Health & Wealth

'There are, of course humane and intelligent people among the rich of Glasgow, writes Edwin Muir in his Scottish Journey, '...it would be absurd to deny it'. Muir continues:

But if one considers them as a class one cannot ignore certain things, and particularly what may be called their geographical position in society. They are rich in the midst of poverty. Their money is made out of coal, iron, shipbuilding, and various similar things. The coal-miner, the iron-worker, and the shipyard labourer are poor. Yet it is a popular fiction that such facts are merely economic and can be confined to one sphere, and that they have no influence on the moral character, the better thoughts and feelings and habits of the rich. That cannot be the case. Wealth accumulated in such a way does not only allow its possessors the opportunity to lead a more free and comfortable life; it brings all sorts of drawbacks with it. It brings, for instance, extraordinary conventions which every successful class erects for itself and insists on living within. These conventions are in the last resort barriers set up to shut it off as completely as possible from the classes beneath it. Though in appearance as irrational as the taboos of savage tribes, the quite practical basis for such customs lies in the desire, or rather the necessity, of the rich to close themselves off from the poor, or in other words to ignore the source from which their comfort and elegance are derived. Everybody who lives a little more comfortably than the poorest of all has to exercise this customary repression almost continuously, though for the most part he is not aware of it. Accordingly the rich have psychologically a far greater burden to bear than the poor; ostentation is one of the most obvious ways of blinding themselves to it; and in this way perhaps the lives of the Glasgow rich can be explained, as well as their behaviour on public occasions.

I have always thought the rich, like Muir (although he might not explicitly say it), somewhat demented in their grasping and clinging of wealth, and their reluctance to redistribute and share it. It is, fundamentally, an irresponsible attitude, but then, as Muir implies, the rich, whether Glaswegian or other, are hardly the most mature people among us. They have not just made their money from the harder work of others in iron, steel and coal, but in slavery and disease, in tobacco and human-trafficking.

That they seek to prey, and not to share, is evidence enough of this immaturity, as is the building of the walls of conventions to protect them. Having myself worked as an EFL teacher in many different environments and had to endure what may be described as hellish enough situations of work and accommodations, I have been fortunate enough since, not to ever take for granted life and how lucky I am to have been born into Glasgow and not some god-forsaken hole in the back of beyond. I came to the realization fairly early on in life, that the true wealth lay not in ostentation and ornamentation, and accumulation, but in simply health and wholeness, heart and mind.... and a derobing of all the regalia and conventions that closet us in.

I can recall as a very young and immature 28 year old (after year-long residencies in Naples and Istanbul, and 2 years living and teaching in Paris) embarking upon a teaching post in Dakar, Senegal, and being at the beck and call of young Africans desperate to leave their country and enable the opportunities that most of us born in Britain take for granted every day. Several years later, after a year in the hard-line state of Qatar at 32, I ventured upon Zawiya in Libya (later almost entirely destroyed in the uprising of 2010) where I discovered how utterly desperate most of my students' lives were (with abducted relatives, trade sanctions, and a dilipadated infrastructure that would make a crumbling Chernobyl look modern). None of them, between the ages of 20 and 45, had the opportunity to leave their country, except perhaps to neighbouring Egypt or Tunisia. I was told by Mohanned (who was a fisherman in Zuara), and others, of the coastal town's nocturnal raft departures to the Mediterranean isle of Lampedusa and beyond. Most of them asked me if I could help them attain visas to get them out of their country, aware as they were that the shit was about to hit the fan. I remember interviewing a few of them in my amateur role as a foreign correspondent (towards the end of an intensive five month posting there) and putting together some wonderful stuff on their attitudes towards Gaddafi, which I later sent to the BBC, but of course they weren't interested without the necessary conventional journalistic qualifications.

Again, later, after Libya, I saw and lived Morocco, Jordan, Poland, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, before coming here to Kazakhstan. I breathed these places, not as tourist, but as a teacher and traveller, and most significantly as a listener and a student. From all these experiences was born and nurtured a great sense of gratitude for whatever and wherever I was, and for the circumstances (my mother's forcing me back to University after my rejection of it, amongst others) that inexorably led to this unornamented state of mind I have now. The truth be told, I was an odious little snob when I was young, my father not entirely to blame for this, but also the plethora of little snobs that I attended school with at St. Aloysius in Glasgow. My father had always fancied himself as something more than he actually was and imparted this desire to escape his class (sine nobilitas) upon his children in no uncertain terms, telling us all, myself and my three brothers that we were better than everyone else, that the Romans were not just as my school motto proclaimed 'born for greater things' (ad majora natus sum) but born as greater beings. Consequently, it took me until at least my early thirties to realize my true nature, and to throw off this great orangutan that had been hitherto clinging to my back. My brother Phillip had just hung himself causing me to re-evaluate everything, most of all my self. All these countries too helped in waking me up, in stopping the snobbery and somnambulism, to the point now where having nothing, no assets, no family (at least not in any conventional sense), no mortgage, no car, but just my brother's bicycle, and a beautifully petite rented studio flat near the river in Govan (where people do not pretend to be better or superior or dress themselves up like demented monkeys), I can consider myself 'awake' and 'liberated' from the flurry of nonsense that the sleepwalkers and the walking dead embalm their selves with on a daily basis.

The centre that I could not for the life of me find when I was younger, but which had always been there, was now all over me, and continued to expand outwards. The great change was early on in 2006 when at the age of 35 I had spent the first 8 months of the year exploring on my bicycle the hills and lochs around Glasgow. It was an awakening like no other: the transformation of a (mostly) dead man walking into a fully fledged living human being, who, once and for all, realized, through the gifts of silence, breathing and solitude, and the great tranquility of the Campsie Fells and Kilpatrick Plateau, the true nature of the unadorned self.

In But for the Grace of God, J.W.N. Sullivan, describing how he felt when hospitalized in Serbia during the First World War wrote:

I can still feel at times that the transition from an overcrowded Serbian hospital, even to a life of one room, a bed, a chair... is so vast that the millionaire's extra advantages are hardly perceptible on tat scale.

And there's the crux, which Muir touches upon above. That wealth is actually a burden, not just of responsibility, but of psychology. The stuff that we surround ourselves with distracts us from the real purpose of our lives, to share and be compassionate. It convinces us that we are somehow more than we actually are. How many times I have heard the rationale (not least from my own father): I have worked hard and I deserve these treats. [It even makes me smile as I write it]. There are none so deluded than the self-made millionaire who has worked his way 'up' from nothing to all that wealth that surrounds and infects him. [I, on the other hand, started off with nothing, as did every living creature on this planet, and still have most of it left]. This nothing is the real riches; yet we in the topsy-turvy west are apt to see it the other way, that having nothing means being poor. Yet, this is the paradox that we cannot fathom (perhaps because our arrested development and our cluttered mind will not allow it): that through an impoverishment of conventions, one may attain a sort of existential wealth.

The more stuff we surround and ornament our selves with, the more insecure we show our selves to be, and the more distracted of our true purpose we become. 'Clothes' do not maketh the man. The more clothes, the less the man. The more we adorn the self, the more hollow we become. It is a vicious ever-decreasing circle, perpetuated by a spiralling society predicated upon profit and pomp. It is, in reality, a vortex that sucks the self in, and that has to be smashed if one is to wake up from the mechanical automata that we have allowed our selves to become.

The teacher-student with his Kazakh thinking cap on! [The hat is my student, Kuzya's]. I always tell my students with a wry smile that all my clothes are hand-me-downs (which they are!) from my brother Thomas' frivolous spending habits (he hasn't quite attained the realization that I had by his age). My whole wardrobe which probably amounts to a half dozen t-shirts, 2 pairs of jeans, 2 sports jackets, a pair of boots, a pair of shoes and sandals, and 2 pairs of trainers is the sole result of my taller younger brother's boredom, and the habit he has of washing his clobber at the wrong temperature. I do have a pair of cycling shorts and cycling gloves, a pair of tracksuit bottoms, and underwear, and two shirts, which are my own doing. One of the shirts which I bought in Qatar in 2002 is still going strong 12 years later.