Finally,today i got around to going through some of the piles of accumulated paper i have to admit i hoard and live with.The pile i waded through is mainly miscellaneous papers and documents accumulated through years of working in the criminal justice system.No-one should get excited at reading this,there is nothing incriminating or compromising of me or anyone else.Its all much more banal than that.A lot is simply the flotsam and jetsam associated with work and career.Indeed much of it,is th sort of stuff i set aside to read or at least glance at some other time-but never did,not even now.Some of it might be of more interest:notes on challenging issues,informatin about this campaign or that,how to complete particular forms or reports,data entry.It all,i suppose amounts to the stuff that
keeps the wheels going for me as a worker in a particular trade or profession.But then back in January 2012 that career came to a halt with retirement frm it.Its not that i've lost interest in criminal justice or social work-i definitely have not,but whilst i should never say"never",i don't think its likely to return to my profession or anything approaching it,although i suppose the threat of"austerity"and what it might come to mean looms like a spectre(or hobgoblin!).Otherwise,no 42 years or so is enough-i would not commit to it as a career again.
I return to going through the papers,and realise that suddenly,what one was not just imbued but saturated with meaning is now empty,like a shell or a husk.How strange that it,and how quickly it happens because i suspect,that had i rummaged the day after my retirement might have been very similar.
And yet i admit there are fleeting,occassional moments when it is painfully different.i suppose that is because sometimes something on the paper touches a memory and i am transported,usually to a melancholy place.
And in that there is a clue to something else,even more melancholy.When my dad died,my mother was there and with whom i went through some of the grieving process.Only two years or so later my mother died,and whilst i was with my sister through a lot of the experience,including returning from the USA to live in my parents last house,somehow it was different,in that we ourselves had to dispose of a lot of the objects of their daily lives,inclduding indeed their little house.
What struck me was how some objects suddenly possessed an apparent power,probably of memory and evocation,so that i would have to stand still for a few moments or more drawn back into memory and reverie.Then there was another response to other things,where suddenly all meaning had drained out of all kinds of things.And even if i think back now,my fond memories are for particular situations,moments,even light but not actual objects.To make the point,i sometimes think back to a paricular place in the hallway of ur family home,where a yellow-orange carpet of autumn like colours,took on a particular tone in spring or autumn light,made even more powerful in relaity and memory by the combined impact of say the copper kettle,a slightly tinted mirror.i also remember some small orange and brown glass.i hold the memory but not the desire for the actual objects in the memory.
I am reminded of something else.Since my retirement,i have been able to become more active in my trades union,and so i can actually attend its branch meetings.Only a few months ago,i attended a particular meeting in which the main focus of discussion was the latest round of redundancies made by"our"employer,in part of its handover of some of its activities to another,private company....
i have no wish to appear arrogant,but i do have some experience as a socialist and as a trades unionist over over 43 years.unfortunately i am all too familiar with recessions,redundancies,cuts...but i am NOT inured to the impact of such events.So in the discussion of these redundancies,i found myself caught up in the shock and devestating pain of brothers and sisters who had,they had only haerdwithin the last few days,and not even"properly"that they would be made redundant.It is a bewildering experience,and it can be so much worse when procedures have not been followed and workers get letters as in this case which begin with the words"you have been deleted".i suggested that all letters and emails going from our trades union from then on,should contain a strap line along the lines of"solidarity with the deleted".....i was so angry and distressed that i wrote a little post on facebook about it-though i know my distress can have nothing on the impact on those who were actually"deleted".i am grateful for the comment of an old friend and comrade who commented on the brutal honesty of employers.whilst i was initially taken aback-that comment set methinking further.
i noted firts of all in my own thinking and i suspect in others too that whilst we intelectually know one thing,our hopes or perhaps our(individula)psychologies are not neccessarrilly entirely synchronised with that understanding.In this case i admit i had the hope that a public sector employer who employs people like me to"help"others might actually behave differently.But no it does not!
It took longer to reach a second point in my thinking and to go beyond it.I realised that there is acertain sense in which my friend was right,although i wonder if any"institution"can have any feelings or understanding-which is rather in the heads of those making the decisions.Then i thought that the very collective responsibility for such decisions might actually have some kind of absolving aspect to it.It also reinforced a view i already hold that context is if not everything,then it is much.I imagined the board or some other agglomeration of senior management,making the decision.Whilst some might(i hope this at least)feel"awkward"i think they might be sustained by the environment in which the decision was made-i imagine in some kind of boardroom which however"pressured"is not the same pressure at all,as that in which my brothers and sisters work every day beset not only by the pressures of the job itself and the self expectation that mostly workers,despite our alienation,still give it the best we can-but also the not so background anxieties associated with our own lives in such a period as this.i dont know about interesting-but i do know it is austere and that times are very hard.
It made me think too that the expression"you have been deleted"is actually absolutely serious.i have begun to think more.harder,deeper about how atually those in their class or associated with it,who act as its minions,might actually think that in"deleting"workers form their jobs,might actually end,negate,empty the problem.I think that THEY now really DO think they have emptied the problem-it no longer exists.But that reflects their vision of the world in which we are merely here as lbour to be bought and sold.We know we are something much else,much other......
In a world in which THEIR view of us is the dominant one,it is easy to think we are not much at all,and to believe that when they"delete"us in any way,somehow we might go away.But then we dont,and indeed in turning around to resist and to struggle we begin to form a class consciousness of ourselves that reasserts that it IS our labour that makes the world.All of it..It is our talent and skill and imagination that might imagine it otherwise.That perhaps their world really is empty of meaning,and content and that actually it is our world that we can make and fill with something else-a commonwaelth,to be shared and lived in together.i like to think that what they fail us in is the barbarism,and that our vision is a socialism,something completly other,new,exciting,challenging.
in the meantime,i am reminded again of the words of William Blake in his poem"What is the Price of Experience?"
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/23579-what-is-the-price-of-experience-do-men-buy-it
