Soulless and soul destroying, that pretty much summed up my view of work by the time I left school. A place where adults with no imagination sold their souls for money and status. Not that school was any better with its rote learning, simmering rage and hollow bravado, a place increasingly devoid of wit and playfulness. As monotonous as work and less well paid! Staying on was hardly a possibility anyway with my academic record, but my loathing was such that I wanted nothing more to do with any institution of learning. Which meant working, however reluctantly. I was not ahead of my time enough to realise that unemployment was an option, and besides my parents insisted I get a job and earn my keep if I was to continue living at home.
| Work seemed a place where adults with no imagination sold their souls for money and status |
Having nowhere else to live, no qualifications and no obvious talent for anything other than looking bored, I was not spoilt for choice. After a visit to the labour exchange my life as a paid employee began at the age of sixteen. I became a slabber in the local tile factory for the princely sum of eight pounds a week. Not much for your soul but they did not complain about the length of my hair so at least I could look like an angel!
Four months later, a week before Christmas, I was made redundant. Despite this demonstration of the sensitivity of British management practice and unlike the half dozen other men also laid off, I was delighted. I received some redundancy money which enabled me to buy a second hand drum kit, took a few weeks break and looked for another job. Which led me to become a packer in a warehouse, packing boxes of zip fasteners into cartons for nine pounds a week. Less messy and more soporific, I looked even more like an angel but felt even more bored. I was hardly selling my soul, more giving it away!
However, unlike my last years of school I no longer found everything boring. Having left the educational system I rediscovered the joys of reading. I had also become more immersed in music, had started to play drums and begun to write poetry inspired primarily by the lyrics of rock music. It may not have had much literary merit but it touched my heart and stirred my soul, which was more than anything else did. It was also, alongside bashing the drums, a more constructive outlet for the rage that seemed to increase in me as my boredom decreased. Feeling quite inarticulate and being unable to write coherent prose, poetry and drums were perfect vehicles for expressing the intensity of what I felt without the constraints of grammar and rationality!
Life was becoming meaningful but work was definitely not. As what I enjoyed doing did not require a lot of money and having no interest in money for its own sake, the idea of spending five days a week doing something I did not enjoy just to earn money seemed increasingly absurd. It made more sense to work as little as possible so as to have as much time as I could to do the things I liked. Therefore, in 1969 at the age of seventeen I decided to retire from full time work.
As a result of this decision, after five months of packing I left the warehouse.
I spent the following three months travelling around, sleeping rough and working intermittently as a fruit picker and fairground attendant. But I did not enjoy this very much either. Taking my drum kit with me was hardly an option, so I missed playing the drums. When I needed to earn some money the work was both hard and monotonous and in the case of the fairground, very long hours. And sleeping out with just a sleeping bag was no fun when it rained. Which, being England, it often did!
So I returned to London and began looking for regular part time work. Having by this time extremely long hair and being of an inherently scruffy disposition, I was not exactly a marketable commodity. But fortune and the jobs column of the Evening Standard led me to an agency that specialised in part time work and where short hair and a suit and tie were not required! I became a domestic cleaner, which meant I got paid for doing other people's housework. Low pay and low status, but only three days a week and I got to keep my soul!
Looking back from the perspective of Achilles Heel it would be easy to claim it as some form of political statement, but there was no conscious political intent of any sort. Although I did at times take a perverse delight in being a man doing what was at that time unequivocally considered women's work, the basic issue for me was that it served my purpose of working part time. As far as other people's views and politics were concerned, my attitude then was essentially one of 'piss off and leave me alone'. I felt left out rather than right on and basically preferred it that way.
However, from a personal rather than political perspective, I do not think it was a coincidence that I found a satisfactory relationship to paid work in the sphere of women's work rather than men's. The male world of work seemed rigid and desiccated, an environment lacking in warmth and emotion and devoid of nourishment and meaning. The nature of the work itself reinforced the alienation I felt, with no scope for imagination or creativity. Other workers tended to conform to a rather conventional and to me limiting form of masculinity as far as both appearance and attitude were concerned, which exacerbated my sense of being different and further isolated me. Housework at least took place in a human environment both chaotic and lively, with the additional unpredictability of children thrown in.
During this time I was conscious of feeling an aching sense of something missing, a wish for connection and meaning with some dimly perceived deeper presence, initially within myself yet also with the world outside. For the next four years, working part time as a cleaner, I was able to explore that ache for connection and depth, primarily through music and writing. What I received from this women's world was space and acceptance, with no expectations of me to be other than how I was.
Yet equally important and at a level I did not understand or even consciously realise at that time, it also helped keep me human. I have always been drawn to the dark and destructive side of life as much as to the light and creative side. For all my attraction to angels, Lucifer was always the most interesting one! The sense of alienation and isolation I felt during those years intensified that darkness, leaving me often feeling an intense nihilism and rage where the allure of violence and destruction cast a powerful shadow over everything else.
By the time I was nineteen I no longer had any connection with my parents or most of the friends I grew up with. I was living in a lock up garage opposite Highgate cemetery with my collection of books and various musical instruments, looking as much like a tramp as an angel. Although my reasons for living this way were quite practical (dead people do not complain about the noise and a garage was cheaper to rent than a room) it did increase my strangeness in the eyes of other people. This intensified my isolation and left me even more separate and detached in my own private world.
In these conditions it was easy to fall into feelings of resentment and hatred towards people generally. A recurring fantasy throughout my adolescence was that of me walking down the street with a machine gun, shooting indiscriminately at everyone and anyone. Tailor made to be an alternative comedian or a ruthless terrorist! Mind you, on earnings of less than ten pounds a week buying a Kalashnikov was always going to be a fantasy.
Yet more significantly, I never felt that hatred towards the families that I regularly cleaned for and in fact had a genuine liking for them much of the time. The ordinariness of their lives and their friendliness and acceptance of me kept me anchored in the human world and enabled me to explore the very real madness inside myself without acting it out in a way that harmed others or got me locked up as crazy.
What had emerged by this time was a clear differentiation between paid employment and work. My work was my music and writing, but not only this. It was also the reading I did, the art galleries I visited, the concerts I attended, even the walks I took, and always the continual search within myself for connection and meaning. This work was purposeful, joyous, desperate, tedious, confusing and sometimes heart breaking. But it nurtured my soul and made my life meaningful.
| Paid employment that is based upon greed and self-gratification can only generate self disgust and loathing |
Paid employment on the other hand was not necessarily work in this sense and in my case never had been and did not seem likely to be so. Its purpose was simply to feed and keep me, enabling my body to survive and be nourished on a physical level but having no meaning beyond that. I had no more vocational wish to do other people's housework than I had to be a slabber or a packer, but if I had to work at one of these I preferred housework. It did at least feel human.
One consequence of this split was that my identity as a man was never bound up with the notion of paid work and its corollary, money. My view at the time was that such a masculinity was absurd and that most men appeared either too stupid or too afraid to refuse it. Humility and compassion for my fellow man were not exactly my strong points! The only exceptions to this grey and monotonous masculinity seemed to exist in the world of artists and musicians, particularly rock and roll. It was in these spheres that men appeared both emotional and wild, feminine and aggressive, expressed in both their attitude and appearance. However, there was also a strong destructive streak running through all the men I found most inspiring in these areas. The very creativity and imagination that was missing elsewhere was often not pitched in the service of love but of hate and disgust.
From where I am now, I think a notion of paid employment that is essentially based upon greed and self-gratification can only ultimately generate self disgust and loathing. So that an identification of masculinity with paid work in such a capitalistic system is inevitably going to result in destruction ultimately directed at oneself. Accepting that art essentially is rooted in and reflects the soil of the community and society in which it emerges, a genuine alternative expression of masculinity in and through art needs to be rooted in the service of something greater than self gratification. However, the artists I found most interesting at that time were the ones that reflected but could not rise above this unloving and self serving masculinity. Unsurprisingly, I ended up disgusted with my own artistic output (mind you, some of it was disgusting!). I was unable to truly nourish my soul through an isolated creativity.
As a result, although I continued with this split between paid employment and work for over twenty years, the focus of meaningful work changed as I attempted to find a more human and less alienated way of being in the world. By the time I was twenty two I was living with a woman for the first time and the work of maintaining and exploring my relationship with her was primary. Alongside my relationships with my children, I consider the relationships that I have had with the women who have shared their lives with me as partners during these many years have been the most consistent, demanding and rewarding work I have undertaken. Not that I can claim great success in this. Three children from three mothers from three different countries and speaking three different languages is probably taking diversity a bit too far! Even when spread out over twenty years.
In addition to my relationships, therapy, dancing, ecology, ritual, community politics and Achilles Heel itself have all become additional areas of work, that is the work of soul and meaning. These have not been activities that have paid me in money or given me much status. In fact they have often cost me money! But more importantly, they rewarded me in other ways that both nourished and satisfied me, giving me a sense of achievement and value in myself.
| Low pay and low status, but only three days a week and I got to keep my soul! |
Alongside these changes in meaningful work, my paid employment also changed. At the age of twenty three and soon to become a father for the first time, I managed to get onto a short but intensive government training scheme which enabled me to become a computer programmer. Not able to earn enough money to support a family, I thought that computer programming was a job that I could do part time yet would pay enough to keep us all. Although most companies I was subsequently employed by were initially reluctant, by a mixture of determination, persistence and blackmail I managed to get the terms I wanted. This was perhaps made easier by the fact that being employed only three days a week enabled me to work harder and them to pay me less!
I continued earning money as a computer programmer for sixteen years. Despite being a male world where the work was essentially rational and abstract it was also more accepting of unconventional attitudes and appearances. Although black eye liner and blue nail varnish never went down too well.
However, I now see the split I created between paid employment and work as a false one. It is not so much that paid employment is not work as that work has many levels and meanings, of which paid employment is just one. The essence of work for me is that it is an activity that demands effort and has a purpose. It is where I offer myself as a resource in return for nourishment and satisfaction. In this it reflects the level of my engagement with my environment as well as being an expression of my relationship with the world.
Despite my somewhat disparaging attitude towards paid employment, I was generally a hard and willing worker. In part this was due to the fact that if I did not engage with what I had to do the boredom became intolerable. But it was also because I saw it as my part of the deal. I did not expect something for nothing and needed to get some satisfaction out of what I was doing.
This connects strongly with soul, which I recognise as also being an expression of my relationship with the world. To me soul is the matrix of destiny, as expressed by the fusion of spirit with the rhythms and purpose of the earth. In practical terms, this means that my physical body, being made up of the very stuff of earth and utterly dependent upon the planet for its survival, needs to find alignment with both spirit and nature. I think there is an inherent tension in such alignment, between the expansiveness of spirit and the limitations of material life. Soul is the manifestation of this tension, where the earthly and divine collide with as much dissonance as harmony. If work is the expression of myself as a resource, soul is where the purpose inherent in resource unfolds and deepens.
In this respect, finding the answer to what the earth means to me is less important than asking the question, what do I mean to the earth? What is my purpose within the greater framework of the planet as a whole, what does it expect of me? How can I serve life in a way that expresses me as I am, which is not necessarily the same as whatever ideal I might have for myself. The answers to these questions tell me both what my work is at all levels and reveal the direction of my destiny. And such answers are never final and complete.
For the past four years, since I have turned forty, I have been fortunate in finding paid work that is both purposeful and meaningful to me. I am still employed part time because there are many other levels of work that are equally important in my life, particularly my relationships with my partner and my children. Yet having the experience of having paid work that engages my soul and is purposive in itself gives me a sense of connection to the world that I can best describe as a feeling of belonging. This is not because it supersedes the other levels of work but that it completes them, allowing all of my life to be meaningful for the first time. I no longer have to be a mercenary, I have an acknowledged place in the world.
| soul work has as much to do with darkness and struggle as with light and achievement |
However, such changes bring different challenges, not least maintaining balance between paid work and the rest of my life. Keeping clear limits and boundaries, something I managed with ease as a mercenary, is suddenly a more difficult task. It is also harder to remain detached enough at times, so that what I perceive as incompetence and lack of commitment in colleagues infuriates me. The amused detachment with which I could view such behaviour in the computer world (and it was as prevalent there from boardroom down) is harder to maintain, as is my patience and compassion. Yet I recognise that accepting limitations is part of the work of soul. To challenge with compassion and engage with change whilst accepting the present conditions for what they are. Difficult when my every impulse is to throw some of my colleagues through the nearest window without opening it first!
But then soul work is not easy and has as much to do with darkness and struggle as with light and achievement. The work I have found as my vocation is that of counselling men who have been and often still are, violent and abusive. It is dirty work, dealing with abuse and despair, sadism and suffering, the cruelty that one human being can do to another. And, surprise, surprise, it is neither well paid nor high status. But it rewards me in ways that neither money nor status could ever do and engages with my whole being, thinking and feeling, heart and soul. My own history is as dark as it is light, as connected to hatred as to love. In doing this work I both challenge and heal this history. But equally important, I draw upon the experiences of my history to inform me, to direct me, and to take me down into the darkest and most desolate places alongside the men I work with. My history is my guide, the subtle creative light that emanates from the darkness.
Many years ago in a workshop examining the roots of my life, the statement came to me that I flowed out of darkness. In the process of doing this work that statement has deepened in meaning, as I have come to realise that my basic task is to bring the light from the darkness. But then, working in a soul mine, what else would you expect?
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
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