Walking whilst ill

It has been a while since I blogged. Since my last entry I have given up work to concentrate on my recovery, both mental and physical.

I started doing Qi Qong and Tai Chi last September because I read somewhere that it helped with balance – something I very much need. I found a friendly group of mainly 50 somethings doing these slow Chinese exercises. I kept going for the chat and company as much as the exercises. But recently, the teacher has changed the format so there is an hour of Qi Qong followed by an hour of Tai Chi – this has made a considerable difference. I almost bounce out of bed the day after my session. I am now thinking about how I might gain some strength to do the long hiking trails that I dreamed of doing whilst I was completing my PhD – this might involve a personal trainer or gym membership – as well as continuing with my Qi Qong and Tai Chi.

I am crap at Tai Chi, failing to remember the basic moves and their sequence. I enjoy doing the complete short form, supported by more proficient students who surround me in a grid. After a year, I am still in the beginners group and the volunteers trying to teach me are embarrassed by my evident failure. I notice the lack of eye contact and that other students get more attention and advice. I did think of complaining – but I am weary of other people’s embarrassment (especially from the able bodied) and their lack of attention to me does not stop me trying to follow them. I acknowledge my sadness but that is all. I have recently managed to access the company’s community website which has some short videos – I am starting to follow the video sessions to improve my proficiency and to continue to strengthen my balance.

I noticed that when I moved my head slightly when I was sketching – head up to look at the view/object/person, then head down to look at the drawing – and repeated movements like this caused me to vomit. I have thrown up in most of the major museums in London. I was upset when I realised what was causing this vomiting as I thought it would bring to an end my ability to sketch. However, the classes are helping to reduce my sickness – I will not allow this illness to stop me doing what I love. I hope all this will contribute to my ability to hike and paint in the countryside.

I struggled initially when I left work and for a time took anti-depressants. They helped me to look up and start my painting journey instead of lying in bed weeping. I take them no longer. I still weep but I have accepted that as part of my life now.

Painting has been a joy. I have started to take classes and I am attempting to use up paints – honestly I could open my own art shop with the materials I have accumulated over the years which makes me slightly ashamed. Of course, the art lessons encourage my art materials purchases – but at least I am using them now instead of putting them aside for when I have more time.

I have been reading a book by Lauren Berlant, called ‘Cruel Optimism’. She points out that our fantasies of meritocracy, a career that only goes upwards, a stable family, a state that cares for us are crumbling – what do we do when faced the impasse of a precarious future? My life feels a bit more precarious now with an insufficient pension and no regular income. I did think of turning my hobby into a small business as so many have done before me.

Some time ago I did a screen printing course on fabric. I noticed that my class mates – mostly middle aged women – all wanted to leave their jobs and set up a small business, selling cushions, bags or tee -shirts. Instead of experimenting with design they were calculating how much time their (fairly dull) designs would take to produce, so that they could be small batch producers. (I have recently signed up to a tee-shirt printing course so maybe I have some residual fantasies of a small business). At the time of the first course, I was exasperated by my classmates attitudes but have had similar thoughts myself now in the face of precarity.

Berlant argues that capitalism deadens our creativity by insisting on profit above all. How do we flourish creatively in a capitalist society? I notice how difficult it is to make money by being creative. Many famous artists have the backing of wealthy families to enable their art work, e.g. Lucien Freud. You only have to follow the complaints of musicians about Spotify and the strikes by writers and actors in Hollywood to understand how risky it is to decide to live a creative life – particularly if you are not from a wealthy background.

So I have tried to banish any thoughts of selling my work – I am surprised at how difficult this is – and focus on the paintings themselves and what I learn from doing them. After all, I am trying to get to the end of my meagre talent before I die – I am interested in seeing where I get to and truly flourish in precarity.

My workplace is offering voluntary severance – I am going to go for it. I have been really unhappy in my job for years. I promised myself that when I had completed my PhD I would leave and find other work but then I got ill and lost my confidence. So I stayed on.

Recently, I read a novel, ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ which described my experience of my workplace perfectly. I am not a natural scientist but I too have experienced an academic department riven by favoritism and peopled with mediocrities. I wrote a funding proposal in the last month and I asked a colleague to work with me. Not only did she make herself unavailable, claiming to be ‘too busy’ to contribute to developing the proposal, but then pulled out at the last minute – this is fairly typical behaviour of her and others. I struggled to think of anyone in the unit that I wanted to work with.

I suffer from underemployment which is very depressing – not just in this job but in all others that I have done. In the past, I have been fit enough to just move on to another job but not this time. I think if you are underemployed you begin to buy the idea that you are not good enough to be rewarded with work. But as this book illustrated, it may be because you are too good or too clever and others suffer from the comparison. I have become angrily defensive, frightened that this ‘not good enough’ assessment is correct, wanting to be part of the team but at the same time pushing people away. I have started to believe the view that I am a bit crap and this has led to some mistakes in my judgement. I have too readily agreed to do low value work in evidence reviews in the hopes that one day I might lead a review and do it my way. But that is never going to happen. So the last two reviews I tried to participate in lacked any kind of intellectual leadership, and foolishly I tried to supply some kind of conceptual framework. One team leader relentlessly gaslit me and the second shouted at me and cancelled all our meetings. They were both terrified that my contribution would show them to be the mediocrities that they are, so rather than take me on intellectually, they resorted to bullying tactics to silence me. And it worked, I was silenced.

So I am leaving as I promised myself I would at the end of my studies. When I experienced cancer the first time, my illness reminded me that life is short and so I decided that I would take up painting more seriously to get to the end of my meager talent. I did paint regularly for a while and got better but soon I gave up, bored by my pictures. I recently looked at my pictures from that time, I liked them, and I have framed a couple – why did I give up really? A writer friend told me that she thought I had reached a turning point and was afraid to go further because the possibility of failing was very real and it was about something I cared about deeply.

For my birthday, my sister gave me a sketchbook. This is important because she is a talented print maker, recently leaving teaching to pursue her artistic impulse. She has never given me any art materials, nor showed any real interest in my artistic attempts so the gift felt like she was giving me permission. I didn’t realise until then how much I needed her blessing which the sketchbook represented for me.

A second bout of cancer and the death of my father (a man who also suffered from underemployment (is it genetic?)) has pushed this ambition to the forefront as I have encountered yet again the fleeting nature of life. I have dreams of walks and sketches in my new sketchbook. So I hope the severance pay will fund a painting year.

I will post my paintings on this site if I can work out how to do it – the many failures and the few successes – and you can judge if I turn any corners.

I have started to read a book by Davies and friends – ‘Unprecedented’. Their argument is that trends in society have been exacerbated and revealed by the pandemic so these trends have become clearer.

In an earlier blog, I talked about authoritarian states and the production of loneliness and I found echoes of this in the opening chapters of this book. This is particularly true of the trends in social media. I notice people constantly looking at the phones on the tube – I used to think that they had loads of friends and were texting them, but as I looked over their shoulders I could see they were immersed in gambling type games – not communicating at all. I try to catch their eye to start a conversation – I have much more success on buses where people are a bit older and happier to talk, perhaps to reduce their loneliness.

As Davies et al. point out Covid domesticated us. The home became a workplace, a school and a shopping hub. We were discouraged from going out to meet friends because of the infection risks so we got food delivered and subscribed to Netflix and other platforms for the latest entertainment. Women have been the losers, expected to add teaching to their already long list of tasks, hardly recompensed for this expansion of their role. Teaching is a gendered profession particularly in the early years, and schools have seen an expansion of their role – they are expected to provide not only educational services but social ones too.

Unlike those working in the financial services who make fairly spurious claims as to their contribution to our economy and therefore their right to be amply recompensed, as a society we seem unwilling to pay for care. Is it too domestic, too private? Is this a girl/boy thing?

The net has invaded our privacy so we have become sources of data, consumed by large anonymous net platforms, increasing our vulnerability to surveillance and propaganda (Morozov, the Net Delusion). Has Covid changed our private lives, making decisions about who we meet and how more difficult?

Davies and co. argue that our public spaces are becoming privatised, with draconian measures to prevent street demonstrations and other signs of solidarity – no more public squares?

I am glad for the strikes even though I am a regular visitor to my local hospital and a train user. I must admit that the strikes have inconvenienced me somewhat. However, more importantly, these workers point out that caring does not pay. And as most carers are women, it seems that the strikers are standing up for women too. The picket lines are not lonely places, workers seem to get on and appear to be chatting on the street, still a public space. Our fragile government’s response is to devise legislation to make striking even harder. They seem to want to punish collective action, both by the workers and the climate activists. I notice in various vox pops that the general public is broadly supportive of the striking workers, perhaps deep down we recognise the value of collective action as an escape from our lonely private lives.

We seem to be living through a series of political and economic crises. Liz Truss, our last leader, galloped back into the Thachterite past without much regard for our current troubles. It seemed too much to expect this politician to consider current suffering as she and her chancellor inflicted more in the name of ‘growth’. Likewise Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt are reviving austerity as the answer to our debt problem, even as people are struggling with bills and finding adequate healthcare and housing.

Is Labour doing any better on the ideas front? I don’t think so. Starmer seems so timid. I think of the Labour Party as ‘Tory light’. There is no point in voting for them since they will simply follow the Tory party lead. The most exciting idea at their recent conference was a national green energy company. But if it is successful, it will probably be sold off to the private sector which will exploit its assets, sack the workers and dis-invest – as has happened to so many bodies in the public sector.

So much is happening now – assaults on democracy in USA , Brazil, Russia and other Eastern block countries such as Hungary. Climate change, of course and the accompanying migrations from populations decimated by drought and floods. The early and lonely death of thousands from Covid, and the damaging consequences of the pandemic to children and their education.

Now, we are being led by an Eton educated, Goldman Sachs millionaire – apparently he will offer stability and reassurance. Has nothing changed? Are we meant to just kowtow to the City? Have we forgotten their carelessness in 2008? Why do we believe that they know what they are doing?

Is our society suffering from entropy? The rich do not circulate their wealth but save it to bequeath to their children on their death. No such thing as trickle down economics. This chronic saving sequesters money into bank accounts at home and abroad. It deprives others, especially poor young people, of opportunities to flourish by developing their own ideas. It sucks wealth, both material and intellectual, out of our society. We have become an economy of owners not producers. What is the point of an economy that does not enable the broader community to flourish?

I am a remainer. I live in London although when I was younger I spent some years in Manchester – a place I liked as it helped me grow into adulthood.

I have been reading a book called, ‘the Northern Question’ by Tom Hazeldine which describes the relations between the City and the Southern counties and the northern industrial areas. His is a left wing view. I was struck by how close the actions and strategies of the Tory and Labour parties in dealing with the North in the 20th century. There was a sense of continuity whatever party was in power. It seems that Labour was Tory light, especially the Blair era. Hazeldine quotes Margaret Thatcher’s comment that New Labour was her biggest achievement.

The callousness of successive governments towards the North was breathtaking, not only did administrations destroy industrial jobs but they did not help the region develop and bring in modern industries to provide employment, as happened in other parts of Europe. They preferred to enable the City to invest in companies operating in Europe and further afield. The notion of ‘levelling up’ promoted by May and then Johnson, presupposes the dismantling of the power of the City and hegemony of the South. That was never going to happen.

I cheered when I read about the Northern Region’s Leave vote in the referendum in the book – I surprised myself. I remember commenting to a friend how surprised I was at Brexit and he replied that he wasn’t as he had a brother living in Knowsley. He replied: ‘There is nothing there – no hope for a better future.’ But now I think those leavers in the North were right. What else could they do to get the attention of the political classes who have so ignored them for decades?

And Brexit has achieved a lot politically. Most notably it has fractured the conservative party and brought some uneasiness to the South. The City is unhappy. Wealth in the South is evaporating. ‘Levelling up’ is a belated recognition of the harms done to our friends in the North, but remains a rather empty promise. Brexit is acting as a mechanism of ‘levelling down’ in the South.

Perhaps the Conservative party members choice of an ideologue as the new Prime Minister is an outcome of that uneasiness, hoping that she will bring us back to the old certainties. Does the recent Labour party performance at their annual conference encourage us to believe a break with the past regarding the North? It seems to me that Starmer’s party is simply a continuation Blairite party. Disciplined but essentially conservative. A new Labour administration would not necessarily be good news for the North. The focus on economics is understandable but it does play into the City’s hands.

I have come to the end of Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, a long and not particularly cheery read, but lots of food for thought about the politics of the USA, Russia and the UK.

In the final chapter, she talked about the totalitarian state – in this case Nazism and Bolshevism – and how the terror it unleashed generated loneliness as a method to isolate and control its citizens. She distinguishes it from solitude which she describes as allowing for the possibility to generate creative thought. As a writer herself, she valued time on her own to write her books.

But the production of loneliness is the destruction of all human contact, including that of friendship and family, and the possibilities of spontaneous action in order to create the cadres to carry out the orders of the elites, however irrational and bizarre these orders are. There are shades of totalitarianism in both Russia and the US.

Putin is an old fashioned authoritarian leader in the Bolshevic mode, claiming the states of the West are decadent and corrupt. He is carrying on the idea of the communist state as the final solution to the nation state. His attack on Ukraine is an attempt to bring the totalitarian idea of history into a greater reality. It may be one of the many reasons why Russian soldiers kill so indiscriminately as they may believe that they are ridding Ukraine of decadence. This murder spree echoes that of the purges in the earlier Soviet Union under Stalin. Putin’s actions have served to isolate his country and citizens, frozen out from the Western World by sanctions and lied to by state media. It is heartening to hear of soldiers leaving their posts and running back to their mothers – their links with their families are not completely broken. At the same time, Ukraine has stepped up to protect its nation, and its wider community. By defending its nation, it is resisting the notion of empire and world government. It was moving to see the newly liberated residents of towns around Kharkiv hugging and touching their liberators – banishing the loneliness of sheltering underground.

In the US, things are at a earlier stage. I read a disturbing story today in the Guardian about a strategy document written by the Proud Boys, a violent right wing sect implicated in the 6 January attack on the Capitol. I read these articles and am struck by the ridiculously inept attempts at challenging democracy. But they seem to be successful at turning the police against demonstrators, marching for racial and women’s rights. This movement is less based on final solutions to the nation state and much more on ideas of ‘the survival of the fittest’ and missions to eradicate races considered inferior – not far from Nazism in their targeting of black people. And to force the right kind of woman to have babies. Of course, the police state is a marker of both totalitarian leaders and the autocratic state. Our own leaders are keen to restrict demonstrations and labour organising. But it is the demonstrators that remind us of democracy and through their collective action keep isolation and loneliness at bay.

I suffer from loneliness – and suffer is the right word. I am sometimes overwhelmed by it. But I also recognise my need for solitude and probably seek aloneness out too often. I have managed to avoid Covid so far and I wonder if those unfortunates who became ill thought that community and relationships were more important than safety. It appears that community and relationships bring us a different kind of safety.

In a recent forum about research, a small group discussed critical thinking/theory in relation to a review that a colleague was developing as regards to grief (a very current topic!). 

There was some confusion as to what we mean by critical thinking/theory. As researchers reviewing evidence,  I think  we mean critical thinking as an application of schemes to test the validity of findings – we are criticising the quality of the methods of a study.  Critical theory on the other hand comes from Marxism and is concerned with power and ideologies that maintain power.  As such these studies might seek to uncover oppressive systems and how they work by examining patterns in empirical data. 

Usually these systems are invisible so how might we study them in the context of systematic reviews, with its emphasis on objectively verifiable data?  And why might it be important to do so? 

A critical realist would reply that these invisible forces cause patterns and effects in the observable world and so a full explanation of what we see empirically would necessarily include some consideration of these forces.  So a simple example would be a relationship that ends in divorce to the surprise of friends.  The couple may be outwardly happy but underneath both partners might be deeply unhappy and reluctant to share their troubles with others.  These feelings, invisible to others, have a shattered the relationship with material/empirical consequences for both individuals. 

This example is on the individual level but will have implications for the children, if there are any, and housing arrangements and perhaps have knock on health effects.   We might ask how our institutions deal with divorced people.  Do we hold moral views (ideologies) about marriage failure that might prevent extending help or resources to these people, or such a failure might be considered shameful so prevent help seeking by the couple? How we think about marriage will impact on institutions in ways that we could observe.    

To consider invisible forces, I find it useful to draw on the theoretical or critical literature, because researchers more informed and skilled than me have thought about the issues in fields of study I am unfamiliar with and some have identified the institutional forces that affect our empirical observations.  Using empirical (that is, observational studies such as experiments) work, I can try and build on their reflections.  So for example I have been considering issues of help seeking for female victims of domestic abuse.  It appears incredibly difficult for them to ask for help from their networks – if they have any – without losing their dignity and a sense of control over their lives. 

These studies brought me to the notion of interdependence as discussed in the literature about the campaigns of the disabled.  How do other groups ask for help?   As far as I can see the causal forces are linked to capitalism which seems to characterise the healthy adult as independent and if you ask for help, you can easily be treated as a dependent child (or a scrounger) and thus lose your dignity, your sense of personal responsibility and your right to make decisions about your life. 

Our conversation about grief suggested to me that the concerns of business might be behind the pathologisation of those going through the grief process.  Not only has the inability of people to get health support from their insurers in the US reframed grief as a mental illness, but the reluctance to offer compassionate leave to low income earners, meaning they are forced back to work before they are ready.  Grief appears to be a luxury for high income groups.  So, as critical researchers, we might examine grief in these frames, as illness and luxury. 

I have come across this term quite frequently recently.

Firstly, it came up when I was considering help seeking by women dealing with domestic violence. I read an interesting article, written as an exploration of the disabled sector fight for independence. The author (Reindal 1999) identified ’embeddedness’ (i.e. being part of a supportive network) and ’embodiment’ (i.e. enabled to materially support oneself) as the key building blocks to interdependence. In my exploration of help seeking by victims of domestic abuse, these ideas seemed to resonate with this group. After all, abusers who practice coercive control often detach women from their networks and take away any financial independence in order to isolate and control them and make help harder to seek. In a surprising analogy, she calls those who recognise their own interdependence as representing a ‘social movement’. I was intrigued by the idea.

Another instance of the use of this term, I found in Hickel’s book ‘Less is More’. He criticises capitalism and its growth fetish and advocates for an appreciation of an inter connected, interdependent world, where humans take their place alongside the natural world. He argues for an understanding of society that draws on the insights of ecology where we understand ourselves as part of a ecological network, rather than as a striving, isolated, independent individual – a common conception of an ‘adult’. Surely as individuals, refusing help for fear of being seen as child like in dependence, we are much more vulnerable to being picked off by unscrupulous capitalists.

Arendt does not use the word, but it is perhaps implied in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’. She describes the subject of a totalitarian state as atomized and isolated, even from families and friends. She is explaining Nazism and Bolshevism but I wonder what she might make of the politics of the right in the USA and here, in the UK., if she were alive today. Liz Truss and her commitment to tax cuts reinforces notions of capitalist choice – for some sections of the polity – to drive growth, expansion and wealth. Both Arendt and Hickel argue that never ending growth is absurd, dangerous and unsustainable.

Perhaps the recent resurgence in trade unions and protest movements such as Enough is Enough, and Don’t Pay might turn into a counter to this atomization. We are very far from a totalitarian state.