Old Jim
In which memories of a misfit character prompt thoughts on community and power.
Old Jim was a memorable figure in my home town of Newport. He usually sported a shock of unruly hair and a full beard, but once a year he would go to the barber’s and have it all cut off. It was strange to see him clean-shaven after this yearly ritual, his head bald and scabbed.
Old Jim could often be found outside the post office. Towards the middle of the day, sunlight reached in through the windows of the post office and alighted on the cleavage of the friendly young woman who worked behind the counter. Old Jim was transfixed. Surprisingly, the young woman would wave to Jim. Jim would give a nervous wave back, which only goes to prove that the correct behaviour around cleavages can be complex. Sometimes the elderly post-mistress would come out of the shop and chase old Jim away.
Jim took refuge in the butcher’s shop next door. Jim was not really the kind of person who could have found work, but Alan the butcher let him help out by chopping up meat and sometimes sawing up bones for the armies of pet dogs that belonged to the town and for those occasional folks who still prepare soup by boiling up a bone.
Jim could also be seen down by the river, staring out over the water. His oversized leather jacket would flap in the wind and his baggy jeans scuffed through the grass where he walked.
Jim’s conversation was fairly basic, but he would always speak when he saw me. When you spoke to Jim he seemed to scrutinise you closely, as if looking for some sign that you were mocking him or holding him in contempt. Indeed, it became obvious that many people held a low opinion of him. Some would make shifty side-long glances at me as well, if they saw me stopping to speak with him.
Old Jim lived alone. One evening, whilst sitting in his armchair, he just slipped away to his eternal rest. In fact, it turned out that Jim had not been that old, being barely into his sixties when he died. When I lived in Newport I used to sit by the river myself quite often and I like to think that Jim could still somehow look down on the shifting waters of the River Tay. Who knows? Let’s hope at least that he’s keeping away from cleavages.
Every community has to face up to the issue of strange misfit characters in some way. Someone like Jim might have been locked up or driven away at one time. Now we are more inclined to try to include someone like Jim, even although it may be difficult for someone like him to really have a say in what his life should be like.
But someone like Jim, although they may appear problematic at times, is really one of the least worrying types of person we might encounter in small communities.
Let me explain further.
I heard a lovely story not long ago about a group of actors who had travelled to a small town to put on a show. The church hall had been left open for them so they could have a rehearsal ahead of the show in the evening. After the rehearsal they went through to the kitchen that adjoined the hall. Here they discovered three puddings – I think they were a lemon-meringue pie, a rhubarb tart and an apple crumble. The actors were delighted that the townsfolk had left them this generous gift and they fell to eating the puddings straight away. Just as they were finishing the last crumbs of the puddings a local woman came into the kitchen. She looked at the actors and at the empty plates, turned pale and walked out. She returned some minutes later with her husband in tow. The woman was too angry to speak so her husband spoke for her. ‘These were for tonight’, he said. The actors were mortified.
Well, we might ask, was it really such a big deal? Even although this was a small town, no doubt they had a store of some kind where more food could be purchased – or surely there was a supermarket not too far away from the little town. My suspicion though is that the woman was not really upset about the puddings! My suspicion is that there was some deeper problem in her life – maybe even one that she was not fully aware of – and that this was the real reason for her being upset. Why do I say this? The reason is that, having been part of numerous community groups, incidents like this are one of the most common occurrences. People will seem to be discussing some matter that the group needs to decide on, but in fact one or more people are actually talking about their own personal problems – their own buried hurts.
But there is another type of person even more toxic for groups. Think now about the really big political events you may have witnessed – something like a meeting of the G7 or a United Nations conference. Groups of presidents and prime ministers are there in front of the cameras and they are greeting each other. Here there is a kind of pecking order of apparently friendly gestures. One holds out his hand for a handshake, the other takes hold of it with two hands and then it’s very difficult for either one to let go! Whoever lets go first, you see, is the one who will appear to be slightly less friendly. So there’s a bit of a competition as to who appears the most open and welcoming. The same thing happens with the hugs. After a bit of a hug then one party will move onto patting the other one on the back. Then the other must start patting and then who is going to be the first to break the hold and stop the patting? The message here is that powerful people play strange games, and this applies in small groups just as much as it does amongst world leaders and politicians. Any group may have someone, or several people, so sure of their own opinions that it does not even occur to them that they could ever be wrong. If someone were to challenge their authority then the powerful person will often just find this confusing – there is no notion that they might have been misunderstood or that they might need to change their minds. And it can be even worse in groups that aspire to some kind of equality amongst its members – the powerful person, the pocket tyrant, will actually believe that they are sticking with the group’s ethos of equality whilst all the while making life very difficult for everyone else.
Old Jim knew he wasn’t clever and knew that he relied on other people for help. The woman with the puddings might one day have realised that all her more petty concerns were because of some deep hurt within her and she might have found a way of healing that hurt. But alas it is very difficult for the pocket tyrant ever to back down – very difficult, but still, sometimes, it happens.
These matters are sometimes expressed in terms of power relations. ‘Power-over’ is the relation we have just been discussing – the domain of the pocket tyrant. Groups might aim instead for ‘power-with’ – that is, shared power. But that can be a mistake. People cherish their power and won’t give it up easily. Even the lady with the puddings and people like her have a certain kind of power because in a way they can hold a group to ransom. The group is not giving them the attention they crave. They secretly want the group to sympathise with them and even to try to solve their problems for them, so in the meantime they hold the group to ransom by disrupting whatever is going on and attempting to turn the spotlight back to their own personal issues.
A further alternative in power relations is sometimes referred to as ‘brokenness’. That’s not supposed to mean that the community or group is destroyed. It means rather that people let down their barriers, admit to their own failures, accept a loss of dignity and not take themselves too seriously but instead be able to see the humour in themselves. To be humble.
We might call this state of ‘brokenness’ a form of ‘power-under’, because it collapses all of the power games of power-over and even of power-with (where the workings of power are really still bubbling away beneath the surface). Power-under is a tricky term because it is sometimes used to mean a resentment of the powerful but at the same time a certain welcoming of having a routine and having people telling us what to do. But I don’t mean it in that sense. I mean it rather as a conscious refusal to accept any power relations. Let’s face it, community groups, workplace meetings and communities can be boring affairs at times. But if a group can get itself to that power-under state then it starts to be a place where we can truly be ourselves and in fact to know ourselves more fully because of the relationships amongst the group. Power-under sees the beauty, the poetry and the humour in life and relationships. It sees life as the artist would see it – and we can all be artists.
These days of course we can just about avoid any kind of group if we choose to – we can run away from our families, leave our jobs and not attend any kind of community gathering. The message of contemporary Western culture is of the autonomous and self-sufficient individual. And if there were some major upheaval to life – a nuclear war, the end of world trade, the destruction of the internet, the collapse of government – then our ‘solution’ is what is often described as ‘survivalist’. We might choose to ‘bug-in’, that is, guard our own homes and have sufficient means to survive there for at least the short to medium-term. Or otherwise, we might plan to ‘bug-out’, that is, to run for shelter in some remote spot where we have a stash of food and supplies or where we might forage or hunt.
All of this rather smacks of desperation, and of course it is very much a young person’s game. The elderly, the disabled, those needing ongoing medical care – well, they are just left to die. Instead, I’d suggest, true resilience comes through community. And of course it is very much the broken, power-under kind of community I have in mind here. So, my suggestion, if you really want to survive whatever disaster might come our way, is to get to know your neighbours! And even if there is no terrible disaster in the immediate future, building community is still a brilliant thing to be engaged with. Politics can be something of a dirty word these days. But politics, to get back to its original meaning, is just about how we as people organise ourselves. Politics starts with the street.
Your street might have an old Jim, a lady with worries she cannot quite confess or a pocket tyrant. But power under is possible. Why not give it a go!
