The School of Life

Michael Landy on Acts of Kindness

In celebration of last Sunday’s World Kindness Day artist Michael Landy talks about his project Acts of Kindness with its curator Cathy Haynes.  Acts of Kindness is an Art on the Underground commission calling for stories of kindness on the Tube. Since the project began in June 2011 the public have sent in over 300 stories. Over the coming year Landy is placing his selection of stories as artworks in Central line stations and trains. To find out more and send in your own story of kindness on the Tube, visit the Art on the Underground website.

Cathy Haynes: On the Tube on the way here, I had this weird little shock of self-awareness. I’d settled into my seat a bit like I would at home and was vaguely watching all these strangers around me almost as if they were on TV. I was daydreaming and wondering about their lives, but making no real connection. Then my eye drifted onto a safety sign and it broke the spell. I suddenly became properly aware that I was surrounded by real people. And I remembered how at the beginning of this project you talked about the way we retreat into a bubble on the Tube. We’re in intimate proximity with strangers Underground but we do our very best to ignore each other, in an amplified version of the way we treat each other in the city above.

Michael Landy: Yes. You enter the Underground and suddenly the atmosphere is completely different: how much eye contact you can give, how close you can get. You become much more aware of people because you’re in such a condensed space. Perhaps because of that we close off and disappear into ourselves. And because of the way we act there, the Underground is the perfect platform (boom, boom) for this project to manifest itself.   

I’m interested in what makes us human in a basic sense apart from our economic identities, especially at this time when people have lots of financial worries and the world seems to be a very troubled place, and we don’t really know how to move forward. I want to find out what makes us human, and what connects us, beyond material things. For me the answer is compassion and kindness. And this project is a way of collectively exploring that idea. I mean I don’t know if it’s going to help create a kinder place on the Underground. I think that’s probably too big an ambition to have. But, in the way that it can make you feel uplifted when you see someone be kind on the Tube, I’d like to think that the artworks presenting the stories will also do that – that they’ll become life-enhancing for people. In other words, I hope the artworks are an act of kindness in themselves.

I’m trying to place the story artworks on platforms and in trains in ways that echo the unexpected ways you encounter acts of kindness in the flesh. They pop up when you least expect them. And I’m hoping the stories will have the same kind of effect on the reader as seeing an act of kindness. That’s what I’m hoping.

Click here to read the full interview. The School of Life's campaign: 'A Month of Reaching Out' continues for the rest of November, with Karen Armstrong delivering our next secular sermon this Sunday. Visit our facebook page to check for your daily task.

John Paul Flintoff on Compassionate Correspondence

After the riots in London this summer, I was happy to join the riotcleanup movement that saw individuals rush out with rubber gloves and broomsticks. But cleaning up broken glass was never going to be enough. What about the psychological mess?

I was struck by a newspaper column arguing that we must listen to the rioters if we’re to understand them. I thought: that’s what I’ll do. I’ll write to one of them. I’ll try to give them a bit of encouragement, at a difficult time. If a correspondence develops, great. If not, I've lost nothing.

I wrote to others involved too. First to Tariq Jahan, who lost his son Haroon in Birmingham, then my local police (in London), and my MP.

Finally, I wrote to one of the people involved in the looting. He'd attracted a lot of media attention because he was older than most, at 31, and had a job as a classroom assistant in a primary school.

I said I imagined it must be painful to have so much anger directed at him, but wanted him to know that some people wish him well - including, I was sure, the children he helped at school. I said that I am very lucky to have an interesting job, a home and lovely family, but that when I was younger I took part in criminal activity just as serious as what he had done. I was always reluctant to join in, but didn't have the strength to stand up against what I knew was wrong. The only difference between us was that I never got caught.
"I know that you will survive this horrible experience, and flourish," I wrote. "Despite the terrible difficulty and pressures on you, I hope you will find the opportunity to exercise the wisdom and compassion that, I'm sure, enabled you to get your job as a classroom assistant."

I posted the letter to his solicitor, whose name I found in the newspapers. (You can read all the letters here: http://tinyurl.com/5s3543f) And a couple of weeks later I got a phone call while I was driving. I pulled over to talk – and it was him.

He said he was really surprised to get my letter, and very grateful. He said he felt very encouraged. He wanted to know why I'd written it, to which I could only reply that I thought it might be helpful. He said it was. I asked him to keep in touch. He said he would. It wasn't a long conversation, and nobody said anything very profound, but we made a strong connection, and something very powerful rubbed off on me. I came off the phone feeling elated.

I'm not entirely happy to blog about this because I fear that it might come across as self-serving. But I'm very glad I wrote that letter, and would encourage anybody to do something similar.

John Paul Flintoff is a Faculty member of The School of Life  - join him for the next session of 'How To Make A Difference' on Wednesday 23 November 2011.  Read his postings at http://jpflintoff.tumblr.com/

Richard Reynolds on Compassion for the Cracks

Trampled across, shat upon, dumped on. We let the wasteful abuse of these poor downtrodden sods carry on day after day. Most people are blind to it until they end up tripping up and only then realize what peculiar and ubiquitous little things they are. I’m talking about tree pits, those usually muddy, gravelly openings in our pavements from which a tree grows or perhaps used to grow. I urge you to show them compassion.

These little openings in our hard landscape are direct and public access to the earth and from that ground comes great potential. Their creation is almost always to serve the grander ambition of planting a tree. But this opening can be more than a conduit for a tree trunk. In the early years of a tree’s life the pit serves a crucial purpose in helping the tree take in water. Theoretically a protruding plastic tube or a pavement plughole should provide this, but how many times have you seen anyone re-fueling a tree with a thirst-quenching nozzle? Never I bet. Watering is left to nature and so it’s down to that tiny little tree pit to capture what it can and offer it up for what ever can grow within it. The tree relies on its pit for water until its roots have found other deeper sources of water.

The tree hugger in you will see now how vital a healthy tree pit is. At the very least don’t trample them, litter them or worse still, let your local authority fill them with that deceptively fancy looking resin-bonded gravel which only prevents the tree pit of providing any service it may provide, except as a dog toilet. Better than that, show the tree pit some active compassion. Clear the scrappy tangle of weeds, lightly fork over the soil so it can absorb more water, enrich the ground and in dry weather occasionally carry out a can and give it a really good soaking. Get comfortable with these PDAs and then get more expressive. Plant something joyful there. The open ground is your canvas. Let this tree pit show its potential! Around a mature tree plant daffodils, tulips, crocus, sunflowers, hollyhocks, petunias, cornflower, nasturtium, poppies, mint, marjoram - I’ve had them all flourish in tree pits by guerrilla gardening there, regardless of who should really be tending them. Gardening here is conspicuous compassion and like a wrist band or the red paper poppy it will mark you out to passers by as appreciative, conscious and grateful for the service the tree pit is providing. Get talking to them – I mean the passers by - win them round as compassionate gardeners. Together we can turn these the put upon tree pits into a network of micro parks.

Richard Reynolds is a faculty member of The School of Life, active Guerrilla Gardener and founder of www.guerrillagardening.org. 

If you tend a pavement tree pit in London or know of a beautiful pavement garden then you might like to consider participating in the new Chelsea Fringe London garden festival this May and June. Please contact [email protected]

Dying of Nostalgia; Thomas Dixon Explores Homesickness

Dr Thomas Dixon, writer of the excellent History of Emotions blog, recently interviewed Professor of History at Weber State University, and a leading historian of emotions in the United States, Susan J. Matt. Her first book, Keeping Up With the Joneses, was a study of envy in modern consumer society, and her latest work tackles another emotion: homesickness, in a book titled Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011) which explores how homesickness and nostalgia were transformed from deadly maladies to allegedly un-American emotions. 
 

 

Thomas Dixon [TD]: Hello, Susan, and thanks for talking to us. Perhaps I could start by asking you what got you interested in homesickness?

Susan Matt [SM]: The original impetus was that my own emotional experience of mobility didn’t match up with the mythology of American restlessness. Commentators like Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner as well more modern observers all claimed Americans were naturally restless, that somehow it was in our cultural DNA to leave home. I didn’t find it so effortless or easy to move, and began to wonder if I was alone. Perhaps there was a flip side to American mobility–a hidden history of homesickness. Homesickness also interested me because it seemed in many ways to be the opposite of an emotion I had just been studying–envy. Envy sparks aspirations, pushes people forward, often causes mobility. Homesickness pulls backwards. Both emotions play a role in modern individualism in the U.S.. Americans are encouraged to repress homesickness so they can leave home, be independent, seek more of the world’s goods, act on their envy.

TD: It’s interesting that it was your own emotions that fuelled your desire to revisit their history. I suspect many historians of emotion are in that position. So, what surprised you most about what you discovered when you started digging around in the history of homesickness?

SM: First, how prevalent the emotion was. I thought it would be difficult to unearth, but instead, evidence of homesickness was abundant and easy to find in just about every archive I worked in. Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, I was surprised at how many Americans died of homesickness, or nostalgia as it was called. I knew there had been European epidemics of nostalgia in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but didn’t know of American ones. But indeed, the disease of nostalgia was widely known in the United States–during the Civil War, there were 74 deaths from it on the Union side, and more than 5,200 cases of it in the Surgeon General’s records. 

SD: It became such a problem that army bands were sometimes prohibited from playing “Home, Sweet Home,” which at that time, was the most popular song in the country. In peacetime, civilians suffered from nostalgia as well.  The prevalence and intensity of nostalgia and homesickness throughout U.S. history – from the colonial era to the present - ultimately led me to question whether we were and are the individualists that we are so widely reputed to be. I think we’re not.

TD: I’ve been struck too by the great power of the passions in earlier periods – to cause illness, madness or even death. Medical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abound with fatal bouts of emotion. Is it possible to pinpoint a date after which this changed – when homesickness and nostalgia became mere feelings rather than powerful and potentially fatal mental conditions?

SM: It gradually disappeared as a dangerous disease in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. Army provides a useful gauge in its records. One soldier in the American Expeditionary Force reportedly died of nostalgia during World War I. Increasingly during the War, however, many of the symptoms associated with nostalgia came to be defined as signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock. While the diagnosis of nostalgia stayed on the books up through World War II,  and while there were many reported cases of it among soldiers in that war, there were no deaths. In short, from the early twentieth century on, the number of cases of deadly nostalgia declined, although less lethal cases of homesickness continued (and continue) to abound. It seems worth noting that as nostalgia’s cultural meaning underwent this transformation, the tolerance for the acutely homesick declined, since their condition was now seen as less dire.

TD: Historically you clearly have a really fascinating story to tell about nostalgia and homesickness as modern emotions experienced, as all emotions always are, within a particular geographical and cultural situation, in this case in modern America. I wonder what you think about the contemporary importance of this research, and also of research into the history of emotions more broadly?

SM: The history of homesickness explains a great deal about modern American culture and our national identity. Adults in modern America have learned to repress overt expressions of homesickness, for it has come to connote immaturity, a lack of ambition, and failure. It is out of step with the ethos of modern capitalism, which prizes mobility and individualism. However, while they may not discuss their homesickness publicly, in daily habits and behaviors, American make their feelings about displacement manifest. From ethnic groceries that sell the tastes of faraway homes, to sports teams which symbolize loyalty to a hometown, to our addiction to Facebook, cell phones, and emails, Americans routinely show their preoccupation with staying connected to distant places and people. While we may think of ourselves as an individualistic society, our everyday lives suggest otherwise. And our history – full of people suffering and sometimes dying of homesickness - makes clear that mobility has in fact never been an innate trait of Americans. Instead, they had to learn to leave home, and they have still not completely mastered the art of rugged, restless individualism.

The history of the emotions offers historians and the public a new set of tools to assess the past. Rather than merely judging history on the basis of external behaviors, we can bring in people’s motivations and intentions. These often provide a completely different understanding of social life and revises many of our longstanding narratives about national identity.

 Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions. 

Image: American sheet music of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ arranged for piano and violin, c. 1870s. Source American History Online

NOWNESS interview Geoff Dyer on America

The cultural observations in eclectic author Geoff Dyer's recent freewheeling speech debunking Anglo-American stereotypes at London's School of Life are captured in these illustrations by Paris Vs New York's Vahram Muratyan. In a typically irreverent sermon straddling literature, comedy, etiquette and language, Dyer combined his encyclopedic knowledge with witty digressions into high and low culture. The author of four novels of genre-defying fiction, including Paris Trance and the savagely comic Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, which traces a disaffected journalist's cocaine-fueled trip through the Venice Biennale, Dyer has also written discerning essays on everything from photography and haute couture to donuts and Andrei Tarkovsky. The writer told NOWNESS: “There's a great essay by D.H. Lawrence where he ends up in New Mexico and says, ‘something in my heart expanded’—I get that when I see the American West, the sense of endless possibilities.” Here the reluctantly London-based Dyer muses on the best aspects of life on the other side of the pond.

Unfulfilled dream
My life is a total failure because of my failure to live in San Francisco. To me San Francisco is where that project which I think of as being American—combining individual freedom with civic responsibility—has been taken to some sort of furthest point. It really is like experiencing what life is like a few rungs higher up the evolutionary ladder. 

American literature
I got turned on to reading contemporary fiction through American writers. Salinger, Kerouac, and Joseph Heller: On the Road, The Catcher in the Rye and Catch 22. There's been something about that American voice, the demotic richness of American language that is not at all class-bound, and is so varied. 

Walker Evans
Walker Evans really established the paradigm of how America looks. From an early age you're so exposed to America in films and television, that there's this weird thing that happens when you go there: it seems so different to England but at the same time exactly like you've always pictured it. When we see pictures of old American towns, or old American cars, I wonder, did it always look nice? Or did we start to think it was nice because Walker Evans photographed it? 

Comedy central
One of the ways we console ourselves with living in England is that we like to say Americans have no sense of irony. There's a beautiful irony in that comment because America is the country that has produced Woody Allen, Seinfeld and Larry Sanders, some of the great ironists of our time. I find Don DeLillo screamingly funny. The irony is raised to such a level that is seems both sincere and funny at the same time.

Service culture
Americans are friendly. It's not just friendliness, it is some sort of daily manifestation of American democratic principles. The first time I heard the expression "You're welcome" was in America. I really noticed the transaction being wrapped up in a nice social exchange. You can't help but notice the way that social ripples––friendly, American ripples––extend way beyond the immediate interaction that created them. I'd go for that “have a nice day” superficial friendliness over deep-seated English hostility any day of the week.

Read the interview with some fabulous illustrations by Vahram Muratyan at NOWNESS.COM

Our next sermon will be Professor of Space Exploration, Lawrence Krauss on 16 October 2011. For tickets and more details, click here.

 Photos ©Stephanie Wolff 

If you set up a free school, what would yours be like?

One thing's for sure, ours wouldn't be like the West London Free School, the new school run by parents and led by the author and Telegraph columnist Toby Young.

Of course, you might object to the idea of setting up a free school altogether, least of all because many of the first free schools have been set up by parents in well-off areas to start with. But if we sidestep those thorny issues for after class and just look at the style of the West London Free School, it's clear it wishes it was a five-hundred-year-old grammar school. You can see it in the pupils' blue blazers, the headteacher's black gown, traditional subjects and compulsory Latin. It even has its own Latin motto "Sapere Aude" (dare to learn). It's all very Harry Potter. 

So who cares if parents want to make their school feel so old-fashioned? Well, we do. Without getting all debating society about it, it says a lot about the confidence in our children's future to dream up something that so desperately wishes it was in the past. Imagine if The School of Life had the same rigid ideas of right and wrong subjects and rules. That we wouldn't teach you unless you wore the right blazer and you'd polished your shoes. But when a bunch of well-meaning parents in West London were given a blank slate (and chalk) that's the vision they came up with.

One thing that attracted us to The School of Life in the first place (we were students and fans first, weekend teachers second) was that it didn't feel anything like school or a typical evening class. The style of a school matters and has an impact on us in our later lives. We know this because people who come to our writing class at The School of Life tell us. We've seen it on the faces of some of the more nervous writers at the start too, and in their I-didn't-know-I-could-do-it faces when they realise there's been a brilliant writer inside them all along.

If you think of a writing class most people instantly have flashbacks to lessons about grammar, apostrophes and the dreaded red pen. We don't do any of that. Not that a few rules don't matter, they do. It's just that for most people steadfast grammar rules are wrapped up with fears of getting them wrong. So they worry more about the grammar than about what makes writing a bloody great read.

So if you've been thinking about coming to our Words for Life class but you've been worried about whether you're up to it, or if you've been held back by the autumn (shudder) feeling of going back to school, then this is the writing course for you. We won't get out a red pen once. That's our school motto. 

Rob and Molly run We All Need Words, helping companies with words and branding. They're running our Words for Life weekend on the 8th of October and 3rd of December.

Geoff Dyer on Our Fear of Conversation

For a while, on flights back across the Atlantic from America to Euroland,  we are under the spell  of America. Instead of plonking ourselves down next to someone without a word  we  say, “Hi.”  Maybe even indulge in a little conversation, though this American readiness to chat is counterbalanced by the fear that once we’ve got into a conversation we might not be able to extricate ourselves from it. By the time we’re mid-ocean a kind of preparatory freeze has set in.  As the flight stacks up in the inevitable holding pattern over Heathrow we begin to revert to our muttering and moaning national selves.  But, for a week or so after landing, a form of what might be called Ameristalgia makes us conscious  of a rudeness in British life - a coarsening in the texture of daily life - that had hitherto seemed quite normal. 

Geoff Dyer is author of several novels including the recently published collection of essays ‘Working the Room’ and the wonderfully titled: ‘Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It’. http://geoffdyer.com/

Join us for the first of our autumn sermons on Sunday 18 September that will challenge our engrained ‘British’ ways of approaching life. For further details about this and the rest of the autumn series, click here.

Image: Ryan Bartaby at YCN

Mark Vernon on the Rules of the Group

 The last couple of nights, we’ve sat in the house – watching the blogs, exchanging texts – as our part of London operates a virtual curfew. The looting and arson is rightly condemned. I’m glad about that. But the moment is arriving to try to understand what has been happening on the streets of the UK’s cities too.

It is complex. However, one concept might be particularly useful. It’s the psychological phenomenon of group conscience.

The modern world teaches us that we are individuals. I make my own choices, attend to my own interests and strive to be self-sufficient. Autonomy and individual rights are the moral ideals that shape our age.

In truth, though, no-one is an island. We are social animals, as Aristotle observed, meaning not that we like to socialise, but that our identity is primarily collective. My family, my gang, my team, my nation are where I feel most fully myself and we will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain that sense of belonging. This is what group conscience protects and enforces. It keeps you in, even if that means keeping others out.

It can be likened to the way birds flock in the air, making the most extraordinary patterns as they wheel and swirl. The science suggests that the birds obey just one or two rules. Head for the centre. Mimic your neighbour. They are the rules of the group. We humans are driven by similar compulsions. We long to know our place.

What, then, of the rioters? There is a lot of outraged comment about why youths don’t know the difference between right and wrong. But criminologists point out that this is necessary but by itself also misses the point. Like the birds, the looters are not primarily acting as self-autonomous individuals. They are copycats – doing what their mates are doing; doing what other gangs are doing. This also explains why the violence spreads, and why that is so alarmingly hard to control.

As journalists interview rioters, this is what you hear them say. ‘It was fun.’ ‘We show we can do what we want to.’ ‘It’s time for payback.’ These are collective sentiments. The morality these guys obey is that of the group. And unsettlingly, it can be half good as well as bad. Some of their values, it seems, are driven by a sense of rage and injustice. Others are driven by the culture of greed that opportunistically puts its hand in the till – a value embodied in many other groups too, it should be said.

In fact, we are all the same. The difference is that our groups probably follow values that are mostly, thankfully, pro-social. Group conscience has been heart-warmingly demonstrated by #RiotCleanUp: ‘It's a movement’ declares Dan Thompson, the organiser of the broom army. It has also been on display amongst the vigilantes seeking to protect their property – though they must be careful to monitor the rules they obey.

Heading for the centre and mimicking your neighbour are powerful urges that can lead anyone astray.

Mark Vernon is a philosopher, author and faculty member of The School of Life.  Follow his blog www.markvernon.com

Image by illustrator Emmeline Pidgen see@emmelinedraws

John-Paul Flintoff on #RiotCleanUp

I’m typing this quickly, to get it out before I hear that any more rioting has started, and before setting out to run a class this evening at The School of Life for any intrepid learners not scared to venture out too.

So: #RiotCleanUp. I have been very excited since first seeing this combination of words last night, while the riots were still going.

You see, I’m trying to finish writing a book about changing the world (I know!), but am struggling with the dense horror of the term “non-violent action”. I love the idea, but the words are so off-putting.

I think that #RiotCleanUp more or less conveys much the same idea: it’s dramatic, but also wholesome. There’s a bit of yin and yang going on, as my Chinese doctor might put it: a hint of the liveliness of “riot” that was relished by, among others, the “Riot Grrrrrl” punks, but also sober helpfulness and putting-things-right.

I’ve been a fan of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh for some time, ever since reading one of his books opened my eyes to the possibility of (momentary) enlightenment while washing up. So any movement that takes as its logo a yellow washing up glove is a movement I want to belong to.

(Not that I usually wear washing up gloves, as it happens, because they don’t seem ever to fit my big hands. And washing up gloves are hardly what you need when gathering the broken shards of glass after a riot. But they’re immediately identifiable, and I like them.)

Anyway, am off shortly. But before I go, I’m going to make a trial badge using this image and a make-your-own-badges kit that my brother gave my daughter for her birthday a couple of years ago.

If it’s any good, I might make lots more, the industrial way, and even try to get retailers to sell them.

Would be glad to know what you think.

John Paul Flintoff is a faculty member of The School of Life.  Follow his tumblr here and keep your eye out for #RiotCleanUp badges coming soon........Join the clean up at www.riotcleanup.co.uk