Tell us a story

In a recent bout of insomnia, I've been re-reading John Burnside's memoirs, particularly his account of living with apophenia in 'Waking Up In Toytown'. There's a dream-like quality to Burnside's prose that suits the small hours (hours which he notes aren't small at all to the insomniac, in fact they are 'beyond all cartography') and a guiding intelligence to the way he views his past that emphasises the nature of memory as much as what's being recounted.

"Every story is supposed to have a beginning, a middle and an end, it doesn't matter what order they come in, as long as they're there. One of the things that makes a memory different from a story is that it might well come with a beginning and an end, but the middle tends to blur or even vanish altogether....Any first meeting is the occasion for a romance that might last a lifetime, a thin, subliminal stratum of scents and sounds that can be awakened years later by the faintest stimulus - even if the moment came to nothing."

Burnside's memoirs brim with the idea of the narrative self, the way we make our own stories up as we going along, trying to make sense of the seemingly random and painful things that happen to us. I've written before on 'Poetry on the Brain' about Benjamin Libet's experiments into the gap between intention and action and the implications for our notion of free will, the way the conscious self is alerted to actions that the body is already performing.

We often believe we act much more consciously than we do. This, in turn, relates to the left hemisphere's tendency to confabulate. As Michael Shermer puts it in 'The Believing Brain' (2011), the story-weaving capacities of the left-hemisphere are not necessarily more instructive: the neural network he calls the ‘left hemisphere interpreter’ is adept at reconstructing events into a logical sequence and a story that ‘makes sense’. But its reconstruction may not be faithful, it is biased towards that necessity of ‘making sense’. And it engages in confabulation. In 'The Telltale Brain' (2011), V.S. Ramachandran discusses anosognosia, the denial of paralysis seen in some patients after a stroke which affects the right hemisphere. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with constructing an internally-coherent belief system:

‘If there is a small piece of anomalous information that doesn’t fit your “big picture” belief system, the left hemisphere tries to smooth over the discrepancies and anomalies in order to preserve the coherence of the self and the stability of behaviour. …the left hemisphere sometimes even fabricates information to preserve its harmony and overall view of itself’ (2011:267) 

The right hemisphere, by contrast, is concerned with detecting these discrepancies, is sensitive to paradox and contradiction. To quote Iain McGilchrist:

'Paradox means, literally, a finding that is contrary to received opinion or expectation. That immediately alerts us, since the purveyor of received opinion and expectation is the left hemisphere. I

called it a sign that our ordinary ways of thinking, those of the left hemisphere, are not adequate to the nature of reality. But – wait! Here it seems that the left hemisphere, with its reliance on the application of logic, is stating the opposite: that it is reality that is inadequate to our ordinary ways of thinking.’ (2010: Kindle Locations 3846-3850). 

Patients with a right hemisphere stroke who are paralysed on the left side of their body will deny that they are paralysed at all. Ramachandran believes this clinical evidence relates to ‘the kinds of everyday denials and rationalisations that we all engage in to tide over the discrepancies in our daily lives’ (2011:267). McGilchrist connects confabulation to a shift in Western philosophy in which paradox gradually became conceived of as something more and more problematic.

Poetry often makes a show of that confabulation or misremembering, makes a virtue of the narrative self. We are not who we think we are. We are adept story tellers. In a sense, the version of events a poem offers might be as accurate as anything we're likely to tell ourselves. John Burnside is always sensitive to that in his own poetry, alive to the prospect of parallel lives. In 'Documentary' (from 'The Hunt in the Forest', 2009), he imagines

somewhere from one of those slightly too plausible films
where the street is a parallel street in a parallel world

and everything is altered slightly, though not that much,
only another version of what we know

going about its business, our parallel selves
brighter and more successful than we seem...

(from 'Documentary')

But there's nothing overly-sentimental about the parallel worlds evoked in Burnside's work. As he reflects in 'Waking Up In Toytown', the glamour we touch even our most painful memories with is artificial, a product of the narrative tendency. And that's just fine. To quote him:

"Didn't F. Scott Fitzgerald say somewhere that the difference between a sentimentalist and a romantic is that the sentimentalist is afraid that things won't last forever, whereas a romantic is afraid that they will?"

Against the Arbitrary

Previously on 'Poetry on the Brain', I've written about Merlin Donald's theory of language evolution from mimetic origins, the role of mirror neurons in action perception and (via the indomitable Raymond Tallis) Saussure and the arbitrariness of the sign. All these themes are brought together in a lucid paper by Michael Corballis from 2009, 'Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Language'.

Since its discovery (and all the attendant hype), the mirror neuron system in humans has been associated with language, not least because when these neurons were first identified in monkeys, they were located in area F5 of the monkey’s frontal cortex, an area considered the homolog of Broca’s area (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998), which was also the first area implicated in language (Broca, 1861). In monkeys, the mirror system mostly responds to actions that are object directed. In humans, it responds to those that are not, suggesting a key role in the origins or symbolic understanding and a relationship to linguistic symbols. At some point in human evolution, its evident that the mirror system adapted from its function in primates and assumed an additional role in language.

Corballis shares Merlin Donald's belief that language evolved from gesture and emotive vocalisation. Indeed, he's careful to point out that language need not necessarily involve vocalisation at all, pointing to the sophistication of sign language. The fact that the kind of language we are familiar with today seems far from mimetic (the exception being words that contain elements of onomatopoeia) is not convincing evidence that language did not evolve from gesture. As Corballis puts it:

'Signs....tend to become less iconic and more arbitrary over historical time in the interests of speed, efficiency and grammatical constraints.'

Iconicity is squeezed out by the requirements of speech in context. The arbitrariness of words is not a necessary property of language, but results from expedience. He gives the interesting example of changes in sign language, from gestures which mimic what they describe quite directly to more succinct, abstract gestures.

Mirror Whippets

Indeed, speech, as Corballis defines it, is perceived as gesture by the mirror neuron system. It is a gesture produced by the lips, velum, larynx, the root of the tongue and other parts of the body (leaving aside the more overt gestures that still often accompany speech): gesture is not confined to movements that are visible. Speech and manual gestures share their roots in the mirror neuron system, where they are perceived in terms of intention.

One question which often seems to challenge mimetic theories of language evolution is the problem of how the transition from gesture to speech occurred. Was it the equivalent of The Big Bang? A sudden shift to vocalisation? Corballis suggests a gradual transition process which involved a greater reliance on using the face. Gestural communication would always have involved some facial movement and he suggests that a gradual addition of sound made certain facial expressions more accessible. Like Merlin Donald, he believes the evolution of language was shaped by social pressures (generated by larger social groups) and, crucially, the need to mentally 'time travel', to be able to reference events in the past and the future in order to communicate clearly.

Corballis' article is particularly strong where it challenges many of the assumptions inherent in linguistic theory. He cites Tomasello’s (2003) observation that linguist’s conceptions of language have traditionally been shaped by the languages of literate, Western populations. Language varies according to cultural requirements, in fact.

‘Across the world, languages may vary as much as the material cultures themselves do. In non-western societies, with relatively few material artefacts, language may take a rather different shape….but is nonetheless finely tuned to the needs and customs of the culture…Prior to the emergence of autonomous speech, a largely gestural form of language would presumably have served almost as well, but for the psychological (rather than linguistic) disadvantages of the visual modality relative to the auditory one.’ (2009:33)

In keeping with the crux of Michael Corballis' argument, I'll leave you with Stevie Smith's poem 'The Face', which you can read in full here.

Neuro-inspiration

Whippets & fiction

In a short article for the Guardian Review this Saturday, Charles Fernyhough considered the relationship between neuroscience and fiction. If neuroscience is fast becoming one of the most debated disciplines of our time (in the way something like psychoanalysis was in the past, for example), surely the questions it raises about the nature of experience should be ripe for novelists to explore?

"If tracing behaviour and experience to its neural underpinnings really offers a new understanding of humanity, aren't novelists bound to draw on it in revealing how their characters understand themselves? In one sense, neuro-explanations seem to challenge the mechanisms by which novels work. Neuroscientists warn us that we may have no freewill, no "self" at the helm; their work shows that our memories are leaky reconstructions and that even our visual perception of the world is a system of illusions. How do these messages change what we do, how we feel, how we decide to live? Fiction is a perfect medium for exploring these questions."

Fernyhough points out that most attempts to incorporate the findings of neuroscience into fiction focus on the pathological, on neural disorders. The one counter example he gives is Ian McEwan's 'Saturday', in which the violent behaviour of a character called Baxter turns out to have a genetic rather than neural cause (for all the novel's focus on brain science and the fact that its central character is a neurosurgeon). At the dramatic denoument of 'Saturday', Baxter's behaviour and outlook is not changed by the findings of neuroscience, but by an earnest recital of a poem - Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach'. I for one have always found the conclusion of 'Saturday' singularly unconvincing, for all its optimism. The instantaneous, transformative effect of a poem supports my wildest hopes, but runs contrary to my experience as a writer (or, more specifically, my experience as someone who spends a lot of time reading poems aloud). Poetry has a private magic, but its effects are seldom so immediate and public.

Fernyhough concludes that novelists might be reacting to the focus neuroscience places on evidence, on locating the genesis of experience:

"Fiction exists for its own purposes, and writers and readers will rightly resist attempts to turn it into "evidence" for or against anything. It's possible that neuroscience is just too new for its ideas to have permeated literary fiction in the way that those other paradigm-changers, Darwinism and psychoanalysis, did."

When I look back on the few poems I've written this past year that have been inspired by neuroscience in some way, it seems they're largely concerned with the pathological too. Perhaps, in my case, that's because some of the most compelling or 'creative' writing in neuroscience deals with the pathological - I'm thinking in particular of writers like Oliver Sacks and the fascinating case studies they draw upon.

I'll leave you with my short piece about the notion of Phantom Limb Syndrome, which fails to break with the tradition in fiction Fernyhough is describing.

Phantom Limb Syndrome

- to know there must be more of you
than what your skin contains.

At night, you reach across the city,
stroke her neck without leaving your chair.

The hand you do not have can do piano scales.
It knows each of her fingertips.

It plucks discretely at your coat buttons.
Sometimes, it takes you by the shoulder,

steers you down the street. You’ve cupped
Belize and found it light.

You’ve held the Alps. You’ve let the Dead Sea
trickle through your opening fist.

You’ve still not touched her
everywhere.

Thinking without words

The author, surrounded by several types of snow...
Photo by Andrew Marshall.

In my first poetry pamphlet, 'the shape of every box' (published by tall-lighthouse back in 2007) there's a poem called 'The Word for Snow', which takes as its starting point the notion that the Inuit have twenty-two words for snow. It's a claim I've since heard disputed - some say they only have two: a remarkable rate of attrition.

The idea of all these different words for snow is often connected to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from the '80s, which claims that there is no extra-linguistic reality, that our conception of the world is shaped entirely by language. In other words, someone who really did have a plethora of words for snow would live in a very different world from someone who only has one. Thoughts, then, are determined by language.

Writing about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in his book 'The Language Instinct', Steven Pinker dismisses it abruptly as a "conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere...'

It is difficult, of course, to conceive of thought without language when we're busy communicating about these problems linguistically.

Pinker goes on to make his case rather more persuasively with evidence variously drawn from the logical capacities of aphasics, the way that Turing's machines could reason without language and the capacities of children to solve logic problems before they have acquired language. More interestingly for writers, he talks about those moments when language seems inadequate to express what we wanted to say, when words fail us - those moments when the poem forms only a shadow of the thoughts that generated it.

He also cites examples of creative inspiration coming from a seemingly extra-linguistic source:

Coleridge.

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that visual images of scenes and words once appeared involuntarily before him in a dreamlike state (perhaps opium-induced). He managed to copy the first forty lines onto paper, resulting in the poem we know as 'Kubla Khan', before a knock on the door shattered the images and obliterated forever what would have been the rest of the poem."

I agree with Pinker's instinct to challenge the (now often challenged) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but his substitution of 'Mentalese', the language of thought, merely seems to replace one problem with another. If there is a separate 'language of thought', how can it be accessed, discussed and how does it differ from verbal language? Once again, the discussion seems to confuse consciousness and thought, using the term 'thought' to mean different things at different times.

It only seems fair to leave you with the poem I wrote, inspired by an incorrect premise - a poem that has since been revised to play down the reference! It's taken from my forthcoming full collection, 'Division Street' which will be published by Chatto & Windus late this summer.

Twenty Two Words for Snow 

The lawn was freezing over
but the air stayed empty,
and I wondered how the Inuit
would name this waiting –
our radio playing to itself in the bathroom,
the sound from the street
of ice-cream vans out of season
in this town where we don’t have

twenty-two words for anything,
where I learned the name
for artificial hills, the bridge
where a man was felled by bricks
in the strike. From the window,
I watch the sky as it starts to fill.
In the kitchen, dad sifts flour,
still panning for something. 

Strong imagination: poetry, psychotism and genes

Following from the discussion on 'Poetry on the Brain' a while back about Kay Redfield-Jamison's 'Touched With Fire', linking bipolar disorder and the artistic temperament, I've been reading Daniel Nettle's 'Strong Imagination', which explores similar themes. Nettle sets out to take seriously the claim Shakespeare has Theseus make in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' that

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact...

Nettle is concerned with the extent to which mental illness (specifically affective disorders and schizophrenia) is part of a continuum - "madness is not so much a mental malfunction as a state of horrible hyperfunction of certain mental characteristics." It is an interaction between genetics and environment. People have different, inherited susceptibilities to psychotic incidents or affective disorders which are subsequently triggered by life events. Thus a potential trigger might be a relatively minor life event for someone with a genetic propensity to illness. Discussing the biological and humanistic traditions in psychiatry, he tries to take something from each, focusing on neuroscience as much as sociology.

Considering how the disorders he discusses might be related to creativity, Nettle covers much of the same ground (and cites some of the same studies) as Redfield-Jamison, looking at incidences of mental illness in the families of successful artists and the extent to which "creative individuals have often sought to cultivate something very close to the schizotypal experience as a way into their work." Wary of the Romantic notion of the mad author or artist, Nettle adds several caveats. Firstly, many of the studies he and Redfield-Jamison cite "do not demonstrate an association between psychotic traits and creative capacity so much as an association between psychotic traits and creative recognition. This may reflect something about what contemporary Western culture chooses to bestow value on." He is also careful to show how mental illness is, of course, debilitating and prevents creative output rather than facilitating it. Writers, he argues, are people of great self-discipline, organisation and, often, strong ego, things that may be undermined in illness.

Crucially, Nettle distinguishes between psychosis and psychotism. The genes he is trying to explain the persistence of are those of the latter, not the former. And he makes the case for psychotism being related to creative output and thus being kept in the population throughout evolution because it has a useful function. Heightened creativity comes from psychotism, but not psychosis. He takes examples of artistic endeavours being prized highly in Inuit cultures and other societies to suggest an artistic universal, enduring throughout time. What could that use possibly be? Nettle thinks it is to do with social and sexual display.

"There is an obvious similarity between the peacock's tail and what goes on in the Inuit dance house....at the very centre of the struggle to survive, one suddenly encounters a thing of deep impracticality and showiness, in which individuals compete to impress each other...Human creative performance could well be, at root, a form of sexual display."

The central characteristic of human display, according to this model, is not a physical characteristic but a cerebral one. The argument is not meant to imply that the conscious (or even unconscious) motivation on the part of the creator is to attract a mate, nor that people appreciate art because of a subconscious drive for sex, just that the reason the drive to create has stayed around is because of its usefulness in sexual selection: "it is a theory about the evolutionary significance of cultural performance, not its human significance."

I'm still sceptical about Nettle's equation of psychotism, artistic creativity and sex, perhaps bearing in mind Raymond Tallis' wry observation that 'great artists are more often biological losers than they are alpha semen spreaders’. Occasionally, Nettle's logic breaks down. Discussing gender differences in rates of depression, for example, he suggests that the excess of classical depression in women might be because men are responding to their problems of low mood in different ways:

"There is evidence to suggest that this interpretation is the right one. For one thing, when the numbers of men who are alcoholic or impulsively violent are added to the numbers who are depressed, the total is about the same as the number of women who are depressed."

Of course, to compare these gender differences accurately, you would actually need to factor the numbers of women who are alcoholic or impulsively violent into the comparison too, if these problems are to be considered evidence of depression - Nettle seems to be forgetting that some women might also express their depression in these ways. The statistical comparison does not hold water.

Nonetheless, 'Strong Imagination' is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the artistic temperament. Perhaps Nettle's most telling observation in the whole book is about the objective folly of creative endeavours:

"To ride through a difficult and enervating task, week in, week out, quite alone, without any validation from the outside world, one has to sustain an unreasonably enthusiastic mood. In fact, one has to be in a mood which, from the point of view of most other activities in life, is pathological. One should not blast on with unabashed cheerfulness in a relationship that gives nothing back for months, or persevere in an economic activity that seems to be yielding nothing."

Something all poets can identify with, if nothing else.

Not Saussure about Tallis

Not Saussure

Reading Raymond Tallis’ ‘Not Saussure’ recently (and trying not to groan at the title) returned me to some of Tallis’ arguments against what he dubs ‘neuromania’ in his book 'Aping Mankind...' and in his repeated criticisms of much of Iain McGilchrist’s work about the significance of the structure of the hemispheres to our apprehension of reality - it led me to some possible contradictions in Tallis’ standpoint.

First published in 1995, ‘Not Saussure’ is a typically withering, witty critique of what Tallis considers ‘post-Saussurean’ theory, particularly structuralism and, in relation to literature, New Criticism. Tallis attacks the notion that there is no extra-linguistic reality and that, when it comes to literary texts, there is nothing outside the text (in the sense that all texts are responses to other texts, rather than in the sense that the whole world is a text’s scope – surely there’s an embedded ambiguity in Derrida’s original quote?). Tallis’ argument is more moderate - he believes that “language merely offers a multiplicity of access routes to what remains one and the same referent”.

At the heart of Tallis’ critique is the notion that language may mediate between consciousness and

Saussure

reality, but that does not mean all reality is inter-linguistic. Post-Saussurean arguments seem to confuse consciousness and thought,he claims: the latter may be linguistic, but the former is not. As such, they deny our non-verbal experience and ignore the ways in which, for example, spatial edges are not amenable to linguistic reclassification. He illustrates his point by discussing Terence Hawkes’ claim (in Structuralism and Semiotics) that ‘dark’ is defined principally by our sense of its opposition to ‘light’:

“There is a kind of confusing half-truth in this: of course ‘dark’ and ‘light’ refer to opposing experiences and to this extent are in part defined by their opposition to one another…..Nevertheless, dark and light are not themselves

How do we tell dark from light?

defined exclusively or even principally in terms of this relation. ….the experience of light has a content over and above its formal opposition to the experience of dark. Indeed, without two kinds of experience there would be no basis for the opposition – and there would be no more grounds for seeing ‘light’ and ‘dark’ as an opposed pair as there would be for seeing ‘light’ and ‘custard’ or ‘prime number’ and ‘Roland Barthes’ as opposed pairs….It is experience rather than language that underwrites the opposition between the two terms.” 

Tallis bolsters his argument with a neural analogy and its this aspect of the book that particularly piqued my interest, given his dismissal of works like ‘The Master and his Emissary’ as essentially misleading and reductive. Referring to the brain, Tallis says:

“It is no exaggeration to say that it is the very structure of the nervous system that creates the condition for their being explicit outsideness, a consciousness of extra-cerebral reality. Instead of blocking access to or genuine openness to the environment, the structure permits the events provoked in the brain by the environment to become the basis of the body’s being explicitly environed.” 

Though Tallis goes on to argue further that just because this structure exists it would be ludicrous to say that the brain simply reflects or replicates reality, this seems an interesting admission in view of his critique of McGilchrist, in particular McGilchrist’s suggestion that the brain may ‘generate’ the mind or ‘mediate’ it. If the brain creates the conditions for ‘outsideness’, why should McGilchrist’s argument that the modes of attention typical of the left and right hemipsheres are reflected in the world humans have built and occupy prove so controversial, so reductive in Tallis’ eyes? Tallis is always keen to argue that the brain is a necessary but not sufficient basis for consciousness, but there seems nothing in McGilchrist’s book that contradicts this – the brain is framed as a necessary and important structure which has given rise to two distinct attentional modes, themselves reflected both literally and metaphorically in culture and society.

Throughout ‘Not Saussure’, Tallis is quick to identify tautologies in post-Saussurean theory and is sensitive to ‘pragmatic self-refulation’ (where the act of stating something provides the best counter-example of what is being said. Its interesting, then, to see him responding to Iain McGilchrist’s talk at the RSA by saying:

“He may argue that he is talking only metaphorically but the metaphors are often presented as literal truth and they are necessary to carry his argument.” 

I wonder how something presented metaphorically can simultaneously be presented as a literal truth? ‘Not Saussure’ is a fascinating book, but when it comes to writing about neuroscience, I’m not sure Tallis is always above the traps he damns in the work of others.

In view of Tallis' light / dark example, and the nature of the topic, it seems appropriate this time to finish with Emily Dickinson's poem 'There's a certain slant of light':

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.

1945 and all that

"The art of storytelling is coming to an end … 

It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the

securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness." - Walter Benjamin, 1969

"To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best." - Margaret Thatcher

If you're looking for a film to see this bank holiday weekend, you might be thinking of Ken Loach's documentary 'The Spirit of '45', a whirlwind journey through the creation of the Welfare State after '45

and its subsequent erosion. I watched 'The Spirit of '45' recently in Sheffield, where the audience in the cinema stood up and applauded at the end and someone shouted "Sheffield, unite!". Loach combines archival footage with interviews: now-elderly people who remember the first days of nationalisation and the NHS. The film focuses on Thatcherite Britain as much as post-war Britain and considers how each change established after '45 was effectively reversed by the Conservative government, from the privatisation of the railways to the battle between miners and police over pit closure.

Described by Philip French in The Observer as 'thin, misleading and sentimental', Loach's film does, at times, point towards a past utopia that may never have quite existed (the film barely touches on the difficulties post-war Labour governments experienced, though it does briefly allude to nationalisation sometimes making little difference to the lives of workers, particularly miners). It starkly polarises the early post-war years and the Thatcher era. As befits the way the documentary footage is presented, everything is very black and white. But as I watched 'The Spirit of '45', Loach's work brought to mind some of the polarization described in Iain McGilchrist's work, the divide between the cerebral hemispheres and their modes of apprehension.

In the last section of McGilchrist's book, he looks at the relationship between modernity, schizophrenia and the left hemipshere's tendency to make things both abstract and self-conscious. Though McGilchrist never writes about Thatcherism directly, there are some interesting parallels between the world he evokes and some of the changes Loach's film tries to highlight. In a left hemisphere world:

"Structures which used to provide the context from which life derived its 

meaning have been powerfully

eroded, and ‘seepage’ from one context into another produces bizarre, sometimes surreal, juxtapositions which alter the nature of our attention to them, facilitating irony, distance and cynicism at the expense of empathy. In this way the experience of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reproduces many of the experiences until now confined to schizophrenics."
In particular, McGilchrist's focus on how abstraction breeds paranoia made me think of the - now iconic - Thatcherite notion that 'there is no such thing as society' and the reliance on strong policing:

"Notice that the focus of paranoia is a loss of the normal betweenness – something that should be being conveyed from others to myself, is being kept from me. The world comes to appear threatening, disturbing, sinister. When implicit meaning is not understood, as Wittgenstein surmised, paranoia is the result: ‘Mightn't we imagine a man who, never having had any acquaintance with music, comes to us and hears someone playing a reflective piece of Chopin and is convinced that this is a language and people merely want to keep the meaning secret from him?’"

McGilchrist's identification of a "close relation between a concern for materiality and a simultaneous impulse towards abstraction" suggests a different, metaphorical way of looking at the relationship between consumerism and a particular attitudinal mode. He suggests that "materialists....are not people who overvalue, but who undervalue matter. They see it only under Scheler's lowest realm of value: that of utility and sensation."

Ken Loach's film might be more accurately described as presenting two competing world views (akin

to the 'styles' of the two hemispheres described in 'The Master and his Emissary', using the metaphor of post-war politics to do so. Of course, political reality itself is far from metaphorical - Loach's film gestures briefly in its closing section towards what the future of welfare in Britain might be.

I was particularly interested in Loach's footage of the Miner's Strike, because some of the changes enacted in Thatcherite Britain have inspired poems in my forthcoming collection, 'Division Street'. I'll leave you with a poem, first published in The Morning Star, that considers pit closure, inspired by Ian McMillan's far better poem 'Pit Closure as Art':

Pit Closure as a Tarantino Short

after Ian McMillan

The Suit who pulled the trigger left
a card between the victim’s fingers,
printed white on red.
Business Closed was all it said.

He wiped his bloodless hands
down on his shirt for show,
as if someone still watched him
as he turned to go. And as he did,

he met the dead man’s stare
and noticed how the bullet hole
between those two dark eyes
made up a black ellipsis; then he swore

he heard the dead man’s voice
above the heartbeat of the clock:
Nothing’s finished, only given up.
Before he left, he checked the lock.