Escaping the vitrine

and on finding the spaces between

“There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light —
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.”

Adrienne Rich What Kind of Times are These

Fifty years earlier, Bertolt Brecht had asked:

What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
And he who walks quietly across the street,
Passes out of the reach of his friends
Who are in danger?

from “To Those Who Follow in our Wake”

I’ve been thinking a great deal about silence and the spaces between, largely attributable to much of what I’ve read here on Substack - an invitation, as such, to do so. I have become so fond of silence it is a space within which I wish to dwell as a hermit might. It is in silence I feel most abundant. In the spaces between, I breathe.

Today,

Andō

wrote:

You are the silence, dancing.

Dancing, I am silence.

In the pursuit of silence and spaces between, I have renewed interest in poetry, dormant for so long. Much of what we utter will quickly fade with its incessant redundancy - utterly forgettable along with those whose own truths were drowned in the clatter of chatter. Poetic words, given silence and spaces between, gain a power beyond their meaning.

“I’ve been thinking about the word ‘vitrined’. In Threads (clinic, 2018), the poet and academic Sandeep Parmar describes coming back from the US to England, where she was born, and feeling like ‘an embodied other, an artefact vitrined alongside those with whom I shared a passing resemblance or some common history.’ It reminds me of the ‘Enlightenment Gallery’ in the British Museum, where plundered artefacts from the heyday of Empire are given pride of place: in one glass case, a red-faced wayang mask (used in shadow plays in Java, where my mum grew up) sits alongside two ancient Egyptian mummified heads – the fantastical and the real taken out of context, vitrined, defined by passing resemblance. Power can take the form of a glass case: it plucks apart and rearranges; it erases; it makes us forget who we were, or are, or could be. Which is why Threads is so necessary. An interwoven work of poetry and criticism – or criticism as poetry – by Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya and Bhanu Kapil, it grounds the self in ‘multiple angles’ and ‘shared resistance’.

Will Harris in interview

Vitrined - I experience a relived moment of return. I understand.

---

Is it possible we’re vitrined in representative democracies, put in glass cases with a label upon which our interests are, in theory at least, represented?

In which glass display have the curators placed you: Middle England, The Ethnic Minority, Pebbledash People, The Unemployed …? The democratic ideal is less so in practice.

Last week, we saw that the Occupy movement employed a form of direct democracy. Each participant was afforded a voice and the opportunity to facilitate meetings -decision-making without hierarchical social structure. In London, it seems to have worked, at least for the first four days, but even then, one emerging leader was worried that leadership roles would fall to the same people all the time, giving the appearance of hierarchy even though not intended.

One Wall Street protestor complained that it’s a bit difficult when there’s a thousand people discussing where the compost bin should be sited. If it’s difficult with 500 -1000 people in one sitting, how do you guarantee participation for an entire city, or even a country?

Perhaps there is a workable middle ground? It might entail leadership, but rather than a contest between elite factions, how about a form of delegation?

Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1989

Porto Alegre in Brazil was financially broke. The system was broke. With a population of 1,3 million concentrated in unsanitary urban sprawl (favelas), poverty was rife. At the same time, the workers’ movement had gathered momentum resulting in the local election of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) or Workers’ Party.

Blaming financial mismanagement on previous local governments (as most parties do), unlike most parties before them, PT decided to fix the problem in a rather radical manner. They created an expanded version of an Occupy camp by allocating a large proportion of the budget to its citizens who in turn were given the right to directly participate in determining the city’s fiscal policy, thereby giving those in poverty a franchise they had never experienced before.

The process entailed three kinds of forum in a hierarchical chain of sovereignty.

The first level was held at regional rodadas (assemblies) in one of sixteen regions of the city. Every citizen had the right to participate, speak and vote, and organised group lobbying was prevented from influencing the course of meetings. The regional rodadas were different in size, but established to ensure social and economic homogeneity across the city in addition to maximising citizen participation.

The process began with a series of regional meetings. These were principally organised around two main sessions named the first and second rounds. Intermediary meetings were organised between each round, and to enable participation, free transport was provided. There were two goals for each assembly, to discuss and gain a consensus on local investment priorities and secondly, to chose delegates for the next two stages of the city’s participatory process. Delegates would convey only what was decided at the assemblies.

Policy innovations came from the citizenship base in contrast with representatives competing for office based on proposed policy offerings.

While regional discussions were ongoing, city-wide assemblies took place to discuss general city issues which included, in addition to individual citizen participation, organisations and administrators. The purpose of these was to decide investment priorities. The outcome of both regional and city assemblies were referred to a third administrative level where decisions were refined in light of the funds available. At the time, this was restricted to capital the city was able to raise itself, with little national funding facilitating city plans.

The participatory budgeting process evolved during the course of its implementation, as did the degree and type of participation. Its early outcomes inspired other locations to adopt a version of the Porto Alegre model. Kerala state in India was perhaps the most ambitious, the process covering the entire state (rural villages included with larger urban centres).

In Porto Alegre, high levels of participation from groups normally excluded from the decision-making process emerged. 57% of those who frequented assemblies were from the poorest third of the city’s population. While citizens participated as individuals, many were members of community associations and neighbourhood groups who are otherwise invisible in the democratic process.

Equally fascinating was the direction in which investment was spent. Were voting and investment priorities a form of self-interested expression, or were they more deliberative or even altruistic?

Up Next

These questions form the subject of the next post. What can be learned from a city-wide experiment into participatory budgeting? I will examine the strengths and weaknesses of Porto Alegre’s model, and consider the possibility of a more equitable democracy.

Embers

I recently discovered

Samantha Clark

’s Substack featured newsletter. Samantha is a published author who writes a great deal about the spaces between. I particularly enjoyed her post on the unlit space between stars:

The unlit space between the stars

I hope you find space between the demands of the season in whichever way you celebrate a moment of light in these dark hours.

Winter Solstice, Newgrange, Ireland. An event I had the fortune once to witness. Image Source