Jail talk

Posted on April 29, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

If I had been asked, as they filed in, to point out the one that most unnerved me, it would have been him. Thick set, bull-headed, covered with tattoos, including one in what looked like Arabic script across his neck, he had a penetrating stare and a menacing energy.

Several of the prisoners, I had been warned, were on methadone, and that made them dopey; but this character wasn’t dopey, he was wired. I explained that I was going to talk about, and read a bit from, my own books, and then we were going to do some exercises. ‘Let’s keep it informal,’ I added. ‘If you want to ask questions as we go along, that’s fine.’

We were in one of the visiting rooms, an upstairs space the size of a tennis court with comfortable seating and spectacular views over coils of razor wire to the nearby hills; seventeen long- and medium-term prisoners, the writer-in-residence, half a dozen curious prison officers who, for the time being, were keeping their distance, and me.

I had hardly finished my introduction when Tattoos was in with his first question. He didn’t so much ask it as fire it at me, a staccato burst of almost unintelligible Central Belt patois. I had to wait while my brain decoded what it had heard before I could answer him.

Three minutes later there was another burst. And so it continued for nearly two hours. Every time I paused, and sometimes when I didn’t, Tattoos had another question. They were smart questions: about research, about characterisation and the role of personal experience in the writing process, about what is fiction and what isn’t.

I could feel my prejudices being dismantled. This was a highly curious, intelligent person, albeit one who severely lacked an education and had doubtless been let down by both society and himself in other ways. But his hunger to learn seemed insatiable, and so was his desire to express himself.

We ended with an exercise I have always loved, where people are given a series of prompts to describe someone they know using only metaphors. The result is a poem which brings the subjects alive in a vivid, unexpected and often emotionally charged way.

‘Who would like to share what they’ve written with us?’ I asked, fully expecting the usual lowered eyes and embarrassed shuffling of feet. But Tattoos had his hand up almost before I’d finished asking. I nodded and he fired off his poem as he had done the questions, at high speed, from somewhere at the back of his throat.

It was good. He’d chosen the prison governor as his subject and it was funny and heartfelt, ironic as well as poignant. ‘You are the Gucci watch of the Scottish Prison Service’ was the opening line. If he’d read it slowly enough for everyone to hear, he would have got a big laugh.

Even so, when he’d finished there were general murmurings of appreciation and I congratulated him fulsomely. His face widened in a beam of the most utterly childlike pleasure. I’ve no idea what he was in for, but I wondered when anyone had last told him he’d made a good job of something. Forty-eight hours later I’m still carrying that smile inside me like a charge of raw solar energy.

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Holy week

Posted on April 23, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

I have to write a document that will help a community of monks make public its case for support. The community needs money for its buildings and for its members’ work as teachers, priests, missionaries and providers of physical and spiritual succour. It also needs fresh blood; its population is ageing and new vocations come few and far between in this secular age.

This week I spent twenty-four hours as the monks’ guest, sharing food with them in their refectory, attending their services, and talking with them about the monastic life and its relevance in the twenty-first century. I would like to say that I arrived weary with the modern world and left refreshed by the warmth of their welcome and the calm and beauty of their surroundings. But I didn’t. I had hard work to do, chiefly in understanding the purpose of prayer and how to express it, to a largely lay audience, as something that is worthy of support.

Their leader, a charming, quietly dynamic man in his early fifties, spotted my dilemma quickly. ‘How can you tell our story if you are not a religious person?’ he asked, more in curiosity than judgment. I replied that I spend a lot of my time looking in at organisations from the outside and trying to capture something of their spirit and personality; then at once realised the glibness of my reply. For here, the spirit in question is nothing less than the Holy Spirit, a phenomenon with which I am not personally acquainted.

His question continued to bother me, because it seemed like a legitimate one; in his position I would have asked the same. Only later did it come to me that there was another way of answering it, which is that it’s the writer’s job to imagine, to put him or herself in other people’s shoes. I can’t share the monks’ faith any more than I can share a businessman’s conviction for his enterprise, but I can at least make an imaginative connection with that very human quality of belief.

The thing that makes this connection possible is the research, the process by which one experiences the warp and weft of a particular universe, even if one can’t experience its spiritual or emotional underpinnings. So the sunlight on the lawns, the simplicity and majesty of the church, the fine old faces of the silent monks at their meals, the contemplative calm of the cloisters, all feed into something which, through the action of imagination, becomes a form of empathic understanding, if not actually a shared belief.

And empathy, the ability to imagine oneself as another and suffer as they do, is something I suspect monks understand very well.

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Gardening

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

Why did Nick Clegg ‘win’ last night’s prime ministerial debate? It may be an over-simplification to say it was because he sounded more human and believable than the other two, though that, I’m sure, was the essence of it. Of course, he had the easiest job as the outsider; and taking part in a heavily stage-managed public display of point-scoring seems to me like a generally rotten way of putting yourself forward to govern a country. But there is at least some comfort in the fact that the most apparently natural performer ‘won’.

As I struggled to remain engaged by the debate, my mind kept drifting away to a remarkable document that a friend sent me recently – a kind of personal manifesto by Jan Cameron who runs the Redhall Walled Garden in Edinburgh. This is a place where people with mental health problems can go to find peace and solace and, ultimately, recovery through the physical work of gardening and the close daily contact with nature that it brings.

It’s not a polished piece of writing. There’s no spin, it offers no sound bites. But as a declaration of what it means to lead a small, walled community – which, with all its inherent dysfunction, is surely a metaphor for society at large – it’s not only profound, but profoundly touching; still more so because gardening – or making things grow – is itself such a beautiful metaphor for leadership.

Here’s the final paragraph: ‘I feel privileged to work here. I love coming to work. Even the difficult parts when someone is telling me something awful that has happened to them, while stressful, it’s also a privilege that someone trusts me with that and I am always inspired by the courage that people show. I’m so glad Redhall is here for people to be able to share their experiences. I may need it someday and I want it to be here. The world feels safer to me knowing that there are places where people feel safe enough to open up and share and support each other and believe in a future for themselves.’

This is a voice that speaks simply, honestly, and is not afraid of emotion. It’s a voice that inspires through its very lack of artifice. I would follow a voice like that. If only our political and business leaders were able to speak in such a way… (I’m sure the gardening helps.)

Read more about the Redhall Walled Garden

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Writing elsewhere

Posted on April 9, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

While we continue to pay daily tribute to International PEN’s 50 imprisoned writers through 26:50, I find myself constantly trying to imagine how they managed to write; where they found and concealed their materials, how they avoided the scrutiny of guards, from what miraculously still-luminous corners of their hearts they managed to summon the words.

I picture damp, dingy cells and furtive scribblings on shreds of paper with pencil stubs, scrapings on prison walls with bent nails, even etchings with pins on crumbs of soap, all from minds crammed to bursting with precious ideas. Yet these extraordinary constraints often gave rise to work of great power and even beauty.

In the free world we have to engineer our own constraints. The choice of where and how, let alone what, we write is something we take for granted. Here’s Hemingway: ‘It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.’

Most unusually for rural Scotland, I live within walking distance of both a small community arts centre with an excellent café, and a mainline railway station. These days I write less and less in my converted garage at home, and more and more in either the café or on the train. In both cases I draw energy from my surroundings.

On the train it’s both the movement itself that encourages my words to flow, and the sense of moving through a world I can see but from which I am temporarily isolated. In the café it’s the feeling of being fixed in a particular corner of the world but not really of it; I can observe it at close quarters if I want to, but I don’t have to engage with it.

In both cases there’s a sense of being removed but connected at the same time, and in both cases I feel nourished by the humanity that flows around me as I write, as if I’m being borne along on the tide of life. It brings an odd feeling of completeness, a sense almost of inner homecoming, that seems very conducive to creativity.

Try it when you next have something to write – find a café or take a train ride. And if you do, spare a thought for those writers who weren’t, or aren’t, so lucky.

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Good Friday

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

Today seems like a good day to write about persecution. Trying to imagine the agony of crucifixion, of nails through palms and feet, of torn flesh and muscle, of gradual dislocation as the legs start to give way and the body weight slowly pulls the shoulders from their sockets, I can’t help thinking again of the 50 writers whose hounding, silencing, imprisonment and torture is currently being remembered, one per day for 50 days, by International PEN and 26 at 26:50.

For those of us who spend much of our time crafting the anodyne language of business, this project is a stunning reminder of the real power of our basic resource – words. If we write something that the powers-that-be (for which read clients) don’t like, the worst that can happen to us is an argument over the bill. But for 26:50 we’ve been paired with people who had the courage to speak out and take the consequences, which in some cases was execution.

My subject, Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, got off relatively lightly by comparison with some of his fellow PEN writers. A novelist, poet and Galician nationalist, now widely regarded as the towering figure of Galician literature, he was detained three times by the Franco regime between 1967 and 1980 (with a certain irony since Franco himself was a native Galician). Yet Ferrín steadfastly refused to write in any other language than Galician, and during his second spell in jail created a fictional writer, Heriberto Bens, under whose name he later published – with a foreword by himself.

I don’t actually know how Ferrín fared during his spells in prison, so my 50-word sketch is largely metaphorical, but I hope he would find some kind of resonance there if he ever comes across it (born in 1938, he is still very much alive).

You and the general
Shared a birthright
That awkward bastard
Mouthful of splinters
Your native tongue
But when he placed
His boot upon it
He forgot that hobnails
In the prison diet
Hone resistance
Whet contempt
While truth
Like blood or spittle
Finds its way
When even tongues are tied

Writing this left me feeling that we live in such a desperately timid world; that we no longer dare speak our minds on so many of the issues that matter. Yet ours is a functioning liberal democracy where freedom of speech is still considered sacrosanct and we don’t live in fear of the three-am knock at the door. Nowhere is the language we use more vapid, more feeble, more lacking in conviction, than at work – where most of us spend the majority of our waking lives. On such a day as this I have to ask why? When did you last hear of a business writer being tortured?

http://26-50.tumblr.com/

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The rhythm of life

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

We start our Dark Angels courses with a simple but illuminating exercise. We ask everyone present to name a favourite word. The resulting list allows us to make the point that we have a relationship with words that goes well beyond their simple meaning.

This week, for example, ‘onomatopoeia’ and ‘hippopotamus’ were two of the words offered on a workshop I was running. Why did you choose that word, I asked the participants. Because of the way it sounds, answered one. Because of the rhythm, said the other.

From the beat of our mothers’ hearts to the sweep and tug of the furthest planets, rhythm is a constant in our lives. We find life and energy in rhythm. We also find familiarity and safety in it. And as my students demonstrated, we’re naturally responsive to rhythm in language.

In the meaning-obsessed world of business, the ‘non-essential’ qualities of language tend to be excluded. The writer’s palette remains a dreary monochrome, the voice a dull monotone. And if some kind of pulse does creep in it’s less likely to be for purposes of enlivening the writing, more likely to be out of fear that if you don’t say the same thing three times, people will think you’ve only done a third of the job.

‘Design, develop and implement’ is a favourite, beloved of the strategificators and initiative-creators who populate the modern business world in a great droning swarm. But as rhythm goes, that string of three verbs has all the charm and subtlety of a hammer hitting a thumb. And as for meaning, why in God’s name would you design something if you didn’t intend to develop and implement it? What happened to good old-fashioned planning, anyway?

Many of the recent obituaries of Michael Foot quoted his observation that ‘the men who do not read are unfit for power’. He was right. Great leaders know that the best writing, and speaking, combine clarity of meaning with an awareness of all those ‘non-essential’ qualities of language: sound, rhythm, colour, texture. And how else can you nurture that awareness but by reading?

My own version of Michael Foot’s epigram would be this: the men and women who do not read are unfit to communicate. And yet… it seems that our students do read. Another of our exercises is to ask them to talk about a favourite novel. This they invariably do with enthusiasm, conviction, even passion; and with full awareness of the power and nuance of the language they’ve been exposed to.

So what’s going on? Why do they feel they have to shed that sensitivity like an overcoat each time they approach their office doors?

To be continued, diddle-de-dee…

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50 words for 50 days

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

My fellow Dark Angel, John Simmons, responded to my last week’s post by adding ‘the pretence of objectivity’ to the list of ingredients that I suggested might be swilling around in the toxic soup called management speak – or Manglish as I heard someone so brilliantly describe it the other day.

Objectivity is a word that often stands in for truth when truth itself is too uncomfortable, or too difficult to get at. But as John pointed out, it seeks to ignore everything that’s human and messy, passionate and unmeasurable, so it can hardly ever offer an accurate representation of the human endeavour that characterises all working life.

Objectivity may have its place in the cold, hard reaches of science and mathematics – although there are plenty who would argue that as human constructs, even those disciplines can never be as free of subjectivity as they would like to think they are. But the idea that work, which occupies so much of our waking lives, can or should be described in language from which conviction or emotion is absent, is patently ludicrous, not to say against nature.

In effect, ‘the pretence of objectivity’ is a form of control. Which, of course, is why tyrants since the beginning of time have sought to stifle writers and impose their own regimes of so-called objectivity on language and ideas.

As I write, International PEN is celebrating 50 years of support for imprisoned writers. It has teamed up with 26, the writers’ group that champions a greater love of words in work and in life. Fifty writers from 26 have 50 words each in which to write a tribute to the PEN member they’ve been assigned. These are being published, a tribute a day, for 50 days at http://26-50.tumblr.com/

Please read them – and as you do, try really hard for a few moments to imagine what it would be like to be locked up for what you have written; to live in constant fear of torture, further torture, or execution.

As a testament to the human spirit, these short pieces of writing are very fine. They’re wonderful too as an example of the creativity that can result from a constraint such as fifty words. But best of all they stand as a metaphor for the beauty and clarity of thought and language that prison bars themselves can engender. The one thing you will not find in any of them is the slightest whiff of objectivity.

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Oral history

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

How did we get here? How did we reach the point where we have one language for work and another for the rest of our lives?

In one we tend to engage with all the unique characteristics and faculties that make us the individuals we are. In the other – only really half a language – we leave a large part of our personalities behind. Cipher is a frightening and demeaning word, but to some extent it’s what modern business-speak makes us.

Fear, of course, has a lot to answer for. Fear of looking stupid or out of touch, fear of being called to account, fear of losing control or authority. The less of ourselves we reveal the more we distance ourselves from the possible consequences of what we say or write.

But how did it come to this? I believe modern business language has been brewing for at least 250 years. It comes to us via the age of reason and early scientific enquiry; the subsequent industrial revolution when new technical processes were the dominant force; the expansion of trade and empire, from which a new vocabulary of commerce emerged; Victorian paternalism and love of litigation, which saw the full flowering of legalese; the periods of austerity following two world wars, and the language of twentieth century military command (in particular from Vietnam, the first televised war) with its talk of campaigns and strategic objectives; the IT revolution with a whole new almost mandatory technological dialect; and the explosive growth of management consultancy and the MBA culture – quasi-academic, pseudo-scientific. Add to all that the most recent and baneful influence, the culture of measure-ment, and the resulting cocktail is scarcely a language at all since it fails to communicate on almost any human level.

A couple of days ago my train came to a halt in the middle of the countryside. After a wait of several minutes a cheery guard came on the tannoy to apologise for the delay, explaining that it was caused by children playing on the line. (‘Of course they are,’ said the elderly woman sitting opposite me, ‘they’ve been cooped up inside all winter.’) Twenty minutes later we stopped at a big station. Apologising for the delay to passengers who had just boarded, a different voice explained that it had been caused by ‘trespassers on railway property’.

Twenty minutes. That’s how long it takes for children to become trespassers, and (to borrow again from Jurgen Habermas) for system world to overtake life world. This is the steady creep of something alarmingly like Orwell’s Newspeak. We may have ideas about how we got here, but do we have any idea where we’re heading?

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In the beginning … (part two)

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

Last week I mentioned the opening of St John’s Gospel: In the beginning was the word … I didn’t have the space to add the perennial writer’s question: But which words should I begin with?

It’s one that business writers, particularly, struggle to answer. How seldom in the world of work do we read anything that draws us in and engages us right from the opening sentence? On the rare occasions that we do, it completely changes the way we think about the organisation whose voice we’re hearing.

One of the great privileges of my working life is to sit on the board of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the world’s largest. I was glancing recently at last year’s annual review and I came across this from our 2009 guest director, Richard Holloway:

‘Annual reports tend to be jaunty affairs, celebrating past achievements, as the organisation in question strides confidently on into the future. Well, it wouldn’t be dishonest to adopt that tone in reviewing my own wild fling … as guest director this year, but it would be the wrong way to begin, so I won’t start there.’

It takes a lot of confidence to write an opening like that and Richard, a former Bishop of Edinburgh, now broadcaster, writer and chair of the Scottish Arts Council, is an exceptionally confident communicator. It’s also very personal, and he goes on to explain that his involvement arose out of the misfortune of our director, Catherine Lockerbie’s unexpected leave of absence.

But why should we be so unused to hearing a truly personal voice in the business world? Why do chairmen’s and chief executive’s statements, not to mention letters, brochures and mailshots, so often sound robotic? Whatever the reason, their opening words set the tone for what follows and frequently leave us as readers struggling to stay interested.

Richard Holloway’s opening does at least three things that more or less guarantee we’ll go with him. He pokes a little gentle fun at the genre, so we know at once that this is not going to be earnest (which is not to say it won’t be serious); he introduces a lively voice, his own, which is not that of the organisation, but which we know speaks for the organisation; and he tempts us with a question: why doesn’t he want to start with the jaunty view?

Personal as his voice is, this is nevertheless a piece of business writing in an important public document that reports on the affairs of our book festival to a very wide range of interested and influential people. I’m sure that any one of those who read the opening sentence would have felt compelled to read on.

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In the beginning …

Posted on February 25, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

A friend sent me an article from a recent edition of the Harvard Journal of Management, not my normal bedtime reading. It reports how a group of scholars and business leaders came together to consider the great challenges involved in reinventing management and making it more relevant to a volatile world.

They listed 25 ‘Moon Shots for Management’ (how business loves to borrow the imagery of what it sees as more glamorous activities), including this, at number 24: Humanize the language and practice of business.

Well, at least it made it onto the list, even if preceded by other such eye-catching items as : De-structure and disaggregate the organization, or Stretch executive time frames and perspectives.

‘Tomorrow’s management systems,’ the wise men propose, ‘must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice, and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.’ In all fairness, a right-minded and laudable manifesto, even though I defy anyone to find the nobility in Powerpoint training.

But ‘humanising the language and practice of business’ at number 24 out of 25? Until the language of the business world is humanised, nothing else about it possibly can be. The practice simply cannot begin to reflect ‘timeless human ideals’ while the words that describe it remain impersonal and alienating; in fact, the ideas themselves can scarcely even take shape.

So let’s not forget the Gospel According to St John and its opening phrase, In the beginning was the word. ‘The word’, note, not ‘the thought’. For it’s the word that gives form to the thought. And by this reckoning, omega should become alpha, and number 24 should surely be promoted to number one. A few kind words would be a good place to start.

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