Learning to love the life force

The Answer is Simple ….. Love Yourself, Live Your Spirit’ by Sonia Choquette (Hay House Inc., 2008)

 Sonia Choquette is a globally celebrated spiritual teacher, intuitive consultant, storyteller and visionary guide. In this admirable and persuasive self-help guide she advises we readers to stop dwelling on past errors and start to “live as Divine Beings.” 

She views problems as opportunities which offer the path to true wisdom and warns against the trickery and self-deception of the ego.  She advocates choosing self-love in order to “embrace the authentic you.” These are laudable aims and there’s plenty of truth in what she says.

Choquette’s daunting CV challenges mere mortals like myself to suggest that anything she writes could possibly be wrong.  However,  I venture to part company with her in the manner in which she merges the concepts of the ‘Divine Spirit’ with that of ‘God the Creator’ as if these concepts were one of the same thing.

She writes confidently that  “Your Spirit after death simply returns to the great Creator, the Holy Mother/Father God, and resumes being the light it is made of.” There is of course no fact-based evidence for such an assertion. As with all religious beliefs, faith and mystery stand in for objective proof.

Choquette goes on to revere the Creator as the source for “the fulfilment of all your needs.”  She argues that since this great Woman/Man looks after all our interests all that remains is to keep the heart open and clear. This is all fine and dandy if you are prepared to take on trust the notion that  “God has a plan and positive things are always in store for you.”

Confusingly, she also maintains that “we, as Spirit, are the creative writers, directors, and actors in every scene.” In saying that we and God have the power to steer our lives towards peace, love and understanding is surely a contradiction in terms. Either we open our hearts up for celestial guidance or we set about doing the guiding ourselves. Who’s in control here?   

As I non-believer, I believe that placing trust in a mystical (and unprovable) creator is to deny the power we have within ourselves. As a result, every time Choquette introduced the word Spirit (always with a capital letter) I mentally substituted the term ‘life force’ (in lower case).  After all, the book title urges us not to love your spirit but to live it. 

In short. I think a better title for this book would have been  ‘Love yourself, Love your life force.’  

What’s God got to do with it?

What’s to like about The Zone of Interest ?

We live in a world increasingly dominated by likes or un-likes and surrounded by people to follow or unfollow. Although this was entertainingly dramatized in the Black Mirror episode ‘Nosedive’ ,  in reality it is no laughing matter. The grey areas in between these binary choices are marginalised to the point that there’s precious little space left for nuanced opinion.

When a film like Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ comes along this limitation is a major problem.  The film is an accomplished, complex and uncompromising piece of work that left me awestruck, disorientated and a little numb. These are not reactions that can be summarised  by clicking a ‘like’ button.

Gender as a free-floating artifice

GENDER TROUBLE by Judith Butler

“One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.” —Simone de Beauvoir

“Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body? I dunno – The Smiths (‘Still Ill’)

I have written this post – my first of 2024 – to help me to clarify some the mind (and body) blowing ideas contained in Judith Butler’s influential but still controversial book ‘Gender Trouble’ which was first published by Routledge in 1990.

At the heart of Butler’s treatise are two fundamental questions: What is a woman?  What is a man?

In her 1999 preface to the 3^rd edition, Judith Butler clarifies her intentions stating that one of her primary motivations was to challenge the restrictive definition of gender in feminist theory. She affirms that  woman does not only exhibit her womanness through heterosexual coitus “in which her subordination becomes her pleasure.”

We are conditioned to accept the principle that  power, reason and rationality should always be associated with masculinity while  femininity is confined to a passive role of being in thrall to these qualities. Under the rigid terms of paternal law “the female body [is] characterized primarily in terms of its reproductive function.”

One of the main criticisms of ‘Gender Trouble’ is that it is written in a heightened academic style which many have found both incomprehensible and pretentious. Butler insists “I am not trying to be difficult” yet  acknowledges that the book is not written in a populist style. Her defence is that complex subjects do not lend themselves to simplification : “If I treat that grammar as pellucid, then I fail to call attention precisely to that sphere of language that establishes and disestablishes intelligibility.” 

Purity is the most mysterious of the virtues

Notes on Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Wise Blood’ (with spoilers)

First edition of ‘Wise Blood’ published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1952

“All comic novels that are any good must be about life and death” wrote Flannery O’Connor in her note to the second edition of her debut novel ‘Wise Blood’.  

When I first read this book I was attracted to the gothic atmosphere and the ironic , distorted images of humankind. I took it to be a satire on religious extremism, having no idea at the time that the author was a devout Catholic and that for her the slogan  ‘Jesus Saves’ was meant as a statement of fact.

Despite her unwavering belief in grace and salvation, O’Connor knew full well the criticisms against the faithful and the arguments for atheism. Instead of mounting a defence of the Catholic Church, she presents the anti-religious viewpoint through the voice of the absurdist central character Hazel Motes. He is  a deeply troubled 18 year old who returns to a deserted home town of Eastrod after being discharged from the army. All his family are dead. He is alone, rootless and faithless.

Haunted by visions of Britain’s past

THE MAGIC BOX by Rob Young (Faber & Faber, 2021)

Rob Young was brilliant at uncovering Britain’s visionary music in ‘Electric Eden’, a definitive study of folk music in the UK that took the reader/listener far away from the mainstream.  He is less successful in attempting to apply similar insights into the nation’s visual memory bank.

A more academic approach to television history would have reflected upon  innovative works of writers and directors such as Allan Clarke, Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, David Leland, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Rob Young charts a less linear and more idiosyncratic course . The original works of Nigel Kneale are rightly feted but that doesn’t mean these more  established names should have been excluded. 

Surprisingly, there is also no mention of many of the many cult TV series I remember from the 1960s and 1970s  like The Prisoner  , The Champions , Adam Adamant Lives!, Doomwatch ,  Gangsters and  Jason King . Nor does Young mention any of the long running soap operas and largely ignores comedy shows.

I understand that any study of the period must be subjective but it seems to me that Young’s viewpoint on British culture implies that ghost stories and folk horror were the dominant genres. The political background is for the most part peripheral as the emphasis is on his own memories and the idiosyncrasies of the British character.

TV output from the 1950s to the present provides such a rich source of material that it’s a pity Young chose also to spread his net even wider to include cult movies. In my view, he should have stuck to the small screen.  A cinematic history of Britain belongs to a separate study.   

At his best, Young shows that the weirdness that influenced the alternative music scene was matched by eccentric TV programming of the era . This transported unsuspecting viewers into strange and, often,  scary territories.  Many of the shows referred to were one-offs that have only recently resurfaced in all their ghostly glory on You Tube and other online sites.

This book is valuable for shedding light on these obscure dramas and documentaries but too many of these half-forgotten titles are merely listed and described rather than contextualised. The best section is entitled Divided Kingdom because he covers race, class and gender. These issues are essential to any deeper understanding of British multi-faceted cultural history.