Steve_Bamlett_blog

From a film made to support schools teaching the poem Give by the BBC. See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/class-clips-video/articles/znd7t39

I happened upon a word on a wall
That said just 'Give': Give what? I thought, I give
Enough in taxes, in support of those 
Who claim to suffer more than me. Who knows?
If someone could write on walls can't they hold
A pen, or beat a metal bar against 
The anvil of my hardness. Can't they just!

When you try to react to a true poem in verse,(as I did in my lines above), you find yourself adopting a voice you did not know you could inhabit – to me it proves that the truth of most claims of ‘acts of random kindness’, if I were to indulge falling into one, are more likely to be a soft and sore reaction to the development of a hardening callus over the whole of my skin, over my soul did I believe I had one, that fears that one ‘random act’ given in to in order to ease another’s suffering might open floodgates of demands made upon me. In those situations, the small act can seem the portal to awareness of huge suffering against which the act shrinks to minuteness in significance. Having said that, I could never properly identify with that vile and selfish voice in my verse above, thankfully.

The work of art that mosts questions whether anything we do or feel can be measured against reason, rather than the sensibility provoked by the experience, is that vastly underrated play by Shakespeare, Measure for Measure. In Act 3, Scene 1, line 61ff.,  Isabella says in one of its problematic arguments, measuring the size of something in the mind compared to its measure of impact on the sensations of the body:

.... Dar’st thou die?
The sense of death is most in apprehension,
And the poor beetle that we tread upon
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.

The points she makes are interconnected, but each is a simple statement of the sovereignity of subjectivity in some measures of experience. They are reduced to three statements thus:

• 1. You think you are prepared to die, but that is because you diminish the impact by merely mentalising it. However small you think that impact is, it might not feel like that when felt in your physical body viscerally.
• 2. You think you are wise and that I am not. You think yourself a cognitive giant whilst you measure my mind as if the size of a little  beetle.
• 3. A beetle’s physical size compared to that of a giant man does not correlate with the degree of its suffering, which is equal to that of a giant man.

Packing giant meaning into small spaces is a trick of early modern literature. In Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, the rich man’s imagination is of wealth beyond the conventional, and its meaning amounts to this:

And thus methinks should men of judgment frame
Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade,
And as their wealth increaseth, so inclose
Infinite riches in a little room.

The same could be applied to the meanings available in a sparse number of words in examples of that literature and was to be done in a manner that challenged our matter-of-fact conventional and normative thinking. Such a way of writing was expected in both the dramatic verse and lyrics of poets in sixteenth, and even more in seventeenth, century English. It was later named ‘metaphysical’ poetic form to contrast it with non-reflexive thought and writing. It allowed the things degraded by intellectual cultures – the lower classes, women, the minorities – a voice whilst appearing not to challenge the intellectual fancies of the court. In Isabella’s speech the term ‘corporal sufferance’ may use abstract Latinate vocabulary, but it is made to feel when voiced as if entirely visceral – full of the the very things intellectuals miss out of their measurement of experience – feeling and emotion. But here – let’s have ‘measure for measure‘.

The same can be said of random and planned acts of kindness. It is because they are small we get away with calling them ‘random’, following no plan and making no claims for their ultimate significance, at least to the recipient of the kindness. I wanted to test that out! Have you walked down a street and seen someone lying in a doorway or window niche, perhaps like the example below – it is a still from the BBC video on Give to which I have already referred)? When I was a student, I remember sitting and talking to such men or women – being equally lonely but at least in a hall of residence. I don’t do it now.

Do I weigh up (measure) the potential cost to me against the actual benefit to them as I conceive it? Are my measures correct? Certainly, I don’t now, as a matter of fact, try to be obviously kind – beyond depositing change near the person. And even more certainly there is nothing ‘random’ in the probable existence of these acts of measuring small insignificant-to-me things against large perhaps-significant-to-them things (even though the latter are only potential (such as, what if the person attacks me?). For a start, I would find all the measures of these things crude and perhaps patronising in look or reality. But let’s take another scene I am less likely to see but might, though in this one, we are aware there is a camera crew in action. It is from the same source as above. Here, as I pass under a dark tunnel, I see a man writing (or do I in my inner speech say ‘scrawling’) on the pavement. Do I read his words, do I evaluate them intellectually, emotionally, or as a call to action? Do I, instead, in fact, pass by because I sense a man kneeling in the dark seems a threat, his words perhaps hurtful (or over-demanding)?

In fact the man is Simon Armitage (but he wasn’t Poet Laureate then) and the poem one we might react differently to from another source – such as in my collection of his signed first editions (signatures collected at various readings), safely wrapped up in book covers – on page 14 of Dead Sea Poems (1995):

A culturally and socially significant poem is Give. It is now taught regularly at O Level (why the BBC have a film about it) and in context, it measured up against the Blair Government’s experiment of mixing neo-liberal economics (based on shrinking and ‘privatising’ the state) and a welfare provision in the state measured against the potentials offered in economic growth. There is meat in the poem – typed in full as an appendix – to challenge that ideology. Lets’take a few lines and certain words in them:

Of all the doorways in the world
to choose to sleep, I’ve chosen yours.
I’m on the street, under the stars.

For coppers I can dance or sing.
For silver-swallow swords, eat fire.
For gold-escape from locks and chains.

It’s not as if I’m holding out
for frankincense or myrrh, just change.

The keyword of the neoliberal experiment launched by Margaret Thatcher and perhaps more honoured by the right wing of the Labour Party than anyone else was ‘choose’ or ‘choice’, certainly now when the latter is the hegemonic force in the current government, and without the broad church of socialist ideas that Tony Blair maintained. Markets worked by the free application of private choices, the result being, the ideology went, growth of both wealth and the ability to trickle down such wealth to those in need at the base of the socio-economic structure of society:

The effect in Left politics was to change the discourse of Labour politics from support for the working class, even when disabled from working, sometimes by the very contradictions attendant on growth of capital as a lever for change, to support for ‘working people’ or ‘working families’. The person in the doorway fits neither category, even though Angela Rayner claims her manipulations of the private housing market and employment law will eventually include them in those who get real-life benefits from that government policy. Their right to ‘choice’ is one that few support, especially if they ‘choose’ to sleep in the doorway of your home, a shop you own or even use regularly. Those that do support them see them as a spectacle perhaps – like the circus acts that Armitage imagines them to be working as – using ever ambiguity in the book. Coppers are the pennies we might give beggars, but they are also the police we pay to rouse them from their place of sleep. We allow the homeless to represent ‘the poor’, those that Christianity sometimes bathes itself in smugness by repeating the supposed words of Christ in Matthew 26: 11:

For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.

Armitage was on that one in those radical days, even joking that that the poor person we see in our doorway is not Christ – he isn’t wanting gifts of GOLD and FRANKINCENSE (or myrrh presumably) but only CHANGE. The change they get are the coppers from my pocket (I try to keep the minimum to a £1 coin but it doesn’t exonerate me – LOL!). For the ‘change’ the poor, homeless and marginalised need is socio-economic and political change. And if we want performers who act as a release valve for our better feelings for a fee, like stage escapologists from ‘locks and chains’, try these:

But I do not think, despite playing up with the Trotskyist poster above that either Simon Armitage nor I need to commit to classic Marxism from the nineteenth century. There is a streak of communitarianism in English Socialism that might suit Armitage and his poetry better – one that lauds diversity as well as the community, as these ideas as cognate But it does mean we have to dispense of cheering ourselves up with ‘random acts of kindness’ and work for change that benefits many. That need not exclude small acts of attitudinal togetherness, displayed by SMALL acts. In the video analysis of his own poem Give, Simon Armitage interviews Graham Hudson, a former homeless man who, at the time of the video, volunteered at The Mustard Tree that helps homeless people in Manchester:

Graham does not minimise ‘small acts’ and has experienced them positively. After the picture below follows a bit of the interview:

SIMON: Graham, do you wanna tell me a bit about what goes on here?

GRAHAM: The Mustard Tree supports a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds, predominately homeless. We run two soup runs a week.

SIMON: Right.

GRAHAM: Which feeds up to 70 people a night. I, myself, was homeless and living on the streets for a while. It’s terrible, because it’s almost soul destroying, you know? People just walk past you, and don’t even look at you. Sometimes, it’s not even about the money. Sometimes it’s about someone just saying hello to you. That can make you feel human again.

SIMON: Bit of human contact is worth a lot.

GRAHAM: Yeah. Worth more than money.

Is 70 people a night having hot food a big deal for a large number of people, even relative to the number of those homeless in Manchester. No ‘measure for measure’, it remains small. Even smaller is ‘someone just saying hello to you’ in your doorway, but, as in Isabella’s speech a marginalised homeless person tucked into small space can ‘feel human again’ as a result of it, and that may be a giant step forward for them so that a ‘bit’ can be, measure for measure, ‘a lot’:

SIMON: Bit of human contact is worth a lot.
GRAHAM: Yeah. Worth more than money.

Now, worse that thinking you must immediately go and join a revolutionary Communist cadre (there are much worse reactions, as the behaviour of Governments towards genocide in Gaza show) is thinking that a kind word or a smile or human contact or a good attitude to the homeless person as a person is ‘good enough’. I remember me in the shop doorway on Marchmont Street, just above Commonwealth Hall – gone now – where I resided, as you add in self-justication, “I have no power to change large systems.” I addressed this sad truth in a blog recently (at the link). But there I was only negative. Because we live under a government that believes change is impossible without trickle down from economic growth does not mean that we should lose faith in the will to communitarian change. We give too much credence to those who think it is all about leadership and top-down action (leave that to the damaged souls of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Sir Keir Starmer). We need to think of the means of bottom-up action, including the educational function that exists informally in ‘public places, dear’ where we might ‘make a scene’. Still believe in art and artists, dearest!

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxx

P.S.

Give by Simon Armitage

Of all the public places, dear
to make a scene, I’ve chosen here.

Of all the doorways in the world
to choose to sleep, I’ve chosen yours.
I’m on the street, under the stars.

For coppers I can dance or sing.
For silver-swallow swords, eat fire.
For gold-escape from locks and chains.

It’s not as if I’m holding out
for frankincense or myrrh, just change.

You give me tea. That’s big of you.
I’m on my knees. I beg of you.