The Charisma Question

One of the most commonly observed
but least understood human phenomena
is charisma, which exists in animals too.

Defining charisma is relatively easy.
In a situation where instruction is involved
charisma is a quality where those instructed
are more malleable because of the charisma
of their instructor, It is much more than seniority,
or pulling rank within a tightly defined hierarchy.

To be a religious leader, a politician, or musician
and be a success at it requires measures of skill,
organisational ability, and (cue fanfare... ) charisma!
For the demonstration of your skills etc to take effect
and the charismatic person to become wealthy.

Charisma is the gift for finding the switch
in ordinary people's brains that makes them believe,
without being able to form questions, what they are told.

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Eleven - The Near And The Far Away

I had no complaints when after six weeks of being a peripatetic care assistant the council changed my job title, and my work, from care assistant where I visited people in their homes and helped them start the day, to being a care worker and visitor who would visit them well after Breakfast. I was relieved that my morning bus journeys to work were standardised to two long journey via the city centre, with the variations of my choice for the journey back. From being a student ten years earlier I had always been 'a bag person', that is I always had a carrier bag with me taking the days required items in one direction and finding more to take back. In Nottingham the upgrade was to a medium sized frameless rucksack, a then-recent charity shop purchase into which I put the food from my late afternoon post-work shopping trips as part of my journey home.10

From April to December I applied myself diligently to the task of being one of a team of three misfit male care workers, and one manager, Pete, who were sent to work in a large fixed portacabin which had several rooms in it, as an office in the middle of one of the more thoroughly run down working class estates in Nottingham where there was not a church, social services, or any sort community building within a three mile radius of the estate. The community I was sent out into were tired and socially withdrawn from so many of then making their benefits stretch to cover their living costs whilst they rented council houses and flats where the council seemed somewhat distant from them. They felt left behind by both Thatcherism and local government. I was employed to make local government seem a little closer and more relevant to them than it had seemed in recent times.20

I write 'misfit', we were all using up the remainder of our part time Manpower Services Commission contracts by doing a job that would either not be done at all or would be more naturally done by women. We were paid to visit local residents and be the better informed neighbour, who when a resident of the area presents a problem as part of a conversation, for us working for the council/living outside the area we could see more clearly that the council had a service that would partially or entirely fix the problem. That is a short profile of what a care worker was meant to do.26

Outside of making council services like meals-on-wheels more amenable to the residents, one of the more useful questions we were licensed to ask was with respect to state benefits. We could and did ask people 'What benefits are you on?' and 'Are you getting all the benefits you are entitled to?'. Quite a few local resident had built up debts that had to be repaid with interest that they could not repay to companies that sold goods from catalogues. One of the still useful parts of the welfare state was to get a loan from the Department of Social Security that repaid the debts with interest that residents had taken out, where the DSS loan was charged at zero percent interest which was repaid at rate agreed with the claimant out of their benefits. We were good at helping local people fill out benefit forms, partly because we were only one job title away from filling in forms on the dole ourselves. We always made sure that the claimant was seen to have filled the forms in, themselves.37 

I liked Pete, the manager, he was going to keep his job with the council, though he might change title and project, long after our contracts ended. Now a man does not have to be gay to feel okay doing what others define as 'a woman's job' but it might help. Up to a point, I think my sexuality helped me do the job better. The job was not going to help me out of the closet-that would take a more personal and emotional push than the job could be. Of the three of us Arthur was the oldest. He was in his early fifties, had an interest in the Citizens Advice side of the work we did from a leftist/journalist's union perspective. He was married and he managed a drink problem. His wife suspected him of adultery, not realising his commitment was to alcohol rather than another female. When he changed his choice of alcoholic drink to one that he was happier having less of that made his wife and his financial position more secure. When I went on a visit and came away with some further choice of action on behalf of who I had just visited  Arthur was a person who saw clearer than I did whether the householder really wanted the help I thought they wanted, or whether they were nearer being bored and making up needs they did not want met.52

I was not alone in getting on badly with the other care worker, Michael. He was the youngest of the three of us. If he was not gay then he was camp enough for others to think he was gay when he was being abrasive and declamatory in the office. With many of the visits we were chatting with women heads of households who were on benefits, who had sons who had moved away. I knew that it was easy for them to see us to see them as like their sons. I knew to be wary about temporary attempts to relate to others with an age/gender gap like that. I tried to keep my visits formal but friendly. That said, I'd level with the women I visited when it felt we were both safe doing that. Goodness knows how he handled the age/gender gap on his visits. If it was anything like his acting out in the office during breaks then he was truly taking the Michael out of the job, particularly when he revealed how well his weekend job as a assistant at HMV paid by comparison. 63

Arthur got annoyed when Michael took the job less seriously in the office, but than we all did,  during the summer months when there seemed to be more time than there seemed to be work to do to fill that time. Michael was one of the few people I can remember privately being very clearly angry and contemptuous towards. Perhaps he had some special technique for getting under the skin of those around him, or I was thinner skinned than I realised in the first place. 68

The latter is more than possible. Pete was the young university educated team leader who kept us all motivated in the face of the indifference around us. He was advancing his career by training as a therapist. I liked him, but then I would have liked any man who seemed personable and had a beard. That said, any attraction that I found through my submerged homosexuality always left me with more questions than I could openly ask myself. The secrecy and lack of explanation it came with required something like assertiveness training to blow the cobwebs away off the subject for me. 75

One day Pete and I got sat talking alone. All the other staff were out on calls. I was lingering over some minor file updating that could be done anytime. By some sort of conversational accident he began talking about his training as a therapist. As far as I could tell my 'being gay' was something others might be able to decode in me if they wanted to. But even if they did, neither of us would have had the words to directly discuss what they had decoded. To me such a dialogue required courage to invent it. But as Pete talked about his training as therapist I was persuaded to reveal one of the earliest unfortunate episodes around my father and his relationship with alcohol. It involved me reading out Christmas cards aged five, and seemingly setting off world war three between my parents just a few feet away from me. 84

Pete very easily regressed me right back to being that five year old in that small living room, reading that card. We were both frightened at how easily he had done it, and both nervous about what to do next to bring me back to a more secure adult state. I found the solution. Aged five I was keen to prove I could read, I read out a Christmas card which caused my parents to argue in such an explosive way that it left me with a hidden trauma. So with Pete, and still in the emotional state of being traumatised and five years old, I teared up a piece of paper as if it were the Christmas card that had seemingly caused me the trauma. This immediately restored me to being the adult he needed me to be, by giving my five year old self an exit they could use from a situation that originally lacked any such exit. But what Pete and I did was dangerous in any setting, and particularly risky in that makeshift private space. 94

I was more glad of that free therapy session, dangerous as it was, than I expected to be at the next works summer Friday night at the pub. At these occasions I joined in because I felt I had to, but I felt I had a lot to be modest about. From the unofficial therapy session onward I felt more confident amid those sometimes disjointed Friday night conversations.96

To be directed to Chapter Twelve please left click here. 

A Life Tested For Shrinkage

 Will always fall short. Will find both life and shrinkage. And the less serious and less thoughtful the shrinkage, the bigger that shrinkage is. There even laughter seems cheap and diminished, a hollow noise where once life seemed fuller. But when you are the butt of the joke enjoy it. You are still making somebody laugh somewhere, there is always a rich life beyond ourselves, and it will often be richer than we think it is, give others what they need and don't worry about your own shrinkage. It happens to everyone.

Self Reinvention Is Never Far Away

Unless we are born into royalty,
or somehow become cult figures
who can command total deference
for life from those we attract,
and deference in the hereafter,
we are all, to a degree, half-formed.

We will never be the people
our complex society advertises we will be,
even when they give us half the means
to be complete, expecting us to busk the rest.

The pressure to conform is easy.
All it takes is an advertisers' nudge
or the withdrawal of gov't money
to make us much more ill at ease
whilst being half-formed, and pressurise us
to doubt the half-sense we have of ourselves.

Whilst signing out of this deal
is difficult, we should not worry.

When societies becomes data
every society is only as good
as it's data storage systems,
and when they collectively fail,
as data storage systems will,
there will be no other version of us,
we are complete in our half memories
complete in how we reinvent ourselves. 

Faith In Language

Until I looked the words up,
I did not realise that the phrase
'super injunction' were so recent
in being coined, or by whom.

2006, and The Guardian, since you ask.

But I understood it straight away.
I had a long memory of living
as part of a family where explaining
to ourselves and each other
what we were doing
and why we had to do it
was an anathema, or at least
it would have been if they knew
what an anathema was.

Adopting religion, well a faith,
did not help the way I thought it would.
There I found not just taboo,
but taboo about taboo, until faith
in language became that difficult
I did not know what to.

Starting from scratch I kept the faith,
but with George Orwell as my guide
I decided that language has to be direct,
active not passive and what mattered
was being able to say who did what,
and when and why they did it.

To ask all this in faith meant that
I could at least have faith in language,
and maybe language could reflect
the life that I thought I was living.     

The Market For Having An Identity.

It is strange how easily old Hollywood,
for being aberrant and ahistorical in itself,
could push images and perpetuate myths
that were nonsense multiplied for viewers
to take as gospel long after the film first had currency.

In 'It's A Wonderful Life' there is a scene
where the towns people lay siege to their local bank
'to ask for their money back' as if the money
they once put in the bank long ago was still there,
their names were on the notes, or at least on the boxes
that their money was stored in, in the safe, as if  the bank
was a safer version of putting the money under their mattress.

To state the obvious, money does not work like that.
Nor does identity and every identity based on money
and property is only as stable as the market for exchange
that it is part of. The process of exchange, new money for old, 
identity updates and advances with age, are what supports
the renewal of every given community and society. 

You will still exist, whatever the bureaucracy.
Whether it is a bank holding your details,
and money that was only ever notionally yours
at the moment you handed it over. Or when the gov't
holds details that facilitate what seems to be the life
style of your choice, when it was chosen for you.

If you want an identity outside of all that,
then first you have to realise the size
of what you are asking for-it is a lot.

As for me, the bank no longer ask for my i/d
as they asked before, the tellers recognise me.
I could not ask for more than that.

       

Unintentional Virtue

The biggest mistake anyone can make
is to deny the possibility
that they will make mistakes.
It can only mean they make more
of the mistakes they made before,
and do worse-through not learning.

The best we can do is adapt
our errors in the hope of change
-making a different mistake-
in the hope of finding virtue in them.