Looking out the window;
Whenever we humans encounter something new or different, our reactions echo the survival skills of our primate ancestors; fight or flight. We learn as children whether it is safe to rush toward a new experience or runback to the protective pleats of our mother’s skirt. The results of these early experiences and experiments colour the rest of our lives, dictating our levels of confidence and comfort when confronted with that which do not understand; change and its minions; the Others.
My grandmother’s life is spiked with tragic change. She was eight when her mother died of TB and her father, who had remained at home for the Second World War due to an injury, had to work all day and spent his evenings with the home guard. From that early age she was forced to care for her younger sisters; cook meals, clean the house, collect rations. She had never had time to experience the comfort and security of a childhood. For her and all who shared this time and place, the Others were the Nazis, and she was united with her countries efforts against them. For the Germans who made their home Under the Nazis regime, the Others were the countless foreign parties that threatened their security and plagued their economy.
She became a rather Victorian woman in her later years, with unusual periods of childish melodrama and tantrums, like scratches of the undernourished child within vying for attention and recognition; even her job in a toy shop seemed to be influenced by her desire to remain as a child.
I, by comparison, led a very sheltered life when I was younger. My Grandmother held the belief that the country she had seen alter and change around her was too dangerous for children. The world purported by the “Daily Mail” and the “ITV news” was the world she believed in; the world of paedophiles, muggers, drug-addicts and pushers. For her murderers and child snatchers lie beyond our red painted doorstep. It was, I believe, a mixture of protectionism and selfishness that made her keep us in; trying to prolong the innocence of our childhood, the one she had lost so early in her life; partly for our own sake and partly so she could re-live it through us.
Eventually, like all those who live under an oppressive control, I lost the will to venture outside, her fear became mine; Unlike other children of four I would cling to my mother everywhere we went, the whole world seeming hostile and threatening to me. So overwhelming was her desire to perpetuate my childhood that I was still pushed around in a buggy until I was six, in fact I would often refuse to walk, insisting upon the secure blue nylon cove of my push-chair to keep out the infinite array of bogie men.
My mother was an emotional wreck, my father and grandmother both islands of authority, and regardless none of them were anywhere near our age. In search of relation and social hierarchy, we turned inward toward each other. I remember when my sister first asked me if I believed in God; sat on the rusted green mettle of our garden swing I ventured a nervous yes, and received a welcoming look that reinforced my sensation of relation to her. I felt connected. But my brothers abused this connection; forcing me and my sister into things we didn’t want to do and picking on us. We went along just so we didn’t feel excluded and alone.
I had never, as a small child, thought of myself, my situation or my condition as weird. Why would I? I had no basis for comparison. But as soon as I went to primary school it became startlingly obvious that the other kids thought I was strange. I arrived on my very first day at school in a thickly knitted V-neck tank-top with the sort of NHS milk bottle spectacles you could use to fry ants, pushed in my little blue chair of security. Even the mothers stared. I could feel my own mothers’ embarrassment, but she had not the will to challenge the mitten wearing iron fist of my grandmother.
That first day I cried and knuckled down to work in equal stints. I showed promise as a student but failed to relate to the other children at all. For their uniform, I had my Grandma’s home-knitwear, for their shell-suit tops I had a duffle coat, thick blue with toggles and handed down through two other kids; as they talked T.V. and toys I thought of space-ships and aliens, and read science fiction and the bible in place of their comic books. I was, apparently very “weird”, a “freak”, an “oddity”, and as a result I was shunned.
I didn’t want to be that way and I tried to fit with other kids. When I went to secondary school I started to smoke, skived classes I didn’t like, tried, with little hope, to date girls – but still I couldn’t shake the brand of “freak”. I think I was around thirteen, that time of amass hormonal upheaval, when I began to stop trying.
Through constantly absorbing the message that I was different for nine years, I stopped trying to argue and began to take a creative control over my superimposed oddness. I blindly enacted a work of alchemy and turned shit into pure gold; I embraced a change in myself.
I began to defended my “weirdness”; it was mine, it was what I was, it was my cultural niche; I took my little blue push chair and part exchanged it for a heavily spiked dog-collar, cuffs, finger-armour and make-up; my new identity became my new security blanket, I was suddenly the cause of my own exclusion, I made it my choice. It stopped being that the cool kids didn’t want to speak to me; it was that I didn’t want to know them. I became what people wanted me to be. I would bark at people who picked on me, wore make-up to school, and was proud to sit and read poetry and philosophy at lunch instead of trying to play football. My “weirdness” became the effectual outcome of itself... not that I was conscious of any of this at the time.
I found others like me and we began to form friendships of sorts; still strained under the burden of internal hierarchy. It became a competition to see who was the weirdest, just as the other children campaigned to be the top-dogs of cool. I felt included and accepted; so long as I maintained the “weirdness” I had friends.
When I reflect on this I have to ask who was more worried about their identity and security; me or the other kids?
We live now with the re-emergence of the BNP in this country; we use to call them black-shirts, national-front, skin-heads or Nazis, but now they ware D&G suits we listen. Suddenly Islam is a word associated with bombs and violence; when I was a child I’m sure it was the Catholics and the Irish. In Afghanistan, Iran, and the Gaza Strip, I’m sure the word’s American, Jew, and Christian carry the same fears as Terrorist, extremist, and bomb do here.
Whenever we humans encounter something new or different, our reactions echo the survival skills of our primate ancestors; fight or flight. We learn as children whether it is safe to rush toward a new experience or runback to the protective pleats of bigotry, secularism, and egoism; our mother’s skirt; the safe haven from which we can hurl stones at that which we do not understand; change and its minions; the Others.
Each stone that hits our target leaves a scar that strengthens its identity, solidifies its cause, and removes it further still from a state of inclusion with ourselves. At the same-time as they find fellows who are also being stoned, we find others to help us aim and throw, until the others fight back, and a war is born. We, like our primate cousins defend our territory; our mental territory, the boundaries of our identity and beliefs.
What is our identity then, as either a group or an individual, other than a shelter from change, a means of relation and maintenance of security, and a vehicle for our own social perspectives and agendas? It’s the little nylon blue push-chair or studded collar and make-up of my youth; it’s my Grandmothers dominance over our childhoods; its being French, English, African, Gay, Straight, Bi, Black, White, or blue; a “Chav”, a “Jitter”, a “Goth”, Christian, Jewish, Arabic or Atheist. It’s being Pearce, Smith, or Peasey. It’s how we find each other and how we stay alone. It’s our frontline defence against change and the threat of the Others.
We craft the Other, we bring it more sharply into existence; we isolate it and point the finger, causing it to realise more and more its own identity and secularism. There are no innocent parties in this primate game; each group sharply collecting the other and forcing it into its respective box. Like two chimps meeting in a disputed tree, we decide in an instant whether the other chimp is of our own pack or not. What clever little monkeys we all are... after all we are ALL the same monkeys.
He thought to himself, "Ah, yes! It is the chief's banner — they always do thus when they are about to give a feast." Then he noticed that his blanket was missing and he suddenly realized that it was the blanket that was floating above him. It was high in the air because Trickster had had an erection during his sleep. He said to himself, "Thus it always is with me." Then he addressed his penis, "Younger brother, bring the blanket back before you lose it." Trickster took his penis in hand, and as it got softer, the blanket finally floated down. He took out the box in which he kept his penis and began to coil his member up and pack it away. Only when he had reached the tip did he finally retrieve his blanket. Trickster carried this box on his back.
