MMIW Public Evaluation
Monday. Mother-line. HOME Arches.
I don’t know these 12 women, so I owe them fuck all. It is a workshop I am running. They have been on a ten-month, once a month, journey with each other. Before me, they have worked with 2 other artists. One visual. One musical. I open with tell me who you are — and what you enjoyed about the other artists. 10am. Small break. I ask direct questions. They love direct questions. They are delighted to know more about each other. They feel safe. Their words. 12.30. We have lunch. I keep my fucking distance. I am the facilitator. I am nobody’s friend. So much for perpetrator — Freudian slip — facilitator/participant blending. We’ve laughed. Cried. I always share so they can trust me. After lunch we build on our previous work.
12-words 2 x A4
Title
I want you to write down what you got from this morning. I give them time. This is your title.
Object
Tell me the first object you saw when I said that — you must be able to touch it. (Of course you get those who saw nothing — that is impossible. 4 get childhood toys. Great start.) Your subconscious mind wants to tell us something. They each find their object.
Stepping Stones
Write 1 — 12 on the 2nd piece of paper, so you can refer to it. I give them time. List 12 things you associate with that object.’ I give them time. They each find their 12 stepping stones.
A Journey Into Your Soul
You have 15 minutes to write a story under your title. You must use your object. Your 12 associations. Cross them through when you have used them, to keep score.
It reminds me of the Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice. After his wife Eurydice dies from a snake bite, the musician Orpheus used his lyre to charm his way into the underworld and persuade the god Hades and his wife Persephone to let her return with him.
Your object and your associations are the weapons that will keep you safe as you descend into the underworld of your past that isn't dead but creates your hell.
The room goes quiet. They disperse to different parts. Most need the use of a table. A pin could drop. Their stories are magnificent. There is even magic realism. It is like therapy. Their words.
Tuesday Mother-line. HOME Arches.
We transform their 12-words into 8-stations.
8 stations 1 x A 3
We stand up at the table so they can see me.
· Draw a square.
· Overlay that with a diamond.
· Beginning bottom left, number the points 1 — 8.
· These are your 8 stations.
You interpret like tarot cards.
1: The upside-down angel is the protagonist.
2: The cross hatched circle is shading — the theme.
3: The mask means something is hidden in this station.
4: The crescent moon is a recurring cycle.
5: The ½ black ½ white rectangle signifies change.
6: A circle, Equator, Capricorn and Cancer lines, plus climate rays, is the world.
7: The ghost is the ghost.
8: The sword. It will either slice you to death. Or you can pull it from the stone and be armed as you walk forward.
Exorcism
I’m so assertive they just get on with it. Remember this word. Assertive. Then I pick Karen. Karen’s object is her childhood teddy. She has brought Teddy. Not only that, and I didn’t know this, she has typed up Teddy. Synchronicity. We ask our present facilitator Jolene, to print Teddy. We each have a sheet. More proof that this is meant to be, is Karen has already broken Teddy into paragraphs. First, we must decide, with Karen as our guide, which of the paragraphs fit the 8 junctions. We interpret each as a drawing, aligned to its station on our 8-station mind-map. Including Karen, we feed back our interpretations. Karen interprets our interpretations including her own. She digs deeper. Ade who needed extra help yesterday but is brutally engaged now in a wonderful way, post writing the most amazing 12-words story, is trying to shoehorn Teddy into 7, the ghost. ‘No, you are cheating.’ We keep going round the table. Telling our diagram and our interpretation. Karen revealing more and more of her story. Getting so hot about a potential lover she whips off her outer top. And its minus 4 degrees. No, that’s not the ghost. She’s flexible. Her shy bob is now a mobile bob. She laughs a lot. We take the piss a lot. We’re free — we’re free — we’re free — then!!!!!! It manifests the usual cloud. The ghost is coming. It hits her hard. She uses her hand to go up her own chest from her belly. It is entering her face. It’s collapsing her face. Welling her up. It’s here. It’s here. It’s here. We all hold our breath. Scared we won’t be able to digest what she is about to tell us. But we can. We do. The room is changing. The exorcism allows the light in. The ghost is laid to rest.
Friday. MMIW Public Evaluation.
And why am I telling you all this. I must learn I am nobody’s friend. Not in a workshop. I can’t save fucking anybody. But I have 2 amazing techniques. 12-words and 8-stations. And I could have used them with the most engaged public who I invite to evaluate MMIW. But Safiya is going on with her fucking self. My fault cos she has read my previous newsletter where I have given her a line of dialogue — 'as S says on the last day of my most recent project, ‘When you leave it will go back to normal.' She means she will feel abandoned again. Excerpt from https://www.lindabrogan59.com/knowledge-4-techniques-part-2-includes-discoveries-in-part-1/) Now, dressed like a gorgeous freedom fighter Safiya thinks she is special. We do love that fucking 15 minutes of fame. Hahahaha.
When Dionne WhatsApp’s me to ask can you tell me more about what we will be doing, I should have said we will be evaluating MMIW using 12-words and 8-stations. Instead, Dionne uses the evaluation morning to shut down Russian/Jewish/Ukrainian Kate. In all fairness Dionne may be upholding my ethos prior to MMIW, that white people have privileges that we don’t have. She's not understanding, or I'm not not articulating, that I don’t think like this anymore. We’ve all been manipulated with the 3000-year-old Caste system. Think about it — 3000 years is 1000 years before Christ. One Indian family has said to another Indian family — both approximately the same colour — from this moment on my family are Brahmin. We will contemplate God, govern medicine, declare philosophy, accumulate wealth. And your family are Dalits. Your family will shovel my family’s shit, literally.
They have recognisable second names that follow both castes through the ages. Why not just change their fucking name? Isabel Wilkerson, who writes amazing Caste, meets a liberal Brahmin and a powerful Dalit at a conference to eradicate the practise, but notices that the Dalit cannot overcome the Dalit in him where the Brahmin is concerned. Neither can the Brahmin: she still talks with an air that she must be listened to and obeyed; and he responds accordingly.
The difference being our skin makes us easier to single out. But, do you get it, no one can help us, no one can change us, no one can give us anything. We must fight to not believe it. WE must fight our brainwashing. And somehow in MMIW that privilege was awarded to me. I don’t give a fuck that Kate is white. And, yes, to a certain extent her referring to us as all the same is racist. She’s trying to level the playing field. She is probably suffering from white guilt or white fragility in this moment. But she is on her own. The only white woman. No, there is also Oelda. I wouldn’t fucking condone it the other way round — Kate is not available to be our football. NO. Safiya and Dionne leave before they hear any of this. They don't agree with me. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it Linda!’ What the fuck can I say? They have become co-joined teenagers and I have become their youth worker.
When Dionne, after her single, that we all enjoy, orders a double Courvoisier and coke in the Tiffin Room having eaten nothing and declares in that I-have-to-pull-a-ghetto-stunt ‘It’s all right, Linda, isn’t it!’ I should have said, ‘Nope.’ More fucking cowardice. Can you fucking believe it. But sometimes I just think let them unravel themselves.
When we get back to HOME, Dionne tries yet again to savage Kate. Imagine trying to savage ‘posh’ white Kate when you and me are the only 2 that know the enormous event Kate is going through. Shared secretly at the Tiffin Room table again to level the playing field.
‘But you don’t care,’ Elena says, and she doesn’t even know to the extent that Dionne doesn’t care. ‘You won’t allow us to be peaceful. I want you to leave.’ Her words. Elena, Dionne’s peer, is stood up — crying.
I am so glad Elena has said it. ‘I agree. You need to leave.’
Kirsty tries to stop us. ‘It is singling out someone again.’
Me, ‘I don’t care.’
Elena, ‘She doesn’t care.’ Meaning Dionne.
What a shit show.
Dionne leaves. Dionne comes back. Dionne leaves again. Dionne comes back. She takes over our conversation when we are each making a pledge to finish something in a year. But it doesn’t matter. The relationship is over.
What have I learned?
1: Don’t invite people I know will be a problem no matter how sorry I feel for them.
2: If I make that mistake, do not be intimidated — you have the weapons of 12-words and 8-stations.
3: Use them to shield me and them, safe ground to build our emotional towers.
4: Listen to each. Who are you? If the project is about to happen — what do you expect to get out of it. If the project has happened — what did you get out of it?
5: Use their answer as the title of their 12-words.
6: Elect one of the 12-words' stories to be communally broken down into 8-stations.
7: Acknowledge the ghost as it is exorcised.
8: Help each articulate a task to complete in 12 months using 12-words & 8-stations.
My Dream
I remember when Kirsty asks — Why don’t I own this book? — my shield is also my dream. My dream is to write a how-to book that is as famous as Julia Cameron’s The Artist's Way. Its central premise are 2 techniques — 12-words, and 8-stations. Equivalent to Julia's morning pages and artist's date. My book like Julia's gives artists permission and a blueprint to generate their dreams. It unblocks all entrepreneurial artists, by leading them into their hell where they can take their soul by its hand and lead it above ground to be their limitless subconscious creative life-partner.