Belfast by Moonlight - The Ballad of Auld George - A Sense of Place

The following was written for the programmes of Kabosh Theatre's 'Belfast by Moonlight' written by Carlo Gebler, stages in St George's Church. Also included here is a recording of the presentation given at the after-show discussion on 23rd October 2013.

I met Auld George on a dull, muggy day, walking across his courtyard and leaving the uneasy traffic flow of High Street behind; the chaotic, multipurpose deluge at odds with the singular unending flow of the silent river beneath the street.

Standing at the gates I imagine what he would have looked like had the fortunes of the Earl Bishop of Derry been happier. Originally envisioned as a simple squat, yellow-grey sandstone prayer box, Auld George received his new grandly classical face when the Earl Bishop died during the construction of his new house. The finely crafted pediment, distinctly Athenian in appearance, was hauled all the way from Castledawson and was pulled up the Farset by barges to be fixed to Auld George’s facade. His plain face, slightly curved in the centre, is transformed into bold late Georgian classicism, perhaps more befitting of the ornate rituals of the Anglican tradition within.

Before approaching Auld George I glance at the city around him and consider how, despite being so enmeshed in Belfast and it’s past, he seems to sit apart from the city; in the city but not of it. Set back from High Street and protected by three substantial trees, George seems to be putting himself at arms length; perhaps knowing that the greatest service he renders is to provide respite for weary citizens of this tiresome urbanity. To his right he looks onto the backs of the early Victorian terraces on Church Lane; all Bangor Blue, Belfast brick and cast iron downpipes. To his left, he is overshadowed by faceless apartment blocks, as alien to the city as George but lacking his self-awareness and humility. They lean over him in a vain attempt at intimidation, but Auld George is more robust than that.

Facing him is the High Victorian clock known as Albert and it’s modernist counterpart Transport House; friendly faces sympathetic to George’s plight. They too are interlopers from another Belfast. I scan around to the mouth of Bridge Street in the near distance and marvel at how the National Bank Building has survived the blitzkrieg when Arnotts had been flattened to one side and Imperial Buildings to the other had lost it’s head. Returning my gaze to Auld George I consider the close call he had on that grim night in April; that night he lost his school house and watched friends and neighbors burn and fall.

I walk through his grand doors, cross the shallow vestibule and pause before entering his church-proper. The short corridor in which I find myself is littered with the peripheries of worship. Bibles, hymnals, tracts and prayer cushions remind the architectural tourist that Auld George is no archeological artifact, but a living, breathing place of worship. As his door whispers open I slip behind his facade and I am face to face with Auld George himself. The street noise disappears and silence envelopes me. His hard stone floor squeaks under my trainers and I slow my gait, considering each step to guard against the conspicuous noise, almost profane against the din of silence. Even Auld George’s materiality politely requests your respect; material properties which have no doubt heavily contributed to the church’s musical liturgy.

George’s interior itself is as simple and functional as his facade would have been had it not been added to. A demure tiled grey stone floor neatly meets white plastered walls lined with windows with shallow curved heads, four on each side, mostly simple wired glass with a few embellished with delicate stained images. A narrow balcony spans three edges of the room, simply supported by columns with gold-painted corinthian heads; the heads most likely being a late Victorian addition. A second row of large grand windows bathe the space in an even coverage of natural light and offer glimpses of the city beyond. Rows of simple timber pews face an ornate chancel, undoubtedly Auld George’s focal point.

The chancel stands in direct opposition to the austerity of the rest of the hall. The three tall stained glass windows give the presbytery a phosphorescence, an almost ethereal glow. The double-height space is adorned with gold-leaf and medieval style religious murals. The ornamentation draws the eye upwards to exposed timber trusses, painted white and patterned with green stenciled leaves; work completed by architect W.J. Barre, contemporary and rival of the great Charles Lanyon.

I slowly lap the nave, examining the stained glass windows and several memorial plaques inscribed with names I regret I do not know; James Halliday Neill, Sarah May Nelson McTear, John Quiller Lane. And a few I do know, Sir Robert Hugh Hanley Baird, Sir Henry Pottinger; family names spread throughout the city and yet another chunk of Belfast history held by dear Auld George.

I slip into an empty pew and the timber groans under my weight and I sit silently still, only moving if I dare. The silence once again returns and I calmly gaze at my surroundings. The total lack of audio creates a sense of alienation. The empty hall into which I stare could almost be a photograph, I look closely at a candle resting on a nearby cill and I swear it is not even flickering. I try not to let it unnerve me and endeavor to use this lack of sensual stimulation to allow me to see better.

My eyes return to the gaudy late Victorian chancel and find it overloading my mind. I close my eyes and I’m gone, not to somewhere else but to some different stream of experience, stripping out the everyday context of the church and replacing it with the much richer context of Belfast itself.

I see High Street as it would have been, a dirt track running along the south bank of the Farset ending where the stream discharges into the mighty Lagan; the river bed just about visible beneath the rushing waters. Given time and tide the shifting sandbank ford would thrust up through the flow permitting passage to the other bank; a journey far from guaranteed however. The unpredictable Lagan would sometimes surge, washing pilgrims out into the lough. The last piece of dry land, therefore, became an important waypoint; a place of thanksgiving for a successful journey, or a place of prayer for the journey to come.

Given the volumes of pilgrims wishing to cross the river, Auld George is established as a permanent place of worship, although it would be a long time before he is given that name; being originally referred to simply as the Chapel of the Ford. A small village grows along the rough dirt track, which eventually becomes a place with a name, that name being Beal Fierste, the approach to the ford. I see the small village expanding as people establish markets, at first to provide the pilgrims with much needed respite on their journey, and later to profit from them. A stronghold is constructed, a satellite castle to the much larger Carrickfergus. The crossing itself becomes commodified, pilgrims now need to ask the king of the castle for safe passage before asking Auld George for the mercy of the elements.

I see the settlement expanding, coming under control of English planters, it’s name shifting to Belfast, an anglicised version of the more musical gaelic. Land is slowly reclaimed from the surging Lagan and Auld George’s connection with the water dwindles. As the city rises in importance, however, so does Auld George. When the city is made that slick profit-making-machine referred to as the Belfast Corporation, Auld George becomes the chapel of choice for the Burgesses, being recast as the Corporation Church.

The sometimes cartoonish, often tragic politics of Ireland played out around Auld George and he sat on, paying it no mind but often acting as a backdrop. Cromwell’s forces occupied and garrisoned Auld George, defacing and damaging his fabric considerably. Several years later King William himself, on his way from Carrickfergus to face King James at the Boyne, was George’s guest of honor, while a century later the martyred remains of Henry Joy were interred in his graveyard. Auld George welcomed in heroes and villains, blackguards and white knights, showing neither favouritism nor bias.

The aforementioned graveyard, so Cathal O’Byrne tells us, was closed in the early 1800s as the grounds were liable to flooding. O’Byrne goes on to bemoan the defilement of the graves by the rebuilding and extension of Auld George, a fact reinforced by a discussion had with a church member who described an incident which occurred during minor building works. A skeleton was found in the sitting position in the centre of the nave underneath the central walkway, and it remains there to this day. Sitting there in the silence, my eyes slowly opening, I can think of no better place to be laid to rest.

As I leave Auld George behind I am struck by how closely his story is connected to Belfast, the church acting as synecdoche for the entire city. When Belfast flourished so did the church; when Belfast suffered Auld George suffered too; and through the tumult and upheaval he sits on in quiet humility. Unlike his saintly namesake Auld George does not slay the dragons, but rather endures them and by the sheer act of remaining, defeats them.

The Model To Date - Part 2 of 2

What about other people?

We are social beings and most of what we do, and particularly architecture, is for and with other people. Therefore, formulating a model of an individual’s experience in the world must take into account the interface with fellow sentient beings.

My own particular route into this topic is through Karl Marx, and in particular the opening section of Capital Volume 1. Here, Marx explains his concept of commodities which are key to Capital as expounded in it’s opening sentence. “The wealth of societies in which a capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities." He goes on to describe them as “an external object, a thing which through it’s qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind.”

While Marx explains this term purely as a way of explaining how money and capitalist society operates there is a broader philosophical application, and I believe it is key to understanding how these internal phenomena become communicated to fellow human beings. Commodities, as Marx describes them, are comprised of three main properties. These are value, use-value and exchange value. Value suggests that all commodities are the products of human labour; use-values suggests that commodities satisfy a human need or want (which relates to Damasio’s homeostatic tree); exchange values place the commodity in a relationship with other commodities in a similar way to the relational properties of phenomena in Heidegger’s model of ‘Dwelling.’ An object which is the product of human labour and a use-value (which Heidegger would refer to as a thing) is not automatically a commodity. A commodity is rendered a social ‘thing’ by it’s exchange value, that is a “use-value for others, social use-values.”

While Marx was discussing exclusively the physical products of human labour, it is here that we can observe the commodification of the internal phenomena discussed by Heidegger and Damasio, although we need to redefine some of Marx’s terms. Value, defined by Marx as the products of human labour, can be redefined as the product of human physiological homeostasis. Use-value can be defined as the interpretation of action required to satisfy the value. Value plus use-value therefore equals a phenomena. Our ability to relate this phenomena to another human being in a way that they can relate to one of their own internal phenomena allows the phenomena to become commodified.

For example, a delicate chemical change in my blood triggers a series of related reactions throughout my body which is in turn translated as the need for sustenance. I then am able to tell my friend ‘I am hungry,’ and my friend understands this as she has experienced a chemical change within her body at one time which she has also translated as ‘the-need-for-sustenance.’ The internal phenomenon may feel entirely different for my friend, but I can never know as I cannot experience things from her perspective. The only thing I can understand is the agreed word for a phenomenon translated as ‘the-need-for-sustenance,’ that is ‘hunger.’

...and everybody else?

In this introduction to his seminal work ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,’ Richard Rorty describes culture as “an assemblage of claims to knowledge.” It appears to me this has a strong link to Marx’s opening sentence of Capital where he describes the wealth of societies consisting of “an immense collection of commodities.” We can equate the commodity-as-socialised-phenomena as a claim-to-knowledge, that is an understanding of what a phenomena means for us and the agreed socially accepted reaction or interpretation thereof.

This brings us to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist heavily influenced by Marx. Bourdieu describes different social groups as ‘fields,’ which is another name for these assemblages of commodified claims to knowledge. Fields are fluid things, with individuals being able to take part in them, or not, as they wish. Each individual will partake of a host of fields at any one time. It is important to to note that, in a given context, it may be expected or ‘socially necessary’ (to borrow another of Marx’s terms) for an individual to partake in a particular field.

The commodified claims to knowledge within a field organise themselves into relational projects, much like Heidegger’s notion of dwelling. These projects, however, are Platonic. They do not exist in lived experience like Heidegger’s projects, but exist as a social script for how-things-should-be-done in a given context. Bourdieu refers to this collection of Platonic, commodified projects as the ‘Habitus.’

This pantheon of Platonic projects provides a ‘best practice’ which often gets caught up in moral and ethical judgements. The ‘best way’ becomes the ‘right way,’ and anybody who does it otherwise is viewed in a negative light. Performing in the ‘correct way’ within a Habitus bestows the actor with cultural or social capital, which, much like Marx’s description of capitalism, all subscribers of the Habitus are striving to achieve for both themselves and their Habitual construct. Different Habitual constructs will ascribe different values to particular cultural practices.

As we always fall back on the enlightenment model described earlier, the subscribers of a Habitus assume that their Habitual construct provides the objectively correct way to be. They will therefore promote and defend it with any alternative Habitus quite often being viewed as a threat or an affront. This is when political discourse comes into play, resulting  in either compromise or conflict.

What can also happen in this instance is that one Habitus can exert power over another Habitus, much like Marx’s description of class struggle, ensuring that the cultural values of the dominating Habitus are assumed, or have a direct effect on, the dominated Habitus. This does not remove the cultural values of the dominated Habitus, but ensures that their notion of cultural-capital is widely seen as inferior to the dominating cultural-capital.

In Summary

Value can be attributed to anything which stimulates the human senses; a product of human homeostasis.

Use-value can be attributed to anything that directs our action on the world; an awareness of a human want or need.

Phenomena possesses both value and use-value.

Projects comprise of linked together phenomena and are aimed toward the satisfaction of the identified want or need.

Exchange-value is a communicable use-value; something which identifies the want or need of more than one person.

Commodities possess value, use-vale and exchange-value. They are socialised phenomena.

Habitus is comprised of commodified sets of projects, the Platonic way-of-being of a collection of people achieved through an agreement reached using social discourse.

Cultural-capital is achieved by subscribers to a Habitus who perform or act within the Habitual guidelines in an exemplary fashion.

Political discourse occurs when two or more Habitual constructs occupy the same space enabling more than one way-of-being to exist simultaneously utilising conflict or compromise.

The Model To Date - Part 1 of 2

The following was written before my 100 day viva in order to clarify things for myself. It is basically a more long-winded and detailed version of my viva presentation.

The problem with the Enlightenment...

Ever since the enlightenment our understanding of how we exist and act within the world has remained much the same. Cartesian coordinates, Newtonian physics and the mind-body dichotomy have defined the ‘commonsense’ paradigm amongst rational and logical human beings.

Post enlightenment thinking describes us being in the world much like any other object, with the exception that we possess that ‘something else’ that bestows us with sentience, that is a mind with the ability to perceive the world around us and allowing us to act appropriately. This ‘something else’ has been described in many ways including the religious concept of the soul, the ‘ghost in the machine,’ or Descartes’ notion of the pineal gland, ‘angel in the head’ or ‘animal spirits.’ When explaining his famous ‘I think therefore I am’ Descartes defined us a ‘thing which thinks.’ By this he does not mean that our body thinks but rather that the mind/soul/knowledge/understanding exists as a substance that lives within but is also separable from the substance of body.

This idea, referred to as Cartesian Dualism, has dominated science and philosophy ever since it was conceived in the 17th Century to the point where it seems intuitively true. The ‘stuff’ of the mind appears to be extremely different from the content of the world. Yet, on deeper examination this idea appears incomplete, relying on the pineal gland to process the input from our senses and produce this mind-substance, or on an ‘angel in the head’ to whisper to us the knowledge and meaning of the content of our senses. 

Enter Neuroscience

Neurologist Antonio Damasio attempted to refute this assumption in his book ‘Descartes’ Error’ (1994). Here, Damasio outlines his alternative take on the mind-body problem, using a series of examples of people with brain injuries or diseases to show how feelings and emotions are entirely dependent on body-state. 

Damasio’s model consists of three major points.

1. The brain and the body consist of an indissociable organism, integrated by means of biochemical and neural circuits.
2. The organism interacts with it’s environment as a whole, neither the body nor the brain has sole responsibility for this
3. The mind is a process which occurs inside the organism, mental phenomena can only be understood in the context of the organism’s interaction with an environment.

The third point is the most important and the most profound. To use Damasio’s language ‘The physiological operations that we call mind are derived from the structural and functional ensemble.’ Damasio clarifies this in his third book ‘Looking For Spinoza’ (2003) where he outlines his ‘nesting principle' which relies on the analogy of the ‘homeostatic tree.’ At the trunk of the tree are basic metabolic processes and immune responses, things which rely on subtle chemical differences within our bodies such as digesting food or fighting off the cold. This then separates into branches containing basic pain and pleasure behaviours, or the reactions of approach and withdrawal from a situation or environment. Further up we get drives and motivations also referred to as appetites such as hunger, thirst, sex, etc. In the upper branches we get emotions, which Damasio separates into background emotions, primary emotions and finally social emotions.

As you can see, as we go up the tree the processes get more complex and nuanced. The simpler processes are nested within the more complex ones and all are dependent and affective on the others. Phenomena which occur within the environment have an affect on cells within the body (which can be separated out into our senses, although it is important to note that these are part of a linguistic game, more on this later) which cause a change in body state in the same way subtle chemical processes within the body have an affect on  body state. The components of the homeostatic tree create a map our body state letting us know how we’re getting on in the world. In this model the idea of separating the mind from the body becomes an absurdity.

Perceiving Reality

Cartesian Dualism, seen as the commonsense model, tells us that there are two clear worlds; external objective reality and internal subjective consciousness. The objective world of stuff exists outside us in the three dimensions of Cartesian coordinates and our internal consciousness perceives this through our senses and internalises it so we can make judgements about how to act in the world. Despite the myriad of possible responses of consciousness there exists a definitively objective and universal externality from which everyone’s subjectivity must derive. Reason and logic always refer to this externality whereas emotions and feelings reside within, inspired by our perception of objective reality.

Damasio fundamentally challenges this idea in ‘Descartes’ Error,’ suggesting that without emotion reason cannot come about, and in fact emotion is evolutionarily prior to reason. This is supported by the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist in his book ‘The Master and his Emissary.’

Here, again using a large body of research conducted on people with brain disorders, McGilchrist resurrects the idea of the divided brain; a popularised way of describing modes of thinking as either logical or emotional, left-brain and right-brain thinking. Despite being widely exaggerated and seized by management training pseudo-science, the lateralisation of brain function reveals much about our interface with reality.

McGilchrist uses a range of language to describe the differences between these two modes of thinking, belying a complexity much greater than ‘reason versus emotion.’ The key part of McGilchrist’s model, at least for my own thesis, is that of the understanding of the whole against the understanding of the part, or abstraction against metaphor. Abstraction removes things from their context and examines them as a discrete and autonomous objects. Metaphor refers to contextualisation, looking at the whole picture of reality in a relational and interconnected fashion. 

McGilchrist describes two modes of thinking, “[One allows] things to be present to us in all their embodied particularity, with all their changeability and impermanence...as part of a whole which is forever in flux... The other was to step outside the flow of experience and ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: to re-present the world in a form that is less truthful, but apparently clearer, and therefore cast in a form which is more useful for manipulation of the world...explicit, abstracted, compartmentalised, static, lifeless.”

Relating back to Damasio’s statement that emotion precedes reason, McGilchrist proffers that metaphor precedes abstraction. Art, so often seen as a frivolous and expendable endeavor, is vital for our understanding and knowledge of the world around us. Reason and logic simply augments this feeling of the world, as McGilchrist suggests creating a re-presentation of the world, affording us a perceived ontological security that our feelings and emotions are correct or letting us know that they’re not and they need to be altered. From here we can therefore suggest that what we consider ‘objective reality’ is in fact a construct we create to shore up our own subjective understanding of the world, a fine-tuning device for our body-state map.

While the mind/body distinction remains useful linguistically, if we are to proceed with any kind of profound psychological or sociological model, we must abandon it as an analogy.

So if it doesn’t work like that, how does it work?

When describing Damasio’s model I suggested that things occur to us as affects on cells within the body, through what we refer to as the senses, which alter our map of our body state. Philosophy refers to these affects as phenomena, and indeed an entire branch of the field has flourished around this idea, the field of phenomenology.

Martin Heidegger makes a key distinction between ‘objects’ and ‘things,’ the key difference being that objects become things when we can ascribe particular phenomena to them and thus we understand them, or have knowledge of them, through their use. The idea that objects are known by way of their utilisation also entails that they can only be known through their relationship with other objects and phenomena, which in turn are connected to further objects and phenomena. A hammer relates to a nail which relates to a wall which relates to a picture frame which relates to an image which relates to a place which relates to happiness etc, etc. Sets of relationships are described as projects in that they contain projections of desired phenomena which will satisfy a want or need.

Our world, according to Heidegger, is therefore comprised of projects pointing toward a desired way of being. The deployment of these projects and the positioning of the objects contained therein is referred to as building. Building is not just the construction of a physical structure, but the positioning of objects to allow a mode of living directed at producing a specific pattern of phenomena, which Heidegger refers to as dwelling.

Here we can see McGilchrist’s model at work. We can break a project down into it’s discrete chunks and consider, for example, a hammer on it’s own. But behind this consideration lies an understanding of what a hammer is used for which invokes thoughts and memories of other discrete objects, for example nails, walls and picture frames. But in lived experience a hammer could just as easily be deployed for different projects. It could be used as a paperweight, doorstop or a weapon. The object itself does not define ‘thingness,’ but rather lived experience and utilisation.

100 Day Presentation

This is my first attempt at Video Blogging. I thought some of the concepts and diagrams would benefit from genuine human intonation, as opposed to dry text. It's also an attempt for me to get over the hatred of my own voice.

This is the presentation I prepared for my 100 day viva, held on 11 Jan 2013, thankfully I passed. Feedback welcome!