with the 1969 moon landings which captivated the eyes of the world.
Standing in front of one of these paintings, pictured right, I again heard a sound which was not indicative of the immensity of space. It was the sound of an ocean lapping at the shore – a vast, unlit sea encountered at night from land, the cutting-edges of white-crested waves pulsing towards me out of the darkness. Again the words of Bahá’u'lláh came to me:
“The story is told of a mystic knower, who went on a journey with a learned grammarian as his companion. They came to the shore of the Sea of Grandeur. The knower straightway flung himself into the waves, but the grammarian stood lost in his reasonings, which were as words that are written on water.
The knower called out to him, “Why dost thou not follow?”
The grammarian answered, “O Brother, I dare not advance. I must needs go back again.”
Then the knower cried, “Forget what thou didst read in the books of Síbávayh and Qawlavayh, of Ibn-i-Hajíb and Ibn-i-Málik, and cross the water.”
The death of self is needed here, not rhetoric:
Be nothing, then, and walk upon the waves.”
I am not sure where Mark Rothko’s work would have taken him had he lived longer. Rhetoric was no longer needed. For me, he had gone about as far as he could go before that total immersion in the unknown ocean, that jump through an ancient portal into the nothingness, into the void so empty and at the same time so full of possible meaning.
Filed under: Art, Thoughts | 3 Comments
Tags: Art, Bahai, Bahaullah, Rothko, The Bab
In it to win it?
It was primarily the promising lure of a ’substantial cash prize’ that prompted me to dial the telephone number that would lead me to being auditioned for a new television quiz show. I saw the advertisement in a national newspaper just before Christmas at a time when I was wondering how I could get my mortgage paid off closer to my next birthday rather than the projected target of my 63rd – which is some years away, I hasten to add.
Well, why not? After all, I like quizzes. I enjoy general knowledge crosswords, Trivial Pursuit and the Who Wants to be a Millionaire machine when I occasionally go into a pub. I know I am pretty good on some subjects – art, music, films, literature – and abominable in others – sport, astronomy, science, ancient mythology. I am not a particularly good loser, which I suppose implies a competitive streak of sorts.
So early last week when the phone rang, it turned out to be a charming researcher from this new show asking me if I would like to answer some questions. She would not tell me whether I had got them right or wrong but she did say at the end of the twenty or so questions that I had done well. Would I like to come for an audition on Friday? Sure. Why not? I am always game for a new experience.
It wasn’t until Friday came and I arrived at the television studio that it hit me what I was letting myself in for. In the small reception area sat an interesting array of people – ranging in age from mid-30s to early 60s. They were also auditioning.
“You look familiar,” the researcher said to one of them.
“People think I look like Omid Djalili,” said the budding contestant.
“I know Omid Djalili,” I told him. “You don’t.” How to lose friends and alienate people, example one.
As we spoke and got to know each other a bit better, what surprised me was these people’s passion for quiz shows. They had all been on other shows in the past. One even made it into the semi-final of Mastermind. One hadn’t wanted to be on this show at all – he wanted to be on In It to Win It (which I have never heard of) and his son had put him in for the wrong programme. Others were veterans of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Fifteen to One, Going for Gold. All were keen members of local pub quiz teams. “I don’t watch TV,” I almost thought aloud, “I don’t even have a set.” Example two. I have rarely felt so out of place.
“Think of words that describe yourself” said the researcher.
“Gregarious!” said one hopeful contender.
“Egregious!” said another.
“Erm, a loyal friend,” quoth I quietly.
I heard the sound of rain outside, the wind blowing, the unspoken judgement of pregnant silence. Example three.
“Focussed – which means headstrong,” said the next, moving swiftly on.
The audition lasted two hours during which we were put through a range of activities and quiz rounds. Everything was filmed. I was conscious that someone, somewhere was going to be looking at me in a darkened edit suite, deciding if I would make a good contestant. I would be barely glimpsed in fast forward – 43 years of life experience reduced to a juddering blip in someone’s consciousness.
The first game we played was word association.
“Egypt,” said our host.
“Pyramid!” cut in the first contestant.
“Nile” responded the next.
“Valley” said the woman next to me.
My turn. Simple word association. Easy.
“Valley,” she had said. A word lingered just outside of my consciousness. I knew what I wanted to say but in the pressure of the moment it escaped me. “Latrine?” I thought to myself. It can’t be. That’s not it. Something like latrine…but it was gone. I had wanted to say ravine and it had eluded me in the first test of my potential suitability for small screen stardom.
“Erm, mountain,” I finally blurted out knowing the delay had made me look like the tortoise on sports day at the Academy of Hare Racing. Example four.
The rest of the audition unfolded in a reasonably less uncomfortable manner but I still had problems with speed. I knew a lot of the answers but the other competitors were faster on their buzzers.
“How do these people see me?” I thought to myself. Someone a bit shy, reserved, out of their depth, slow off the mark? It struck me how differently one thought one could be perceived out of one’s usual environments.
Feeling the need for an energy-boosting packet of Minstrels for the first time in my adult life, I bumped into one of the ladies who had also been auditioning, in the railway station café.
“I don’t want to go through that again,” I said.
“So it was your first time,” she nodded knowingly, as if I had just emerged from a honeymoon suite. “I thought you did well.”
Then mild panic hit.
I am not sure if I now want to take part in the show, even if I successfully get through. I don’t think I would ever live down the humiliation of saying something stupid on national daytime television. My day out had opened my eyes to a world which until that moment had never been in my consciousness let alone my experience – the world of the addictive quiz show contestant, hungry for fame and family fortune. There’s a TV series or novel in that in its own right, or at least at this point, a blog entry. I’ll keep you posted if I ever get round to playing for the Big Money.
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Tags: contestants, quiz show
Saying no to hatred
Imagine for a moment that one day someone arrives at your door and tells you that you have just 15 minutes to pack one small suitcase, that you’re not only leaving your home but your country forever. What would you choose to pack into your case? What would you leave behind?
This morning – along with a few representatives from the Jewish community - I had the privilege of conducting a workshop with a class of bright ten year olds who had come to the town museum for an event connected with Holocaust Memorial Day. Under the title, “Say No To Hatred”, the museum has been hosting a display on the holocaust and other episodes of persecution and genocide. There is a panel on the plight of Iran’s Bahá’í community and it touched me deeply to see the faces of the Bahá’í leaders currently being detained without charge in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Theirs was the only contemporary example of religious hatred on display and brought home the reality that, in some places, little has changed.
After the children filed in, a 41 year old local woman told her story: how at the age of five, this very situation with the suitcase had happened to her. In August 1972, Idi Amin, then President of Uganda, ordered the country’s 70,000 Asians, mostly Gujuratis of Indian origin, to leave following an alleged dream in which God had instructed him to expel them. Her story was chilling, told from the viewpoint of a five year old, confused at what was happening, distressed at leaving her home and her pets behind. This was a child who had never seen fog before her plane touched down at Manchester, whose mother thought they would all freeze to death as the family spent their first days in Britain holed up in a disused Butlins holiday camp. On starting junior school, she wondered why the children in her class thought that she smelled different.
The children were wrapt and listened attentively to the story. Then it was their turn. So if this was you, what would you put in your suitcase? A fascinating discussion opened up around the table where I was sitting.
“Food and medicine,” said one boy.
“No, your parents would pack those!” interjected another.
“My Playstation!”
“Yeh! My X-Box!”
The unremarkable paraphernalia of contemporary childhood – computer games for the boys, hair brushes and accessories for the girls.
“I would get my family to stand outside our house and take a picture of us there,” said an endearingly cheeky, ginger haired boy next to me, before adding the names of his three teddy bears to his list.
The next exercise was to watch and discuss two short films. The first depicted the aftermath of Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938. “That’s my birthday!” exclaimed my little neighbour.
The second film, set in 1942, depicted a mother taking her disabled son to the doctor. As the doctor takes the child behind a screen to examine him, we overhear his nurse say, “They are Jehovah’s Witnesses.” The doctor tells the nurse that the boy would benefit from a nice, long sleep and instructs here to go and get a needle. At which point the mother rushes in, snatches the child up into her arms and makes a getaway. We then heard the voice of an elderly man saying, “I was that child”.
As the discussion resumed, a little girl of Afro-Caribbean background piped up, “I’m a Jehovah’s Witness.” A bright, intelligent-eyed Indian boy sitting next to her said, “I’m a Hindu.” (He, incidentally, was planning to put “a statue of God” in his suitcase).
The cheeky one next to me joined in. “I bet you can’t guess what religion I am!”
“You’re Christian,” several of them said, which surprised him. “How did you know?!”
Then, one young lad with dark hair and big dark eyes said, “I’m nothing. I’m normal.” I saw this as a gift to open up the conversation. “That’s very interesting,” I said. “What’s normal? Are you normal because you aren’t a member of a religion? What does that make everyone else? Abnormal? How do you feel about them?”
“What’s abnormal?” one of the pupils asked.
“I would be alright with Hitler,” said one little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. “He wanted everyone to have blonde hair and blue eyes.”
“You’re Hitler’s daughter!” cut in the Indian boy, causing much amusement in the group.
“But Hitler didn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes,” said another girl, with a confused expression.
Our time soon ran out and the class got up to return to their school to continue learning about Anne Frank and numerous others who were the victims of being different, of not being “normal”. I looked over to the Bahá’í exhibition panel and noticed a small Asian boy, with a mild form of cerebral palsy I suspect, and a hearing aid in each ear. He was captivated by the face of Muna Mahmudnizhad, the 17 year old Bahá’í girl who was tortured and hanged in Iran for teaching a class to the children in her community who had been barred from attending school on the grounds of their faith. I wondered what drew him to Muna and what he was thinking as he stood for several minutes looking at her face.
“Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart,” Anne Frank famously wrote in her diary. This morning I was moved to be living in a society of such diversity – one where a class of children has the freedom to think about how to say no to hatred. Hopefully none of them will ever be in the position of having to pack their suitcases in 15 minutes and leave here forever.
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Tags: children, hatred, holocaust, Idi Amin, Iran, Uganda
In case of emergency – pray!
I am not sure who coined the phrase that I saw for the first time at an event this morning: “Worry looks around. Sorry looks back. Faith looks up.” I’ve googled it and am none the wiser – although as you can see, it’s now available on a T-shirt.
I heard this pithy little epithet for the first time at the launch of a new initiative from my County Council. They’ve today published a multi-faith anthology of prayers, readings and reflections designed to assist in the event of a major disaster in the locality that I live in. The book is designed to give emergency services, emotional and spiritual support volunteers and others, a tool with which to administer to those who are suffering or in need of solace should some terrible thing happen.
It’s a noble initiative, and a spirit of friendship – coupled with the sense of a job well done – characterised this morning’s launch. I was particularly touched also that one of the book’s compilers – a member of the Christian clergy – chose to share one or two lines from one of my favourite Bahá’í prayers in her remarks: “Dispel my grief by Thy bounty and Thy generosity, O God my God, and banish my anguish through Thy sovereignty and Thy might.”
But what exactly do prayers or inspirational texts contribute to a situation when material means are clearly required first and foremost to respond quickly and effectively? In the case of a major emergency, you would hope that the first response would be one of assistance and rescue from the ambulance or fire crews. What good can someone turning up with some words of spiritual solace actually achieve?
Recently when my mother was quite seriously ill in intensive care, I sat at her bedside contemplating the powers we have as human beings. In all the superb medical technology that was helping her to breathe, I saw a manifestation of the brilliance of this human species to save and sustain life, and overcome the forces of nature that every other creature on the planet is bound by. It was then that I thought that, rather than being the antithesis of religion, science might be seen actually as an expression of a higher power, or God’s will (if you will): that by focussing our capacity for thought, investigation and discovery – and our physical energies – on discovering how to master the forces of nature, we can become the channels by which good operates in the world, by which life can be preserved, enhanced and improved upon. A friend of mine who recently overcame a very serious illness said that he considered the hands of his surgeons to be the prayers of his loved ones.
So why pray then if science and technology can do everything to save and improve lives? I certainly appreciated the prayers that friends all over the world said for my mother and I am sure that her recovery was assisted by the thoughts of good will and care that were being directed toward her from so many sides.
Well, religious or not, most would agree that human beings are made up of the body and the soul (a higher nature or spiritual dimension). The latter is hard to define and, as Bahá’u'lláh Himself says, is a mystery that no mind, however acute, can unravel. But we see it manifested in the nobler aspects of human behaviour – in art, music, refinement, acts of kindness and philanthropy.
In his book There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem, Wayne W.Dyer makes the observation that the power to heal ourselves comes from within. For example, if I break my leg – which I once did very badly – it is within my own capacity for that bone to mend and knit itself back together. No external force can do that for me, although the technology can assist in making sure it grows back straight.
If we are, as Bahá’u'lláh writes, “mines rich in gems of inestimable value”, it would suggest that the divine capacities, qualities and virtues are already latent within us. Perhaps a prayer then becomes the means by which we are calling upon spiritual forces to assist us in unlocking and releasing what is already there – not necessarily that a Transcendent Being is going to be persuaded from the outside to intervene one way or another to impose a decision on the outcome. But what do I know?!
So, maybe it is this combination of material action combined with spiritual intent and assistance that allows us to function to our fullest power, to heal, to overcome difficulties, to cope with tests and challenges which are out of our control. I wonder if it is by these two means that human beings enact the will of God in the world and become the medium by which the Kingdom of God is established on earth as it is in heaven – cell by cell, person by person, community by community.
In administering prayers at scenes of emergency, in collaboration with the material services that need to be provided, those affected can find within the reservoir of their inmost selves, the strength and resources to cope. God, then, is not necessarily found in the circumstances of events beyond our control, but in the response. Perhaps that slogan should read, “Worry looks around. Sorry looks back. Faith looks inwardly and acts outwardly.” But it would be challenging to find a T-shirt big enough to fit all that on.
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Tags: emergency, prayer, spiritual action
